ABSTRACT
John Carew Eccles is best known for being an outspoken critic of chemical neurotransmission in the CNS – that is, until his own work examining the electrophysiological properties of inhibitory spinal neurons in the 1950s provided compelling evidence for its existence. Armed with his new technique, in 1951, Eccles began examining the responses of motor neurons passing out to the quadriceps muscle of the thigh in the anaesthetised cat. When Eccles stimulated the presynaptic neurons with a small electrical current, it failed to trigger an action potential in the motor neuron. It was a pivotal moment when Eccles was forced to admit he had been wrong regarding the existence of electrical chemical neurotransmission. In attempting to explain how mind and body interacted, Eccles proposed that it took place at the microscopic level and involved the interaction of non-physical mental units with cerebral units formed by sets of dendrites that used quantum mechanics to affect each other.
