ipO BRAIN MECHANISMS AND LEARNING 



However, this nucleus is considerably expanded and supplemented by new 

 links physiologically conceived as components of an integral neurodyna- 

 mic and not linear organization, which we have named the 'functional 

 system'. 



The formulation of our concept became possible only when the basic 

 classical method of investigating conditioned reflexes had been supple- 

 mented by additional techniques which enabled us to reveal the other 

 aspects of conditioned reactions and their physiological substrate. 



The 'secretomotor method', the method of studying conditioned 

 reflexes proposed by us, has been of particular importance in the elabora- 

 tion of the new concept. Owing to a special design of the stand this 

 method made it possible to record simultaneously the secretory and motor 

 components of the conditioned reflex, the motor component constituting 

 not a mere manitestation of movement towards food but a movement of 

 choice towards one of the two or four feeding troughs connected with the 

 given conditioned stimulus (Fig. i). 



The special design of a two-sided experimental stand made it possible 

 to connect various conditioned stimuli with the different sides of the 

 stand and to compare the secretory and motor coniponents in the most 

 diverse experimental situations. 



Since by the classical secretory method this had not been possible on a 

 wide scale, the first experiments conducted in our laboratory with our 

 method revealed new aspects in the physiological architecture of the 

 conditioned reflex (Anokhin, 1932, 1933). All the results of our investiga- 

 tions were published in detail in some of our generalizing papers (Anokhin, 



1949, 1955, 1958). 



To solve the problem of the physiological architecture of the condi- 

 tioned reflex we have made extensive use, since 1937, of the clectro- 

 enccphalographic method. A method of recording the EEG in a perfectly 

 natural environment in the study of conditioned reflexes was first used in 

 our laboratory (Laptev, 1941, 1949). Recently these aims have been con- 

 siderably furthered by the numerous investigations of the physiological 

 peculiarities of the brain stem reticular formation so brilliantly begun in 

 the laboratories of Magoun, Forbes and Moruzzi and later applied to the 

 elaboration of conditioned reflexes in the laboratories of Jasper, Hernan- 

 dez-Peon, Morrell, Gastaut, and our own (Jasper, 1957; Morrell, 1958; 

 Hernandez-Peon, 1958; Gastaut, 1957, loshii, 1956). 



Our conception of the general physiological architecture of the condi- 

 tioned reflex is best considered fragmentally, so that at the end of this 

 report it may appear before the reader in its totality. 



