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firing long distance electrical sparks, but is a cell capable of activating like Golgi’s syncytium and capable of storing information through attached processes, like billions of octopi that fuse their arms to each other. It is an autonomous cell that creates, imagines, and influences the activity of its active neuronal highways.
    This cell likely resides in the cortex. Although Pierre Flourens (1794–1867) and others had difficulty pinpointing areas of the cortex that corresponded to thought it was known that by removing the frontallobe in monkeys, they became more docile according to the work of Scottish scientist David Ferrier (1843–1924). Ferrier claimed the monkeys had no discernible post-operation deficits other than tranquility. The frontal lobotomy to treat violent patients came directly out of his descriptions of a tame monkey.
    American surgeon Walter Freeman (1895–1972) performed the lobotomies throughout the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s. The van that he traveled in was called the lobotomobile. Mental patients who were difficult to deal with were given the procedure. Freeman was educated at Yale and Penn and was not an amateur. He firmly believed in the benefits of the surgery with many notable patients including Rosemary Kennedy. The results of these tragic surgeries were the understanding that much of higher-level thinking resides in the cortex. With the advent of pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatric disease, his lobotomies thankfully went out of vogue.
    But it was the work of American-born Canadian surgeon Wilder Penfield in the 1950s that showed areas of the cortex might be responsible for different functions of thought. Penfield learned under Sherrington and became a master of electrophysiology.
    In the 1940s, it was shown that by cutting axons traversing from the right to left hemisphere, seizures could be reduced. While the surgery was being performed, the human patients were put under only local anesthesia applied in the scalp. Touching the brain is not painful because no sensory nerve endings reside there. The patients could talk to the experimenter and he could talk to them. The surgeon stuck electrodes into different areas of the brain as mapped by ablation and previous electrical studies and asked patients to perform functions. Ironically, by stimulating areas electrically, the surgeon could block them from doing certain things such as saying words or moving an arm. Patients could think about a function, but they were unable to perform it. Although this was the opposite of what they expected—hoping to induce action through electrical stimulation, it did reveal that areas of the cortex were important for many levels of thought.
    Further work into the idea of localization of thought was performed by Roger Sperry (1913–1994) in the 1960s. Using epileptic patients who had their hemispheres separated by the surgery, he covered one eye and had patients perform tasks that would not be noticed by the hemisphere of the brain opposite the eye. He was able to determine that each brainhemisphere has a different consciousness. This is where we get the terms on whether we are a right-brained person or a left-brained person, as the right brain was more associated with emotion and abstract thought, whereas the left brain had more concrete mapping of linguistic properties. Although it is not true that each brain area is responsible for only one aspect of the duality of personality, Sperry would win the Nobel Prize for his work.
    The cell-based root of thought has eluded us. We might know certain elements about how we think, but nothing has validated the Neuron Doctrine’s notion that the neuron is the seat of our intelligence and thought. Thought is intertwined with the ability to imagine and create. The illuminating studies on neurons for their understanding of its electrical properties remain unsatisfactory in their explanation of how we think.
    As pre-electrical Swiss scientist Albrecht