VEGETATIVE LIFE. - It constitutes, as opposed to the life of relation and animal life, the group of activities that tend to guarantee the organism an effective functionality of the individual organs, as well as their mutual coordination for the best maintenance and exercise of the vital processes. The purpose, therefore, of all vegetative functions is to ensure for the individual the most favorable conditions of life for his organism.
These functions are under the control of a particular section of the nervous system: the neurovegetative system (v.) which, with its diencephalic centers and with the two sections of the ortho-and parasympathetic, contributes (in close functional connection with certain endocrine glands), together with the nervous system of relation, to the regular development of the conscious-psychic life.
By means of the organs assigned to the vegetative function, the organism is therefore able to provide for the phenomena of general material metabolism, through the intake, digestion, absorption (digestive apparatus and connected glandular organs: liver, pancreas...), the transport and storage of the various products within the tissues according to their respective requirements (cardiovascular apparatus), the elimination of catabolites through the excretory organs (kidney, intestine, skin). Besides these functions which, together with the respiratory function deputed to the normal oxygenation of the blood, contribute to the growth and preservation of the individual, it must be remembered that among the functions of vegetative life the procreative function must also be numbered, by means of which the perpetuity of the species is ensured. Con-
The regulatory center of the entire vegetative life is today considered to be the neuro-endocrine-diencephalic complex, consisting of the hypothalamic centers of the diencephalon in anatomical and functional relationship with the pituitary gland, which constitutes "the mainspring of primitive, vegetative, emotional and reproductive existence" (Cushing). The entire activity of such a complex takes place outside the direct control of the will and the intelligence, which, only within narrow limits, can exert an inhibitory and regulatory action upon it. And, on the other hand, experience teaches how the vegetative life can unfold perfect and present with all its instinctive and automatic reflexes even in the most deficient development of the higher psychic function, as is seen in the lower beings of the zoological scale, in the vital activities of the newborn and in the most serious cases of mental deficiency.
Ceni admits the existence of two distinct equilibrating systems in the vegetative life of evolved beings: one seated in the diencephalon, the other in the brain and more precisely in the prefrontal zones of the cerebral cortex and in intimate relationship with the psychic centers. To the diencephalic center would belong, still according to Ceni, the hormones that provide for interglandular correlations, while the cerebro-psychic system would contribute a nervous factor capable of acting outside hormonal influences. While, therefore, the diencephalic system comes to have a very remote origin and is present also in the lower animals in which it presides, independently of external stimuli, over the organization of matter in harmony with internal and environmental requirements, the cerebro-psychic system is of recent origin and not inherited, but acquired, and represents the fundamental element of all the psycho-organic reactions that underlie the emotions, which in man can leave the field of preformism and enter that of consciousness.
From what has been reported above, one senses the importance that is currently recognized in this neuro-endocrine complex which Pende defines as "a bridge between soul and body." This zone, in fact, seems today to comprise all the nervous centers of instinctive-emotional-animal life, that is, of the complex of feelings and passions (hunger, thirst, aggressiveness, wakefulness, sleep, mood, sexual tendency...), constituting the zone of the brain in which our animality unfolds. With the progress of anatomical and physiological knowledge of the neuro-vegetative system, it has become possible to delineate ever better the complex syndromes determined by the functional alteration of this or that section of the system. Alongside, therefore, pictures determined by slight dysfunctions, yet capable of giving a particular imprint to the constitution of a subject (orthosympatheticotonic and then parasympatheticotonic type [v. TIPO]), various pathological alterations have come to be ever better delineated, such as the orthosympatheticopathies with excitation or paralysis of this or that section of the sympathetic (cervical, thoracic...) and the orthosympathoses of the sensory, vasomotor, excretory or dystrophic type, in which a concomitant alteration of the endocrine glands is often associated.
Moreover, in recent times (1950) a new morbid syndrome has been identified by Pende, diencephalosis, whose essence would consist in heightened and disordered activity of the diencephalic centers liberated from the inhibitory influence of the higher cortical centers. According to Pende, "diencephalosis," produced by cerebral leptomeningitis from fetal life, with external and internal hydrocephalus, particularly of the third cerebral ventricle, with its irritative, inflammatory and degenerative phenomena of the hypothalamic centers, can explain the profound anomalies of behavior and the notable disturbances of the moral sphere found in subjects who were once defined as "born or habitual criminals" (Lombroso). He even speaks of a "criminogenic diencephaloendocrinosis" whose importance is undoubted not only from the point of view of the educational formation of the individual, but also from the social and moral one, since subjects who should rather be counted among true cerebropaths cannot be considered fully imputable. These diencephalic alterations, although still not well classifiable, cannot today be ignored, since they rest on statistical bases, having been found, through radiological-functional investigation of the skull, the brain and the endocrine balance, in about 20% of children fully abnormal physically and psychically or abnormal only in conduct and in 47% of a group of criminals confined in the prisons of Rome.
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Alessandro Marolla