An invitation to understand the mindbrain
Cortex is the organ of mind.
The double-decker cortex, both the outer neocortex and the inner paleocortex, were proposed to be the “organ of mind,” as pioneering neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield wrote, based on 1,200 open brain-surgeries in conscious epileptic patients at the Montreal Neurological Institute from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Speculation along those lines goes back more than two thousand years to the School of Hippocrates of Cos. But proof positive has been extremely difficult to obtain, and it has taken long-term research programs with advanced brain imaging to settle the question.
This image shows the physical stimulation of the fovea, the functional center of the retina, roughly a 1000x1000 array of dense receptors.
The retinal array is mirrored point-to-point in the visual thalamus (LGN), and again in the first visual projection region called V1. Critically, the connectivity of LGN and V1 is bi-directional, with any minicolumn in LGN linking to a minicolumn in V1, and vice versa. This would seem to risk an explosive feedback loop, but the waking cortex runs very well in the normal, healthy brain.
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Consciousness & the Brain
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