THE HUMAN BRAIN

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 58, 12 March 1929, Page 17

THE HUMAN BRAIN

"NATURE'S MASTERPIECE"

SIR ARTHUR KEITH'S ■ LECTURE

(From "The Posfi" Representative.)

LONDON, 22nd January. In the second of a course of lectures, given in the theatre of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, Sir ;Arthur Keith said that man's brain, with all its. failings, represented Nature's masterpiece. Recently a distinguished Viennese neurologist, Professor Constantin Ecpnomo, had made a more exact census than, any made hitherto of the living units within the cortex or rind which was the essential part of the human brain. He found that a European with a brain of 48oz (which was a common size) had in the neighbourhood of 14,000 millions of living units or neurons, as they were named, in the grey matter or cortex of his brain; The brain, stated Sir Arthur, was "wired" to an' extent >far.:* beyond '■ the wildest dreams of .-'the-.-most modern of telephone engineers, the wires or.nerve fibre being-living filaments drawn from the bodies; of the neurons. VAST. TIDE OF TRAFFIC. Let an engineer think of an organ wired aa the brain was, with messages volleying along each wire at a rate of some 40 or CO a second and travelling at a rate of 200 miles an hour, and he would have some faint conception of the tide of traffic handled by an efficient'brain in the course of a morning. It was plain, Sir Arthur added, that mere mass must be a very. • insecure guide to capacity. A brain might have mass and yet lack of organisation or fail in a hundred other ways; the brain of the elephant and of "the whale, for example, far exceeded man's brain in mass, but, in their case, the neurons were of a vege^ tative order. The fact, however, remained that mass of brain did usually count. If the human bram fell short of- 32 ounces,' its owner was an imbecile; to this no exception had; been known. Craniometrical investigations, moreover, had shown that, in all gatherings made' up from - leading men, the^ average mass, of brain was distinctly higher than that of groups which represented manual labourer*.

The most striking generalisation which had emerged from .recent research on the brain was to show that all .the cortex behind the central fissure had to deal with the receipt and manipulation of messages streaming in from the sense organs of the body and all that lay in front was executive or controlling in function. General opinion, which had long favoured an ample forehead as a- mask of ability, was receiving some degree, of justification from modern inquiry.