Charles Scott Sherrington
Charles Scott Sherrington
Sir Charles Scott Sherrington OM GBE PRSwas an English neurophysiologist, histologist, bacteriologist, and a pathologist, Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Society in the early 1920s. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edgar Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian, in 1932 for their work on the functions of neurons. Prior to the work of Sherrington and Adrian, it was widely accepted that reflexes occurred as isolated activity within a reflex arc. Sherrington received the prize for showing...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth27 November 1857
The brain seems a thoroughfare for nerve-action passing its way to the motor animal. It has been remarked that Life's aim is an act not a thought. To-day the dictum must be modified to admit that, often, to refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one, because inhibition is coequally with excitation a nervous activity.
As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.
He solved at a stroke the great question of the direction of nerve-currents in their travel through brain and spinal cord.
If it is mind that we are searching the brain, then we are supposing the brain to be much more than a telephone-exchange. We are supposing it to be a telephone-exchange along with subscribers as well.
Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern-always a meaningful pattern-though never an abiding one.
The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.