Seeing and thinking / by William Kingdon Clifford.

  • William Kingdon Clifford
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Seeing and thinking / by William Kingdon Clifford. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    from the spinal cord to the brain. We are certain that there are some which go to the spinal cord and end there, and others which begin at the spinal cord and come away, because if the spinal cord is injured—if a man has broken his back—you can still produce convulsive motions of the legs by pricking them, or affecting them in some other way. Messages will still be carried from the foot to the spinal cord when it is not possible to send them up to the brain. That which is called the ‘ reflex action ’ was discovered by Dr. Marshall Hall. But there are others which run right up to the brain and come down again. The first office of the brain, therefore, is just to receive messages in the optic thalami—to co-ordinate them there—to transmit them to the corpora striata, and the corpora striata tell them what to do with them. But that is not all. I have made a sort of train here which will tell you what this other structure is [exhibiting a rough model of the nervous brain structure]. Messages, when they come up from all parts of the body into this portion of the grey matter, which is at the base of the brain, having been carried across are sent to other parts of the body, and that is how you perform complicated actions without having your choice asked about them. If a cat