Thirteen Neurological Principles

1. While experience is mediated by the brain and conscious experience is a function of the cerebral cortex phylogenetically older brain volumes such as the limbic system add emotional color. The entire organism participates in experience.
2. The nervous system functions and is governed by electrical and chemical processes.
3. Complex perception, planning and judgment is most efficiently brought about by healthy nervous tissue.
4. Nervous function is localized and organized into highly interdependent modules working best in healthy union.
5. The goal of the neurological exam is to localize impairment to one of more anatomically localized modules.
6. Presence of mind and goal directed behavior persists in spite of specific modular dysfunction but disintegrates after losing a critical number of modules.
7. Given neurons’ extremely limited ability to regenerate, we need to jealously protect their function.
8. The goal of medical therapy is to preserve nervous tissue function, failing that to lead the way around impairment, to shepherd and support patient and family through the ordeal of illness and enhance quality and length of life and diminish suffering.
9. Rehabilitation relies on plasticity which reverses impairments when neurons devoted to other functions can be recruited to assume a missing function. Limited restoration of function of damaged tissue plays a lesser role.
10. The nervous system is the great organizing the principle and crowning achievement of biology. Like all biological systems, it is the product of evolution and adaptation, affected by the same processes that govern other organ systems and sharing vulnerabilities, but much more susceptible to damage.
11. Personality, experience, intellect, passion and all human qualities are a properties of living organisms, not separate from them.
12. Culture, the product of nervous tissue, with a life of its own, is self-enhancing, growing, influences human behavior and author of all of accomplishments of humankind.
13. Nervous function though Carbon based, shares characteristics with Silicon-based computational devices, thus contributing to our understanding of the brain. Technology will evolve ever more intimate marriage of thinking Carbon based organisms to unknowing Silicon electrical devices. Electrical and chemical advances will enable humankind to abolish diseases, enhance performance and heighten experience. Though progress seems slow, it is unstoppable and the time is at hand when nervous function will improve by human design. Thus the nervous tissue is in the end a miracle of self repair and self enhancement.

-Charles S. Yanofsky