Memory, Learning and Language: The Physical Basis

The symposium was arranged with the purpose of cutting across some of the lines dividing various disciplines all having a common interest in different aspects of the functioning of the brain. The essays, given originally as lectures at one of the Jubilee celebrations of the University of Saskatchewan, were deliberately designed to be of interest to laymen concerned with the problem of education as well as to academics dealing daily with products of the brain's activity in teaching and learning. One of the main themes of the book is that the human brain has far greater potentialities than our present methods of education are exploiting; another is that, although our universities can be said to owe their very existence to the multiplex activities of the human mind, the subject of how the brain functions and the application of even our rather meagre knowledge of this field to the sphere of teaching and learning remains greatly neglected in university programmes. The subject of brain function, studied daily by the neurologist and neuro-surgeon, should gain the interest of non-medical fields concerned with utilizing the mechanism of the mind.

William Feindel (1918-2014) was one of Canada's most distinguished neurosurgeons and third director of the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro) of McGill University.