ABSTRACT
2 3It has been proposed in a recent publication that before the evolution of the mammalian brain the animal world was literally mindless, without feelings. In the evolution of even the most primitive mammals, the basal insectivores, there came to exist a neocortex with a higher level of neural complexity, particularly in its pyramidal cell structure. Their apical dendrites have an enormous synaptic input and they form bundles as they ascend through the cortical laminae. There are hundreds of thousands of synaptic inputs, through boutons, onto a dendritic bundle, which is the reception unit, named dendron of the cerebral cortex. The axons of the pyramidal cells have a wide distribution in the brain. In this simplified conventional account of the structure of the cerebral cortex there is completely missing the story of the feelings that may be generated by the brain activity.
In developing that story it is necessary to move into a higher level of complexity, the ultramicrosite structure and function of the synapse, as discovered particularly by Akert and associates of Zurich. The boutons of chemical transmitting synapses have a presynaptic ultrastructure of a paracrystalline arrangement of dense projections and synaptic vescicles, a presynaptic vesicular grid. Its manner of operation in controlling chemical transmission opens up an important field of neural complexity that is still at its conception. The key activity of a synapse concerns a synaptic vesicle that liberates into the synaptic cleft its content of transmitter substance, an exocytosis. There are about 50 synaptic vesicles in the presynaptic vesicular grid. A nerve impulse invading a bouton causes an input of thousands of Ca2+ ions, 4 being necessary to trigger an exocytosis. The fundamental discovery is that at all types of chemical synapses an impulse invading a single presynaptic vesicular grid causes at the most a single exocytosis. There is conservation of the synaptic transmitter by an as yet unknown process of higher complexity.
The conservation challenge becomes intense when it is recognized that synapses of the cerebral cortex have an exceptionally effective conservation with a probability of exocytosis as low as 1 in 5 to 1 in 4 in response to an impulse invading a hippocampal bouton.
Because of the conservation laws of physics, it has been generally believed that non-material mental events can have no effective action on neuronal events in the brain. On the contrary it has been proposed that all mental experiences have a unitary composition, the units, being unique for each type of experience and being called 4 psychons. It has been further proposed that each psychon is linked in a unitary manner to a specific dendron, which is the basis of mind-brain interaction.
Quantum physics gives a new understanding of the mode of operation of the presynaptic vesicular gird and of the probability of exocytosis. Changes in this probability are brought about without an energy input, so the mind could achieve effective action on the brain merely by increasing the probability of exocytosis, for example from 1 in 5 to 1 in 3. That would give a large neuronal response when the mind through its psychons causes this increment in the hundreds of thousands of presynaptic vesicular grid on specific dendrons. A higher level of neural complexity is thus envisaged in order to lead to an understanding of how the mind can effectively influence the brain in conscious volition without infringing the conservation laws.
