Sunday, April 7, 2013

Sir John Eccles, Nobel Prize Winning Neurophysiologist: The Brain Does Not Produce Consciousness


I have updated my web page on Eminent Researchers to include Nobel prize winning neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles. Eccles is the tenth Nobel prize winning scientists I have added to that page who believed in the soul or in some paranormal phenomenon based on their own research, experiences, or studies. The other Nobel prize winning scientists are:

  • Max Planck
  • Wolfgang Pauli
  • Erwin Schrödinger
  • Brian D. Josephson
  • Charles Robert Richet
  • John William Strutt
  • Marie Curie
  • Pierre Curie
  • Eugene Wigner

Other eminent researches discussed on the same web page who held such beliefs include:

  • Charles Darwin
  • Alan Turing
  • Wernher von Braun
  • David Bohm
  • Karl Popper
  • Sir Robert Boyle

You can learn more about these scientists and their beliefs at the link above.

The section on Sir John Eccles is this:

Sir John Eccles

Sir John Eccles was a neurophysiologist who won the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963 for his work on the synapse. He did not believe that the brain produces consciousness. In Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (1989) he wrote:
I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition ... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Carew_Eccles

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