Sir John Carew Eccles (* 27 January 1903 in Melbourne; "† 2. May 1997 in Locarno) was an Australian physiologist and

"Bodies and my brain mean can I explain, but that is not everything. I can not explain my own existence", said the Australian brain researcher and Eccles once. Eccles investigated among other things, how nerve cells pass attractions on, and contributed crucially to clear the procedures up in the human brain.

Eccles visited the universities in Melbourne and Oxford. To latter examined it together with the British physiologist Charles Scott Sherrington (1857-1952), as signals will transfer between nerve cells over the synaptic gap. From 1937 to 1966 and taught Eccles in Australia and New Zealand worked. Afterwards it researched at the American Medical Association of institutes for Biomedical Research in Chicago, where biomedical research takes place. 1968 became Eccles faculty member at the college of the State University OF New York in Buffalo.

During its work in Oxford Eccles discovered 1951 together with its colleagues, the British physiologist Alan Lloyd Hodkin (*1914) and Andrew falling thing Huxley (*1917) the electricalphysiological mechanism of the postsynaptic inhibition of the attraction line: The impulse arriving on the cell extension of the motor nerve cell (Motoneuron) an excitation or an inhibition, there at the nerve fiber ending, causes which synapses, exciting or restraining chemical substances, which are paid transmitter substances so mentioned. Thus the electrical excitation transmission between the nerve cells at the synapses was enlightened. For these work Eccles as well as Hodkin and Huxley kept the Nobelpreis for medicine and physiology in the year 1963. In the reason of the Nobelpreiskomitees it meant: "For their discovery over the ion mechanism, that during the excitation and inhibition within the peripheral and central ranges of the nerve cell membrane takes place."

Philosophical position

Eccles busy itself also philosophically with the problem of consciousness. For it it is certain that only humans possess "a I consciousness ". This is put on from generation in humans and develops by the relationship with the external world in the first Lebensjahren.

Eccles leaned a strict materialism, thus the position, consciousness discharges itself to purely physical and chemical processes to attribute. It compared for instance the brain with a computer and "I "with its programmer. This I (spirit, soul) is supernatural and avails themselves the brain as instrument; it gives cause for hope that it continues after death.

Critics reject this position as relapse into a religiously motivated interactionistic dualism.

Particularly became Eccles' 1977 admits published writing which I and its brain (The self and its brain), it together with Karl the Popper wrote.

Literature

• John Carew Eccles: The Physiology OF Synapses, Berlin 1964
• John Carew Eccles, Karl Popper: Which I and its brain, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-492-21096-1
• John Carew Eccles: Like the even its brain steers, Berlin 1994
• John Carew Eccles: The evolution of the brain - the Erschaffung of the even, ISBN 3-492-23709-6

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