Centencephalic Theory

Introduction The centrencephalic (or intracephalic) theory is one of the theories of the origin of consciousness that was proposed by the British neurologist and neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in the 1960s. This theory suggests that consciousness and higher cognitive functions (such as perception, thinking and language) are not located in one specific location in the brain, but are distributed throughout the brain. Thus, they are the result of the interaction of various structures and neural networks of the brain that are involved in information processing.

Why and how did the centrencephalic concept arise? In 1950–1963 Italian Jerome B. Sinnot published a series of fundamental studies of electrical activity in various areas of the human brain. He discovered that many nerve cell axons emerge from the clavative suture