On failure of brain power (encephalasthenia); its nature and treatment.

  • Althaus, Julius, 1833-1900.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On failure of brain power (encephalasthenia); its nature and treatment. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    pensable condition for the highest order of mental activity. With regard to this point, Darwin has related an interesting story of a trainer of monkeys, who was in the habit of offering a double price for animals if he was allowed to take some of them home with him for a few days previous to purchase. When asked how he would utilise such a privilege, he said that if, while talking to a monkey, its attention was constantly distracted by trivial things which happened in the same room, the animal would be useless for training purposes, while one that was strictly attentive to everything said to it, was in- valuable. Apart from giving us the faculty of sustained attention, the pre-frontal lobes would likewise seem to furnish us with the power of distinguishing right from wrong, and thus controlling the lower centres, which by giving us sensations and desires incite us to the performance of certain actions, so that without this inhibitory power we should be unable to check our animal impulses. While this view is now almost generally accepted, some able physiologists dissent from it toto C(xlo. Thus Goltz,^^ who is one of the most persevering experimenters on this subject, states as the result of his observations that the cortex ui all its parts is the organ of the higher mental functions, especially of the intellect; which latter he defines as the capacity to work up perceptions by the senses into the performance of purposive actions. For him there is no further connection between the intellect and the frontal lobes than exists between the same and any other portion of the brain; and he has found the intellect to be much more seriously impaired by the removal of the occipital area than by that of the frontal lobes. Munk^^ has likewise arrived at the conclusion that the intel- lect is seated everywhere in the cortex^ and nowhere else, being the sum and result of all images and ideas which arise from the faculty of perception inherent to the senses. Any injury to the cortex damages the intellect in proportion to its extent,