![]() “Perception cannot be understood solely by examining properties of individual neurons,” he wrote in a 1991 Scientific American article. This self-organized behavior, he argued, means that the images we see in our minds are the collective activity of many neurons spread over the brain, not the activity of single neurons. “He argued that questions about mind and consciousness, often considered philosophical problems, could be addressed by experimental investigations of the collective properties of neurons,” said David Presti, a colleague and UC Berkeley neuroscientist.Īt a time when many scientists thought that the various functions of brains – touch and vision, for example – could be explained by simple networks of neurons, like the circuit diagram of a computer, he proposed that the collective behavior of neurons stretching throughout the brain is responsible for perception. He proposed that the way brains work is compatible with the thinking of 13th- century philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas about the unity of brain, body and mind, or soul. His studies led him to philosophize and write about the nature and origin of consciousness and perception, and the role of chaos in creativity and in allowing animal brains to respond flexibly to a constantly changing world. He published nearly 500 research articles in his lifetime, in addition to popular books – Societies of Brains: A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate (1995) and How Brains Make Up Their Minds (2001) – that brought the ideas of brain dynamics and chaos theory to lay audiences. (Bruce Cook photo, 1989)Ī professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Freeman died from pulmonary fibrosis of unknown cause, an affliction that did not keep him from walking to campus every day until just a few months ago.įreeman is considered one of the founders of the field of computational neuroscience, which uses mathematics and computers to understand brain dynamics and neural networks. Walter Freeman III, professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology.
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