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The Neurological Approach to the Problem of Perception1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

W. Russell Brain
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Extract

I much appreciate the honour of being invited to deliver the first Manson lecture, which, its founder has laid down, is to be devoted to the consideration of some subject of common interest to philosophy and medicine. I cannot think of anything which better fulfils that condition than the neurological approach to the problem of perception. The neurologist holds the bridge between body and mind. Every day he meets with examples of disordered perception and he learns from observing the effects of lesions produced by disease, or by the physiologist's experiments, something of how the neural basis of perception is organized. It is possible to study perception as though this was largely irrelevant. How far that view is right will be for you to judge when I have finished.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 21 , Issue 79 , July 1946 , pp. 133 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1946

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Footnotes

1

The first Manson Lecture delivered at the British Institute of Philosophy, University Hall, Gordon Square, London, W.C.I, December 14, 1945.

References

page 134 note 1 Broad, C. D. (1927), Scientific Thought, p. 501Google Scholar.

page 135 note 1 Tunturi, A. R., Amer. J. Physiol., 1944, pp. 141, 397Google Scholar.

page 135 note 2 Woolsey, C. M. and Walzl, E. M., Amer. J. Physiol., 1941, pp. 133, 498Google Scholar.

page 135 note 3 Adrian, E. D., The Basis of Sensation, London, 1928Google ScholarPubMed.

page 137 note 1 Akelaitis, A. J., Arch. Neurol. Psychiat., 1941, pp. 45, 288Google Scholar.

page 137 note 2 Sherrington, C. S., The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, London, 1906, p. 354Google Scholar et seq.

page 138 note 1 Price, H. H., Perception, London, 1932, p. 147Google Scholar.

page 139 note 1 See Process and Reality, Cambridge, 1929, pp. 89, 104–5, 167–8, 178Google Scholar.

page 139 note 2 Loc. cit., p. 229.

page 140 note 1 Loc. cit., p. 3.

page 141 note 1 Adrian, E. D., Trans. Ophth. Soc. United Kingdom, 1943, pp. 63, 196Google Scholar.

page 142 note 1 Relativity theory defines as contemporaneous those events which cannot be causally related to each other. Conversely, causally related events cannot be contemporanoeus.

page 142 note 2 Awareness of the body has been held to give rise to a body schema or image. However convenient in practice, these terms are easily interpreted as implying a dualism which I think is epistemologically objectionable. The most important literature on awareness of the body consists of a paper by Head, H. and Holmes, G. Studies in Neurology, 1920, Vol. 2, 605Google Scholar, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, by Schilder, Paul, London, 1935Google Scholar, the same author's Mind: Perception and Thought in their Constructive Aspects, New York, 1942Google Scholar, L'Image de Notre Corps, by Lhermitte, Jean, Paris, 1939Google Scholar, and some recent work is discussed in my paper in Brain, 1941, Vol. 64, 244Google Scholar.

page 144 note 1 Pötzl, O., Die Aphasialehre vom Standpunkte der Klinischen Psychiatrie Bd. 1. Die optisch-agnostischen Störungen. Leipzig, 1928Google Scholar.

page 145 note 1 Adrian, E. D., The Basis of Sensation, London, 1928, p. 119Google ScholarPubMed.