The concept of Consciousness at the Laurentides meeting in 1953

Promoted by the Council for International Organisations of Medical Sciences, the Laurentides meeting organised in 1953, August, 23-28, corresponded to the third international congress on EEG and to the nineteenth International Physiological Congress. It was proposed at the Unesco House in Paris by Dr. J.F. Delafresnay, by Henri Gastaut (1915-1995) and mainly by Herbert Henri Jasper (1906-1999). It aimed to show the new field of enquiry opened by the recent works on the reticular formation (RF). As Jasper wrote in his introduction: “Discovery of the remarkable functional properties of the extensive core of grey matter lying adjacent to the principal afferent and efferent pathways in the brain stem and diencephalon has stimulated new conceptions of the integrative action of the brain as a whole”. Giuseppe Moruzzi (1910-1986) whom we honour today, played a key role in the exploration of RF. He visited the laboratory of Horace Winchell Magoun (1907-1991) after the war. At that time, several experiments demonstrated that the stimulation of the central core of RF, at different levels from the medulla oblongata to the thalamus, controlled both the cortical as well as the spinal parts, through facilitatory and inhibitory pathways (Morison and The concept of Consciousness at the Laurentides meeting in 1953