Sir John Carew Eccles (27 January 1903 – 2 May 1997) was an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse.

He grew up there with his two sisters and his parents: William and Mary Carew Eccles (both teachers, who home schooled him until he was 12).

[3] As a medical undergraduate, he was never able to find a satisfactory explanation for the interaction of mind and body; he started to think about becoming a neuroscientist.

He graduated (with first class honours) in 1925,[4] and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study under Charles Scott Sherrington at Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1929.

In 1937 Eccles returned to Australia, where he worked on military research during World War II.

From 1952 to 1962, he worked as a professor at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) of the Australian National University.

[1] In the early 1950s, Eccles and his colleagues performed the research that would lead to his receiving the Nobel Prize.

On the other hand, IPSPs could subtract from this sum of EPSPs, preventing the motor neurone from firing.

Although he was wrong in this hypothesis, his arguments led him and others to perform some of the experiments which proved chemical synaptic transmission.

Bernard Katz and Eccles worked together on some of the experiments which elucidated the role of acetylcholine as a neurotransmitter in the brain.

[1] In 1964, he became an honorary member to the American Philosophical Society, and in 1966 he moved to the United States to work as a professor at the Institute for Biomedical Research at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

[9][1] Unhappy with the working conditions there, he left to become a professor at The State University of New York at Buffalo from 1968 until he retired in 1975.

[10] In 1990 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in recognition of service to science, particularly in the field of neurophysiology.

[2] In March 2012, the Eccles Institute of Neuroscience was constructed in a new wing of the John Curtin School of Medical Research, with the assistance of a $63M grant from the Commonwealth Government.

6-1 you will be able to see that I fully accept the recent philosophical achievements of Sir Karl Popper with his concept of three worlds.

It comprises the whole cosmos of matter and energy, all of biology including human brains, and all artifacts that man has made for coding information, as for example, the paper and ink of books or the material base of works of art.

All of these perceptions are in World 2, of course: vision with light and colour; sound with music and harmony; touch with all its qualities and vibration; the range of odours and tastes, and so on.

"Finally, at the core of World 2 there is the self or pure ego, which is the basis of our unity as an experiencing being throughout our whole lifetime.

The various signals from the recording equipment have to be received by my sense organs, transmitted to my brain, and so to my consciousness, then appropriately measured and compared before I can begin to think about the significance of the experimental results.

"Now I come to consider the way in which the three worlds interact..."[14] Despite these words, in his late book How the Self Controls Its Brain, Eccles proposed a dualistic mechanism of mind.