Related to Material concerned with integration and disintegration (-1906)
Description:

'General physiology shows that nervous tissue, fibres and cells, is [sic] no exception to the universal biological law, according to which in life, the period of activity is the period of disorganization, and that disorganization is followed step by step by reparation, without which life would be death. Mu standing point was thus clear: the nervous elements are disintegrated through action, and are immediately afterwards reintegrated, so that every nervous act has a phase of disintegration and another of reintegration; this latter being accomplished according to the modality of the disintegration which preceded it.' (47)

'we cannot be mistaked: the integration and reintegration of the nervous centres are absolutely unconscious.' (47)

'Once developed, the central elements are stimulated by accidental impressions. Their activity disintegrates and fatigues the central organ; fatigue is the measure of decomposition depending on activity; fatigue of the brain produces sleep; during sleep it rests, that is reintegrates; the resultiing freshness is the measure of the reparation accomplished.' (47)

'observation shows that if, on the one hand, the acts which fatigue the most, which give the largest amount of products of decomposition, which in short, disintegrate the most, are the least automatic and the most conscious; on the other hand, the acts which fatigue the least, which are accompanied by the minimum of functional decomposition, are exactly the least conscious and the most automatic. It therefore appears that disintegration produces consciousness only when it is of a certain intensity.' (48)

'the central acts accompanied most vividly by consciousness are those which require a more extended decomposition and cause a greater calorification; ... consequently, the intensity of consciousness is in direct ratio to the intensity of the functional disintegration.' (49)

''You read a chapter which interests you, or you are present at an important lesson, or you reflect in silence on a problem which preoccupies you: certain regions of your nervous centres suffer profound and extended disintegration, caused by the multiple impressions which affect them, and by the innumerable reflex sensations which they awaken: you are vividly conscious of what is taking place in you. But after some time this occupation fatigues you; you suspend it, in order to have food or take a walk; or for some reason, perhaps unperceived, your psychical activity passes to some other regions of the brain, and allows the reintegration to take place in those parts which have been working; immediately you lose all consciousness of the preceding activity, and are only conscious of the actual activity. In the meantime reintegration takes place, you are rested, you return to your first occupation, and, as soon as the functional vibrations affect there integrated parts, the contents of your consciousness become what they were before - but with this modification: the chaos of impressions then received is now duly arranged into a harmonious whole; reintegration having taken place according to the modality of the disintegration which preceded it; you are in possession of a synthesis, of a new conclusion, of an idea which would not come, but which now comes of its own accord; you have learned something; you have acquired a new faculty; and all without the least consciousness of the reintegration to which you owe this process.' (51-52)

'Every moment of our life, every one of the innumerable nervous elements which are called upon to act, continually oscillates between disintegration and reintegration, between consciousness and unconsciousness... Consciousness... is continuous, due partly to the continuity of the process of functional disintegration, so that the states of consciousness, whilst passing from one group of central elements to another, are always connected by this or that form of association and are, from this point of view, really the continuation of each other; and partly to the reviviscence of past consciousness, consolidfated, or rendered latent, by reintegration and again liberated when a wace of disintegration disturbs their repose.' (53)