Diffuse Effects in the Central Nervous System. The Reticular Formation and the Dominant Focus

Abstract

Physiologists were familiar with diffuse effects in the central nervous system at the end of last century. Vvedenskii, for instance, knew that a wave of excitation can spread diffusely over the entire central nervous system and that this spread must have definite functional significance. “From the whole nervous system,” wrote Vvedenskii (1899), “a combined entity is obtained, in which the slightest change in one part is reflected more or less sensitively, at the same time or after a longer time interval, in all its other parts.”*