THE USE OF THE BRAIN

Evening Star, Issue 20118, 7 March 1929, Page 15

THE USE OF THE BRAIN

REASONED OR CONSCIOUS THOUGHT SOME INTERESTING EXPERIMENTS. An exceedingly interesting contribution to the eternal problem, “What is the use of the brain?” is mado to ‘Chambers’s Journal’ by Professor George Forbes. It seems to him to be hardly credible that the brain, or any part of the body, can perform an act of thought. Yet it is clearly correct to say that reasoned or conscious thought depends on the brain. In what sense, then? ho asks. That our natural instinctive true thinking may bo too comprehensive in practice, and the brain is used as a valuable help for concentration upon reasoned thought much in the same way as pen, ink, and paper may serve the purpose. For illustration, ho takes the case of a judge making notes of evidence and a mathematician working out a piece of symbolic reasoning upon paper. The judge might he able to form a sound conclusion, even if his notes were destroyed. But often the mathematician would be unable to complete his reasoned argument if his symbolic writing was not available, any more than a man with a fractured skull and injured brain could carry on any kind of reasoned thought. “Perhaps we shall find,” Professor Forbes says, “ that the brain which is made for a totally different purpose may bp used to furnish, symbols quite as effective as the written words, and almost as effective as the mathematician’s written equations.” The operations both of our muscles and of our organs of sense, the two sole means of communication that the mind of man or of any animal has with the outer world, are accompanied by a stimulation of nerve centres in the brain. We think in a certain way about our will to act, and simultaneously certain nerve centres in the brain are stimulated, and they set in action certain muscles. All these distinct thoughts, related to tbo action of different nerve centres in the brain, arc, he suggests, used by us as symbols, or as letters of an alphabet, for making words and representing ideas, in a natural language. By using these symbols, instead of spoken or written words, we are enabled to conduct a course of reasoned thought.

Words or other symbols are absolutely necessary for converting what may be some of our instinctive subconscious vague thoughts or knowledge into rational thoughts that can he expressed to ourselves or to others. “These arc what we mean by reasoned thoughts,” he continues. “It-is certains that if like an infant or a deaf mute, we had no language, and if we felt the necessity for symbols to reason with, we should almost inevitably choose those nerve centres in the brain that are continually in our thoughts. For they alone give us contact with the material world. Thus would thoughts of nerve centra? become the alphabet for our natural reasoning language. This language would be used before we learned to speak, and would always be used afterwards for thinking out an argument before expressing it in words.”

As an experiment to learn what kind of feeling or thinking goes with the working of a muscle he trained an unusedl muscle. He tried to raise the second too of his foot without moving the others. In a week he was successful. This experiment was tried by others, and some interesting information is given. Professor Forbes quotes from the late Dr Francis Warner, senior physician at the London Hospital, that from the examination of a baby only three days old he could tell whether it would 1 be of normal intellect or an imbecile. A baby of that age when caught awake may bo seen holding up its hand and actuating such nerve centres as its brain contains to bend the fingers. Dr Warner found that if the baby’s body contained a good brain each finger was moved independently. If it had the brain of an imbecile it moved all the fingers together. The baby with a good brain has ten motor centres to act with. In the imbecile these are not phvsically differentiated. The healthy baby has ten different bendings, accompanied by ten different kinds of thought. The article concludes with the writer’s conviction that the thoughts we use for working our muscles are the symbols we use-in a language of reasoned thought prior to expression in words.