The Pathways of Mind
A Neural Theory of Mental Processing Mathematical Principles, Empirical Evidence, and Clinical Applications
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This book offers a synoptic view of comparative anatomical, ultrastructural, cell and molecular biological investigations of the pineal organ. It considers morphological, immunocytochemical and functional features of pineal photoreceptors and neuroendocrine pinealocytes as well as the afferent and efferent innervation of the pineal organ. Special emphasis is placed on receptor mechanisms, second messenger systems (Ca2+ and cyclic AMP), transcription factors (e.g. cyclic AMP response element binding protein, CREB, and inducible cyclic AMP early repressor, ICER) and their roles for regulation of melatonin biosynthesis. Finally, the action, targets and receptors of melatonin are dealt with. The data presented stress the functional significance of the pineal organ and its hormoe melatonin as important components of the photoneuroendocrine system which allows man and animals to measure and keep the time. They also prove the pineal organ as a very suitable model to study signal transduction mechanisms in both photoreceptors and neuroendocrine cells by means of a variety of modern techniques.
The model for this work was the description of the physical world by mathemati cal laws. It were always the simplest phenomena which were treated by this scientific method. Physicists studied simple motions inorder to find the mathematical laws. Astronomists observed the orbits of planets in order to find the laws of gravity. One of the simplest measurable phenomenon in the brain is the stimulus response task. Suchtasks have beenknown since the lastcentury bypsychiatrists and psycholo gists (v. Helmholtz). There existsa vast literature about the measurement and theory of simple reaction tasks and various choice reaction tasks, visualor auditory. They have beenmeasured and havebeendescribedmathematically.One of the firstmodels for the reaction times used a logarithmic function. But many intriguing questions remained open aboutreaction tasks especiallythe neural explanation ofthe findings. The new tool to investigate the neural structure of stimulus-response sequences was the computer. Now it was possible to measure the reaction times by using spe cial programs, to compute the elementary times and the pathway structures from these reaction times, to evaluate the results statistically, to simulate the results, and to write this text. It was this instrument which permitted to save large amounts of data and evaluate them by special software written for this purpose. Thus it was possible to compute the time quanta and the pathways and to understand each re action time as an integer multiple of this time quantum (plus a constant value).
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