Equipotential theory
The Equipotentiality is a historical conception of Neurobiology , which assumes that the brain equally all parts involved in the tasks of the brain. It goes back to Marie Jean Pierre Flourens (1823).
In the twentieth century, Karl Lashley conducted experiments on rats that had to orient themselves in a maze to find food . After learning to navigate the maze and find food quickly, they were left with lesions in their brains in different parts and to varying degrees . After the healing, they were placed in the maze again and examined to see how well they could remember the location of the food. Lashley found that the rats had no problems finding their way around lesions in specific parts of the brain. On the other hand, if larger parts of the brain were destroyed, they had greater problems finding their way around. He concluded from this that the intact brain mass and not individual parts are decisive for functionality (theory of mass effects).
The theory can now be considered refuted. Lashley's experiments have been criticized because orientation in a maze is too complex a task to locate a particular function (in this case memory). Likewise, the procedures were too imprecise to remove specific parts of the brain.
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- Erich Kandel, James Schwartz, Thomas Jessell : Neurosciences , 1996, pp. 8–16, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag , ISBN 3-86025-391-3