in chapter 6, section 5 of his book, how the self controls its brain, john c. eccles describes how the concentration of “attention causes neural activity in rather large areas of the brain, as is revealed by the rcbf technique (regional cerebral blood flow). . . . one can concentrate attention to a finger tip in order to detect a minimal touch that is expected,” and it is this focus of attention that results in the neural activity. “in this technique, radio-xenon . . . is injected into the internal carotid artery through a cannula that has been inserted for a clinical investigation. a battery of 254 geiger counters is mounted in a helmet applied over one side of the scalp. the brief injection causes a pattern of increased radioactivity, as observed by the counts of the geiger assemblage. this increase in counts signals an increased blood flow, which in turn gives a quantitative measure of the subjacent cortical activity. the counts are done in the control resting situation and then during the chosen mental task which . . . was a concentrated attention on the finger tip in anticipation of a just recognizable touch.” eccles’ study gave “a clear demonstraTION THAT THE MENTAL ACT OF ATTENTION CAN ACTIVATE APPROPRIATE REGIONS OF THE CEREBRAL CORTEX.”
THE STUDY OF AKGUL ET AL DISCUSSED IN MY PREVIOUS BLOG DREW UPON A BASIC TECHNIQUE USED IN THE 1990’S BY ECCLES. ECCLES’ WORK DID NOT RELATE TO WAVEFORMS AS DOES THE STUDY CITED IN MY PREVIOUS BLOG POST. tHE STRONG SUGGESTION IS THAT COGNITION ITSELF HAS THE CAPACITY TO GENERATE FOCAL CORTICAL BLOOD FLOWS COUPLED WITH WAVEFORMS THAT TRANSMIT INFORMATION THROUGH SPECIFIED SYNAPTIC NETWORKS TO ACHIEVE SPECIFIC ACTIONS. DUALIST INTERACTIONISM IS AGAIN GIVEN SUPPORT.