Abstract
It has long been recognized that, if non-material mental events, such as the intention to carry out an action, are to have an effective action on neural events in the brain, it has to be at the most subtle and plastic level of these events. Attention has to be focused on the biological units of the brain, the neurons or nerve cells, and on the manner of their communication at specialized sites of close contact, the synapses. An introduction to conventional synaptic theory leads on to an account of the manner of operation of the ultimate synaptic units. These units are the synaptic boutons that, when excited by an all-or-nothing nerve impulse, deliver the total contents of a single synaptic vesicle, not regularly, but probabilistically. This quantal emission of synaptic transmitter molecules (about 5000 to 10000) is the ultimate functional unit of the transmission process from one neuron to another. This refined physiological analysis leads on to an account of the ultrastructure of the synapse, which gives clues as to the manner of its unitary probabilistic operation. The essential feature is that the effective structure of each synapse is a paracrystalline presynaptic vesicular grid, which acts probabilistically in quantal release.
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Eccles, J.C. (1994). New Light on the Mind-Brain Problem: How Mental Events Could Influence Neural Events. In: How the SELF Controls Its BRAIN. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-49224-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-49224-2_4
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