The Form Within: My Point of View

Karl H Pribram

Feb 2013 · Easton Studio Press, LLC

About this ebook

THE FORM WITHIN is the fascinating story of two hundred years of pioneering brain research, told from the unique perspective of the only brain scientist who has been, and still remains, an active participant in that story throughout the past seventy years: Karl H. Pribram.

In THE FORM WITHIN, Dr. Pribram takes us on a compelling journey from the dawn of our collective “recorded perceptions” in cave paintings to our greatest achievements as a species. He explains the important task of mapping the brain; the discovery of our holographic processing of memory and perception; and the detailed research that has created our understanding of self-organizing biological systems.

Along the way, Pribram shares the intimate interactions he has had with luminaries of twentieth-century science, including David Bohm, Francis Crick, John Eccles, Dennis Gabor, Hubel and Wiesel, Wolfgang Kohler, Karl Lashley, Aleksandr Romanovitch Luria, Ilya Prigogine, B. F. Skinner, Eugene Sokolov, and many others.

But this riveting glimpse into our past is only a part of the story. Pribram also provides us with insightful breakthroughs into a science of the future, and points the way to where our understanding of the brain is headed.

About the author

Karl H. Pribram was once dubbed “The Magellan of the Mind” for his breakthrough research on the functions of the forebrain, including the frontal lobes, temporal lobes, and limbic system, and their roles in decision making and emotion. His holonomic theory of memory and perception has been the subject of numerous popular books, including Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe, and Lynne McTaggart’s The Field, among many others.

Born in Vienna in 1919, Pribram received his medical degree from the University of Chicago at the age of twenty three, becoming one of the first three hundred certified brain surgeons in the world. During his next decade as a neurosurgeon in Memphis and Jacksonville, he joined Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center, became its director, and pioneered the field of neuropsychology—a term that Pribram invented.

He spent the following sixty years leading groundbreaking research into the interrelations of the brain, behavior, and the mind: ten years at Yale University, thirty years at Stanford University, and twenty years as distinguished professor at Radford and George Mason Universities and (simultaneously) as distinguished professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at Georgetown University, where he still serves today.

Pribram is the author of more than 700 books and scientific publications, including Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with George Miller and Eugene Galanter, 1960), which is credited with launching the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology; Languages of the Brain (1971); Freud’s “Project” Re-assessed(with Merton Gill, 1976); and Brain and Perception (1989). He is the recipient of more than sixty major awards and honors, including a lifetime grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research; a Lifetime Research Career Award from the National Institute of Health; a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychology and from the Washington Academy of Sciences; honorary doctorates in psychology and neuroscience from the Universities of Montreal and Bremen, Germany; and an Outstanding Contributions Award from the American Board of Medical Psychotherapists. He was the first recipient of the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Award for uniting the sciences and the humanities.