Dr. Wilder Penfield commented on the mind’s being the person. In my first book, Nerve Endings of the Soul: Interaction Between the Mind of God and the Mind of Man through Neural Synaptic Networks, I share a discussion of the inner person of the Self. This discussion gives validity to the mind’s being not only transcendent of the material brain but also being the ”inner core” that is each individual that survives physical death.

Doctor James Le Fanu has presented a discussion of the “self” that is an excellent lead-in to the work of Eccles. . . . Le Fanu describes the Self as the “inner person” composed of several distinct attributes. These include a unique subjective experience of the world that is the Self’s alone, that the Self is an autonomous agent with freedom to choose [via the will of the cognitive mind], that it is founded upon a rich autobiographical inner record of memory, an accumulated subjective experience extending back to childhood and that it possesses powers of reason and imagination expressed through language extending beyond the boundaries of personal experience. The “self” is non-material with no substance, and it cannot be weighed or measured. Its non-material attributes collectively form the “inner core” [of the mind] that is each unique individual. Self is grounded in the human brain which facilitates its formation through cognition and memory, but it has a coherent, durable, transcendent reality that cannot be explained by ever-changing, transient electrical activity of neuronal circuits.

But what the mind does is different. It is not to be accounted for by any neuronal mechanism that I can discover. (Wilder Penfield)

In my book, Nerve Endings of the Soul: Interaction Between the Mind of God and the Mind of Man through Neural Synaptic Networks, I share Dr. Penfield’s comments about what he called “the brain’s highest mechanism.”

“The highest brain mechanism . . . should itself understand, and reason, and direct voluntary action, and decide where attention should be turned and what the computer [brain] must learn, and record, and reveal on demand.”

I posit in my book that Penfield’s highest brain mechanism interacts with the will, intention and attention of the individual Self. . . . Penfield refers to the highest brain mechanism as the mind’s executive. By some means the executive accepts direction from the mind and passes it on to various mechanisms of the brain conforming, I suggest, to the liaison brain proposed by Eccles and Popper that serves as the resource for neural codes specified for certain neural functions. Penfield goes on to say that decisions come from the mind, and “in conformity with the mind’s decision, the highest mechanism sends neuronal messages [encoded]to the other mechanisms in the brain,” again in conformity with with Eccles’ and Popper’s liaison brain. . . . Penfield posits that the messages go as neuronal potentials arranged in a specified pattern [linguistic neural codes] to the appropriate target grey matter, requiring the subject’s mind to interpret what the pattern represents in terms of meaning and purpose.

But the mind has energy. The form of that energy is different from that of neuronal potentials that travel the axone pathways. (Wilder Penfield)

In Chapter 12 Penfield makes the following statements:

By taking thought, the mind considers the future and gives short-term direction to the sensory-motor automatic mechanism. But the mind, I surmise, can give direction only through the mind’s brain-mechanism. It is all very much like programming a private computer. The program comes to an electrical computer from without. The same is true of each biological computer. Purpose comes to it from outside its own mechanism. This suggest that the mind must have a supply of energy available to it for independent action.

I discuss Penfield’s proposed “energy” in my two blogs posted above entitled, “Waves in Our Brains,” Parts One and Two. I discuss the suggestion he made above extensively in my two books. I update the content presented in my books in specific blogs on this website.

In Chapter 1 of Dr. Penfield’s book the author wrote, “. . . that the engram of experience is a structured record within the brain.”

The structure of the record consists of linguistic neural codes about which I speak extensively in my two books. The codes are maintained in memory, and we are learning how dynamic the memory of the brain is, consisting of spike trains of action potentials retained in specific regions of the brain to be called upon by intention, attention and will.

I continue with another excerpt from the Foreward to Dr. Penfield’s book:

“. . . the mind must be viewed as a basic element in itself. One might call it a medium, an essence, a soma. That is to say, it has a continuing existence.”

I continue with an excerpt from the Foreward to Dr. Penfield’s book written by Charles W. Hendel:

“[Dr. Penfield] became more and more convinced that the mind is something in its own right, that it did things with the mechanisms at hand in its own way, that it had an ‘energy’ of its own. . . . [He aligned himself] with the prophets, the poets, and the philosophers who have emphasized the spiritual element in man.”

Charles W. Hendel wrote the Foreword for Dr. Penfield’s book. He said, “. . . I find the last pages are an eloquent, convincing justification of your hypothesis and belief that mind has a being distinct from body, though intimately related to and dependent on body. . . . mind is a very distinctive reality.”

Quoting Dr. Penfield, “Throughout my own scientific career I, like other scientists, have struggled to prove that the brain accounts for the mind. But now, perhaps, the time has come when we may profitably consider the evidence as it stands, and ask the question: Do brain-mechanisms account for the mind? Can the mind be explained by what is now known about the brain? If not, which is the more reasonable of the two possible hypotheses: that man’s being is based on one element, or on two? . . . But it is, I believe, a mystery that science will solve some day. In that day of understanding, I predict that true prophets will rejoice, for they will discover in the scientist a long-awaited ally in the search for Truth.