19792

This article points out that vital intrinsic neural activities may in part stem from a person’s random thoughts and daydreams, or from neural efforts to balance the opposing signals of cells simultaneously trying to jack up and cool down brain activity, or could occur during an internal process of generating predictions about upcoming environmental demands and how to respond to them. These findings corroborate some of the basic principles important for the development of psychoanalytic theory: the utility of conceptualizing functional divisions of the mind and the importance of a person’s inner world. Freud maintained that the organizing principle in the nervous system was based on functional groupings rather than topographical relationships.

Leon Hoffman
New York Psychoanalytic
Institute and Society
New York, N.Y.

Many parallels could be drawn between this perspective on the brain and the World Wide Web. The active nodes, the chaos, and the long-distance and short-distance connections can be compared to servers, terminals, Web sites, and the Web chaos that results in packet traffic being delivered simultaneously to millions of different locations. Each person has his or her own internal Internet.

Dan Dell
Santa Clarita, Calif.