From Dr. Penfield’s book, Mystery of the Mind:

One can only conclude that conscious attention adds something to brain-action that would otherwise leave no record. It gives to the passage of neuronal potentials an astonishing permanence of facilitation for the later passage of current, as though a trail had been blazed through the seemingly infinite maze of neurone connections. . . . Permanent facilitation of a patterned sequence in these brain mechanisms is established only when there is a focusing of attention on the phenomenon that corresponds to it in consciousness.

If previous decision regarding the focusing of attention is made in the mind, then it is the mind that decides when the facilitating engram is to be added. One may assume that it is the highest brain mechanism that initiates the brain action associated with that decision. One may assume, too, that the engram is simultaneously added to conditioned reflexes and to the sequential record of conscious experience.

Is there any evidence of the existence of neuronal activity within the brain that would account for what the mind does?

My two books and the blog, “Waves in Our Brain,” Parts One and Two, address these comments by Dr. Penfield in considerable detail. In contemporary terms he is addressing the function of the liaison brain and its linguistic codes (facilitating engrams) established through a lifetime of experience and archived in memory. The attention, will and intention of the immaterial mind possess a nonclassical energy that works through the linguistic codes of the liaison brain (Penfield’s highest brain mechanism) to effect functional neuronal activities via synaptic networks, such as lifting an arm, speaking a phrase or expressing an idea.

When we come to understand man, we will see that the nature of the mind and the nature of the mind’s energy is simple and easily comprehensible. However, that shows only that I am an optimist. (Dr. Wilder Penfield)

It is my hope that the information shared in my books and blogs makes our mind more understandable as being created in the image of the Mind of God who is Spirit and that our understanding of the human mind as being irreducible to the physical brain becomes clear. The human mind transcends our brain, has a distinct energy and is eternal. Along with our will, emotion and conscience it is our soul.

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.”