In his preface to his book, Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, Dr. Wilder Penfield shared his experience listening to a lecture by Sir Charles Sherrington as a medical student in Oxford. He said, “I realized that there was a thrilling undiscovered country to be explored in the mechanisms of the mammalian nervous system. Through it, one might approach the mystery of the mind, . . . there was always a restless wondering within me about the working of the brain and its relation to mind. . . . the primary duty of each of us is to give an account of his own intriguing expeditions into this undiscovered country and to pass on his own record accurately and hopefully to others who follow on these explorations that have now become a fateful pilgrimage.
In the blogs to follow I will show how prescient the neurosurgeon, Dr. Penfield, was in elucidating the interaction between the mind and the brain through his studies conducted on live patients.