Mind over matter?
Sir: Brian Inglis, reviewing Anthony Smith's book The Mind (17 March), supports his belief in a distinction between the mind and the brain and the priority of the former over the latter with an inaccurate and misleading reference to Grey Walter's Eddington Memorial Lecture of 1969. It should be emphasised that in this, as in all his work before 1970, Walter himself accepted no such distinction or priority. On the contrary, in that lecture he argued for 'the material basis of mental and emotional activity, even in the most subtle states of imagination and affection', basing his argument on his investigation of 'the electrochemical processes that accompany and often precede' mental processes.
For example, Inglis mentions his experiment which made it possible for the subject to influence external events (switching on a television circuit) not through any movement of the body, but
through the electrical activity of the brain initiated by a deliberate effort of will and transmitted by electrodes. Inglis's interpretation is that mental events were somehow directing physical events; Walter's was that mental events were somehow following physical events — a similar experiment made it possible `to discern through an electric machine the genesis of a person's intention, to predict his decisions before he knows his own mind' — and that the two kinds of event were really two aspects of the same event. And he added that, as a physiologist, he found it 'particularly reassuring that we can identify objective accompaniments of spontaneous volition and creative reflection'.
The point is that, despite Inglis's implication, Walter was not a dualist. When he began his career half a century ago he was a disciple of Pavlov; like Pavlov, he avoided the word 'mind', preferring `mentality', which he defined as 'a function of the brain' (or, more technically, as 'the rate of change of behaviour' of the brain), conversely describing the brain as 'the organ of mentality'. Even in his ventures into parapsychology during the 1960s, he concentrated on what he called 'the neurophysiological aspects' or 'physio-. logical correlates' of paranormal mentality, and recognised no distinction between the two phenomena. His position in the mind- brain debate was a rather mystical version of mechanistic monism, based on the theory of cybernetics and the practice of electroencephalography. It may be added that the mystical element increased dramatically after 1970 — ironically, when he suffered severe brain damage in a road accident which ended his career.
Nicholas Walter
88 Islington High Street, London NI
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