Wilder Penfield Quotes

Mind, brain, and body make the man, and the man is capable of so much!

I realized that there was a thrilling undiscovered country to be explored in the mechanisms of the mammalian nervous system. Through it, one might approach the mystery of the mind ...

Although the content of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not.To me, it seems more and more reasonable to suggest that the mind may be a distinct and different essence.

My plea to educators and parents is that they should give some thought to the nature of the brain of a child, for the brain is a living mechanism, not a machine. In case of breakdown, it can substitute one of its parts for the function of another. But it has its limitations. It is subject to inexorable change with the passage of time.

The brain has not explained the mind fully.

In spite of all these disquieting triumphs in the field of natural science, it's astonishing how little man has learned about himself, and how much there is to learn. How little we know about this brain which made social evolution possible, and of the mind. How little we know of the nature and spirit of man and God. We stand now before this inner frontier of ignorance. If we could pass it, we might well discover the meaning of life and understand man's destiny.

But there was something else that I discovered in Madrid. It had more to do with the spirit than it did with knowledge and yet it was something I could hope to hand on. A change in method or technique accounts for many things in human history.

The brain is the organ of destiny. It holds within its humming mechanism secrets that will determine the future of the human race.

Brain surgery is a terrible profession. If I did not feel it will become different in my lifetime, I should hate it.

A neurosurgeon once told me about operating on the brain of a young man with epilepsy. As is customary in this kind of operation, the patient was wide awake, under
only local anesthesia, while the surgeon delicately explored his exposed cortex, makingsure that the parts tentatively to be removed were not absolutely vital by stimulating
them electrically and asking the patient what he experienced. Some stimulations provoked visual flashes or hand-raisings, others a sort of buzzing sensation, but one spot
produced a delighted response from the patient: "It's 'Outta Get Me' by Guns N' Roses.
my favorite heavy metal band!"

I asked the neurosurgeon If he had asked the patient to sing or hum along with the music, since it would be fascinating to learn how "high fidelity" the provoked memory
was, would it be in exactly the same key and tempo as the record?
Such a song (unliken"Silent Night") has one canonical version. so we could simply have superimposed a recording of the patients humming with the standard record and compared the results.
Unfortunately, even though a tape recorder had been running during the operation, thesurgeon hadn't asked the patient to sing along. 'Why not?" I asked, and he replied: "I hate rock music!'

Later in the conversation the neurosurgeon happened to remark that he was going to have to operate again on the same young man. and I expressed the hope that he would
just check to see if he could r

It is fair to say that science provides no method of controlling the mind. Scientific work on the brain does not explain the mind-not yet.