Editorial
Ray Tallis admires the scholarship but is not so easy with the position taken by Chris Frith in ‘Making up the mind: how the brain creates our mental world’. In ‘Not all in the brain’, Professor Tallis—neuroscientist, gerontologist, philosopher, novelist, poet, literary critic and polymath—challenges Professor Frith's concept that the brain works to provide us with an illusion of reality, taking a Bayesian approach to probability, prediction and correction that sometimes gets it wrong but generally approximates to the actual world at a level sufficient to allow us to interact successfully with our environment (whatever that actually may be) and influence the future (page 3050). According to this analysis, we live a brain-derived fantasy that roughly coincides with reality but are liberated from the tyranny of what is actually around us. Our brain discloses the gist of what is going on but spares us the need to ‘trouble our little heads’ with process or mechanisms, revealing only the ‘bottom line’. Having set out his own stall on the improbability and limitations of this formulation, Professor Tallis challenges Chris Frith to locate that part of the neuroscientist's own brain that is able to get outside these illusions and comprehend how it is that we model our environment through fantasy. Furthermore, and here riding his own hobby-horse, Ray Tallis does not sign up to any theory of mind in which consciousness is merely a by-product; or any account of a brain that does not ‘suffer and enjoy, try to make things happen, [is not] happy when [it] succeed[s], and less so when [it] fail[s]’. But, even if not persuaded by Frith the metaphysician, Ray Tallis acknowledges that his provocative ideas call for a radical re-thinking of ‘critical neuro-epistemology’.Professors Frith and Tallis are not the first neuroscientists to adopt antipodal positions on the ‘man [not] a machine’ debate, to wrestle with the philosophical conundrum of brain understanding brain, and to commit to one view or another of ‘Man on his nature’—to borrow the title of Sir Charles Sherrington's Gifford Lectures delivered to the University of Edinburgh in 1937–38 and published in 1940. In earlier issues, this year, we published analyses of the neurophysiology, philosophy and poetry of Sir Charles Sherrington, the 150th anniversary of whose birth falls on November 27, 2007. We conclude this short series on Sherrington, who died aged 94 on March 4, 1952, with two accounts of his influence on individual students. Dr William Gibson, who celebrated his own 94th birthday on September 2, 2007, tells how in 1935 he was precipitated unexpectedly from a quiet summer vacation in northern Ontario to work with Sherrington in Oxford (page 2766). In 1979, with Sir John Eccles, Bill Gibson wrote the definitive biography of Sherrington, revealing many facets of his personality, achievements and interests that made him more than just the ‘Harvey of the nervous system’. Take, for example, his bibliomania. Lord Cohen of Birkenhead relates in his Sherrington Lecture (Liverpool University Press, 1958): ‘in 1935 Sherrington retired from Oxford at the age of 78. John Fulton ... happened to be there when Sherrington was clearing out his desk. "In the back of a spacious drawer, covered up with papers, there were some 58 medical incunabula, which he explained rather sheepishly he had kept there because ‘Dear Ethel’, his devoted wife, hadn't fully sympathized with his interest in expensive books" ’. For a book collector, Sherrington was astonishingly generous: ‘[Sherrington] became the greatest donor of incunabula to the British Museum (Library) in its history’ (Eccles and Gibson, appendix 12, lists 56 early printed books and many other later rarities given to the British Library) ... ‘Sherrington was our best benefactor in modern times’ (Sir Henry Thomas, British Museum's Keeper of Printed Books, 1947). When Walter Morley Fletcher gave his copy of John Mayow's Tractatus quinque (1674) to Sir William Osler so as to make good a defective copy, Sherrington promptly gave Morley his own, leaving unanswered Morley's grateful expression of concern that Sherrington might not have a second copy for himself, ‘for the Oxford Professor of Physiology must have one’. And Sherrington showed commendable discretion on seeing his rare copy of René Descartes's de Homine (1662), intended merely as a loan, shelved amongst Osler's possessions and with the annotation (see Bibliotheca Osleriana, 1929): ‘Given to me by CS Sherrington. Early eds. of Descartes rarely come into the market. In London, only three have been sold since 1903-4: Passiones Animae (binding by Padeloup), Elzevir 11s; Excellent Compendium of Musick, sm 4to 1653, £1 1s 0d; and Passions de l’Ame, First ed., Paris 1649, £5 5s 0d. W.O., August 16, 1914’. On discovering this loss, Sherrington took out his pen and added ‘Guglielmo Osler per Car. Sherrington’. That bookish mis-appropriation is retold by Wilder Penfield in his centenary account of Sherrington (Brain 1957: 80; 402–410). On page 2758, William Feindel describes the influence of Sherrington's ‘brilliant mind and the broad culture of this modest seeker after truth’ on Penfield, founder and Feindel's predecessor as Director of the Montreal Neurological Institute, and—through Harvey Cushing and then Penfield—on the development of neurosurgery as an academic discipline in North America. That said, Sherrington considered that ‘the life of a great surgeon is not really exciting, except, of course, from the patient's point of view’—the exceptions being Lord Lister and Penfield himself.
