Charles Scott Sherrington

Sir Charles Scott Sherrington OM GBE PRS (27 November 1857 – 4 March 1952) was an English neurophysiologist, histologist, bacteriologist, and a pathologist, Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Society in the early 1920s. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edgar Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian in 1932.

Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.

Quotes

• It is difficult to get a hearing from busy men for even a great new truth.
  • (October 1927)"Listerian Oration: 1927 (delivered at the annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association, Toronto, June 18, 1927)". Canadian Medical Association Journal 17 (10 Pt 2): 1255–1263. quote from p. 1261; This oration sponsored by the Lister Club of the Canadian Medical Association should not be confused with the Lister Oration sponsored by the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

• In the great head-end which has been mostly darkness springs up myriads of twinkling stationary lights and myriads of trains of moving lights of many different directions. It is as though activity from one of those local places which continued restless in the darkened main-mass suddenly spread far and wide and invaded all. The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns. Now as the waking body rouses, subpatterns of this great harmony of activity stretch down into the unlit tracks of the stalk-piece of the scheme. Strings of flashing and travelling sparks engage the lengths of it. This means that the body is up and rises to meet its waking day.
  • Man On His Nature (1942), p. 178

• The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.
  • As quoted in the article The Human Brain — Three Pounds of Mystery, in The Watchtower magazine (15 July 1978)