Volume 9 No 3 (2011)
Download PDF
Recollections
Karl H. Pribram
Abstract
When I began my research there were large portions of the brain's cortex whose
functions were unknown. True, we knew that injury to the back of the brain
produced cognitive difficulties whereas injuries to the front of the brain were
followed by changes in personality. But we did not know which brain systems were
involved in producing these changes, nor how these changes were produced. I set to
work, first at the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology directed by Karl Lashley, and
then at Yale University in John Fulton's laboratory to find answers to these
questions. I brought non‐human monkey research that had been developed for
human neurosurgery. This was important: for instance all of Pavlov's surgically
operated animals died either of epilepsy or infection. I found that the posterior brain
regions that were not directly connected to sensory receptors nor muscle effectors,
harbored systems that were sensory specific and when injured, impaired monkeys'
ability to make choices. I use recently developed chemical and electrical stimulations
to show that the prefrontal cortex served as the executor for the limbic medio‐basal
systems of the brain. But these results needed to be supplemented by a fuller
understanding than we had at the time, of the operations of the primary sensory and
motor systems. In turn, to reach such fuller understandings of the input to the
sensory systems and what the output of the motor systems actually does work on.
Thus I came to work with quantum physicist such as David Bohm. The results of
these explorations, some 8 books and 800 peer reviewed papers and commentaries,
can be found on the Karl H Pribram website. This paper provides a brief overview of
some of this research
Keywords
frontolimbic systems, images of achievement, visual systems of the inferior temporal cortex, the holographic aspects of the universe, quantum physics, self‐organizing systems
Copyright
Copyright © Neuroquantology
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Articles published in the Neuroquantology are available under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Authors retain copyright in their work and grant IJECSE right of first publication under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles in this journal, and to use them for any other lawful purpose.