Amongst five papers in the present issue on spinal cord or brain injury and repair, Wenlong Huang and colleagues from London (UK) show that an early pulse of docosahexaenoic acid and a diet rich in this omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid for 6 weeks reduce markers of oxidative stress, macrophage reactivity and neuronal, axonal and oligodendrocyte loss and improve locomotor recovery after thoracic compression spinal cord injury (page 3004). Jacklyn Girgis and a team from Montreal, Lethbridge, Saskatoon and Edmonton (Canada) assess the contribution of forelimb training on recovery in a reaching task after cervical cord injury in the rat, and show that practice may make more perfect the ‘task-in-hand’, through enhanced plasticity at several levels in the motor pathway, but at the expense of less good performance in behaviours not conditioned by the training (page 2993). In neurogenetics, Timothy Norbury and investigators from Kings College (London) perform a classical twin study using quantitative measures to demonstrate heritability for appreciation of pain evoked by thermal, mechanical and chemical stimuli, whereas the extent of the cutaneous response is more influenced by environmental conditions—physiological findings that the authors consider to have implications for the pathogenesis of pathological pain states (page 3041). Two other papers describe novel genetic phenotypes. Anna Hakonen and colleagues from Helsinki and Oulo (Finland) report a family with early onset encephalopathy—athetosis, sensory neuropathy, ataxia, ophthalmoplegia and epilepsy—and liver damage occurring in association with compound heterozygous mutations (A318T and Y508C) of the mitochondrial replicative helicase twinkle, reminiscent of Alpers syndrome and resulting in tissue-specific (liver) mitochondrial DNA depletion (page 3032). Aasef Shaikh and investigators from Baltimore, Bethesda and Cleveland (USA) and Pavia (Italy) describe a mother and daughter with ‘micro-sacccadic oscillations and limb tremor’ as the basis for physiological studies suggesting an inherited defect of membrane function that impairs inhibition in an intrinsically unstable neural circuit for eye and limb oscillations, observations that inform more generally the nature of tremor (page 3020 and see cover). Amongst four papers on Alzheimer's or Huntington's disease, Kerryn Pike and a team from Melbourne, Heidelberg, Parkville and Sydney (Australia) and Pittsburgh (USA) correlate abnormalities of neuropsychological performance with ß–amyloid deposition, using 11C-PIB-positron emission tomography, to show that impaired episodic memory correlates inversely with amyloid deposition even in the asymptomatic elderly, allowing the conclusion that individuals with increased 11C-PIB have incipient Alzheimer's disease (page 2837). Gabriel Gold and colleagues from Geneva and Lausanne (Switzerland) assess lacunar and microvascular pathology in a large series of neuropathologically confirmed cases of Alzheimer's disease to show that various combinations of vascular and degenerative change—neurofibrillary tangle and ß–amyloid deposition, and cortical microinfarctions and thalamic and basal ganglia lacunes—predict dementia and serve to distinguish pure vascular variants from Alzheimer's disease and mixed vascular-degenerative cases. Characterizing the vascular and neurodegenerative contributions to dementia, and thereby offering the prospect of interventions that target specific disease mechanisms relevant to the individual case, is not a new endeavour (page 2830). In From the Archives, we review ‘Regional cerebral oxygen supply and utilization in dementia. A clinical and physiological study with oxygen-15 and positron tomography’ by RSJ Frackowiak, C Pozzilli, NJ Legg, J Marshall, GL Lenzi and T Jones (Brain 1981: 104; 753–778).
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