GRG Profiles: Jackie D. Wood

Autonomic brain in the gut

“…C. L. Prosser, Professor of Physiology at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana campus, in the United States, taught students, in his comparative neurophysiology lectures, that acquisition of complete description of functions at lower levels of hierarchical organization in a nervous system does not predict behavior that emerges from a nervous system when it is responding and adapting to changes in its environment (Wood 2016). Nevertheless, knowledge of electrophysiological properties of single neurons and the synaptic connections of individual neurons inside configurations of neural circuits and networks at lower levels of a neurophysiological hierarchy is essential for understanding the physiology of independent integrative nervous systems like the ENS.…”

“…On the advice of his major professorial mentor, C. Ladd Prosser, the author began electrophysiological recording from neurons in feline ENS in 1967, with first results published in 1969 and 1970 (Wood 1970;Wood 1973;Wood 2016). Simultaneously, in the 1970s, electrophysiological studies of neurons in the ENS were done at the Pavlov Institute of Physiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia (Nozdrachev 1977;Nozdrachev et al 1975a;Nozdrachev et al 1977;Nozdrachev, Vataev 1981;Gnetov, Kachalov 1975a;Gnetov, Kachalov 1975b).…”