The Form Within: My Point of View - Hardcover

Pribram, Karl H

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 193521280X ISBN 13: 9781935212805

Publisher: Prospecta Press, 2013

Synopsis

THE FORM WITHIN is the fascinating story of two hundred years of pioneering brain research, told from the unique perspective of the only brain scientist who has been, and still remains, an active participant in that story throughout the past seventy years: Karl H. Pribram.

In THE FORM WITHIN, Dr. Pribram takes us on a compelling journey from the dawn of our collective “recorded perceptions” in cave paintings to our greatest achievements as a species. He explains the important task of mapping the brain; the discovery of our holographic processing of memory and perception; and the detailed research that has created our understanding of self-organizing biological systems.

Along the way, Pribram shares the intimate interactions he has had with luminaries of twentieth-century science, including David Bohm, Francis Crick, John Eccles, Dennis Gabor, Hubel and Wiesel, Wolfgang Kohler, Karl Lashley, Aleksandr Romanovitch Luria, Ilya Prigogine, B. F. Skinner, Eugene Sokolov, and many others.

But this riveting glimpse into our past is only a part of the story. Pribram also provides us with insightful breakthroughs into a science of the future, and points the way to where our understanding of the brain is headed.

About this title

About the Author

Karl H. Pribram was once dubbed “The Magellan of the Mind” for his breakthrough research on the functions of the forebrain, including the frontal lobes, temporal lobes, and limbic system, and their roles in decision making and emotion. His holonomic theory of memory and perception has been the subject of numerous popular books, including Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe, and Lynne McTaggart’s The Field, among many others.

Born in Vienna in 1919, Pribram received his medical degree from the University of Chicago at the age of twenty three, becoming one of the first three hundred certified brain surgeons in the world. During his next decade as a neurosurgeon in Memphis and Jacksonville, he joined Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center, became its director, and pioneered the field of neuropsychology—a term that Pribram invented.

He spent the following sixty years leading groundbreaking research into the interrelations of the brain, behavior, and the mind: ten years at Yale University, thirty years at Stanford University, and twenty years as distinguished professor at Radford and George Mason Universities and (simultaneously) as distinguished professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at Georgetown University, where he still serves today.

Pribram is the author of more than 700 books and scientific publications, including Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with George Miller and Eugene Galanter, 1960), which is credited with launching the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology; Languages of the Brain (1971); Freud’s “Project” Re-assessed(with Merton Gill, 1976); and Brain and Perception (1989). He is the recipient of more than sixty major awards and honors, including a lifetime grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research; a Lifetime Research Career Award from the National Institute of Health; a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychology and from the Washington Academy of Sciences; honorary doctorates in psychology and neuroscience from the Universities of Montreal and Bremen, Germany; and an Outstanding Contributions Award from the American Board of Medical Psychotherapists. He was the first recipient of the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Award for uniting the sciences and the humanities.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Have you noticed the massive interest shown by the scientific community in studies of mind and brain? Scientific
American is publishing a new journal, Mind; Psychology Today is headlining studies of the workings of the brain; Popular Science and Discover are filled with tales of new discoveries that relate mind to brain and 37,000 neuroscientists are working diligently to make these discoveries possible.

It has not always been this way. When, as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, I took a course on the nervous system, we stopped short of the brain cortex—and what we now know as the “limbic systems” was dismissed as a most mysterious territory called the “olfactory brain.”

It was this very lack of knowledge that attracted me: The Form Within is the story of my adventures in charting
this most important world about which we then knew so little. In the process, the data I gathered and the colleagues with whom I worked changed what opinions I had brought to the research and added sophistication to my interpretations.
In retrospect what impresses me—and what I urge my students to appreciate—is the long time required, sometimes
decades of passion, persistence and patience, for an idea to ripen into a body of hard evidence and a theoretical
formulation that I was finally able to communicate clearly to others.

The Form Within tells the story of my voyage of discovery during almost a century of research and theory construction. The story is set within the frame of the discoveries of the previous century, the 19th, which totally revised
our understanding in the Western world of how our brains work. During the 17th century and earlier, the human brain
was thought to process air, often termed “spirits.” With the advent of the sciences of chemistry and of electricity, a basic
understanding of brain processes was attained that, to a large extent, resembles our current views. Writings like those of William James and Sigmund Freud, around the juncture of the two centuries, will be referenced repeatedly in the following chapters.

My own story has a somewhat different perspective from that which is currently available in most neuro- and psychological science books and journals. For example, my interactions with the 20th century “shapers of viewpoints”
in the brain and behavioral sciences—B. F. Skinner and Karl Lashley, experimental psychologists; Wilder Penfield,
neurosurgeon; Arthur Koestler, author; John Eccles, neurophysiologist and Karl Popper, philosopher—expose the questions that puzzled us rather than the dogma that has become associated with their names.

Thus, The Form Within is the story of my quest. It charts a voyage of discovery through 70 years of breakthroughs in brain and psychological research. More than a hundred students have obtained their doctoral and postdoctoral training in my laboratory and gone on to productive and in some cases outstanding careers. Collaboration with scientists on five continents has formed and continues to form my views. The voyage is not over: each month I’ve had to add to, and in some cases revise, this manuscript. But as a work in progress, The Form Within is to me an inspiring chronicle of a most exciting voyage through what, often, at the time, has seemed to be a storm of experimental
and theoretical findings. As you will see, the concept of form—the form within as formative causation—provides a novel and safe vessel for this journey.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prospecta Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 193521280X
• ISBN 13: 9781935212805
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 560