“By analogy, Nature’s most economical usage of the brain would be for a reasonable proportion of it to be in operation at any one time, rather than having one concept, one neuron.” Instead, each neuron would occur in a great many distinct c…the two surfaces of the disk that represents the cortex. Many other decisions would have to be made concerning the design, even before any really useful experiments could be performed. These decisions would concern qualitative details of st…Sometimes Penfield’s theory is considered to be inconsistent with Hebb’s, but in the present writer’s opinion, the assembly theory is made easier to accept by combining it with this hypothesis of a central control. For the following mechani…
Wilder Penfield
scientist · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Penfield appears here primarily as a neuroscientist whose work on cortical organization and neural mechanisms informs cybernetic models of brain function, particularly regarding how neurons distribute across multiple circuits rather than operating in isolation. The readings invoke his theories—especially regarding central control and neural assembly—to reconcile competing models of how the brain's computational architecture might actually work, suggesting his empirical findings about cortical structure provide constraints that make theoretical frameworks like Hebb's more plausible when properly integrated.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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