About 50 years ago in the mid 1960’s, I was a graduate student at the University of Oregon. There, I had passed all of my qualifying exams, and was prepared to study under a professor who had agreed to be my thesis advisor. Under this professor I would develop a thesis problem setting my career course in experimental population biology.
Unexpectedly, the chief invertebrate neurophysiologist asked me to join his group. It was a very attractive offer, but it would be a big change in career direction. I had to think this change over.
As I mulled over the career offer, out of the blue came a very concrete and sober insight. Transformed over the decades, this insight has become the keystone of the Myth Meta Model Adventure, the present paper.
The insight concerned the physics of the biological organism’s hypercomplex neural physiology. This electrodynamic system is generated by an organism’s metabolism. It interactively contains, surrounds, and penetrates an organism internally, to the very atoms and ions and movements in the parts into which its mass-energy may be measured. It also radiates, and can receive any changing, measurable external electromagnetic field in its neighborhood, such as instruments used to investigate the brain. In this perspective, there exists an electromagnetic theory that accounts for all of any organism’s sense guided behavior.
Today, given modern computational power, this exciting intellectual project seems, to many scientists, nearly achieved, yet it seemed more clearly within reach in the mid 1960s when new means to measure the electrodynamics of single cells, especially that of nerve cells and muscle fibers, were rapidly evolving.
And, the door to a cutting edge neuroscience laboratory had been opened to me.