One
such anomaly is the amazing fact that when a certain type of rare brain
surgery is done, half of a child's brain is removed. Under the theory
that your brain is the sole source of your mind, we would expect that
removing half of a child's brain would either cause the death of a
child, or cause the child to be doomed to a vegetative state.
Instead, amazingly, children who have this surgery done suffer
relatively little mental impairment.
The
type of surgery in question is called a
hemispherectomy,
and is sometimes performed on children experiencing severe seizures.
The operation is described in a Scientific American article entitled
Strange but True: When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One. The
article states: “Unbelievably, the surgery has no apparent effect
on personality or memory.”
The
case is discussed here. Inside a normal brain are tiny structures
called lateral ventricles that hold brain fluid. In this man's case,
the ventricles had swollen up like balloons, until they filled almost
all of the man's brain. When the 44-year-old man was a child,
doctor's had noticed the swelling, and had tried to treat it.
Apparently the swelling had progressed since childhood. The man was
left with what the Reuters story calls “little more than a sheet of
actual brain tissue.”
In
1980 John Lorber, a British neurologist, recounted a similar case of
a brain filled with fluid. “There's a young student at this
university,” said Lorber, “who has an IQ of 126, has obtained a
first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely
normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain.” According to
Lorber, “We saw that instead of the normal 4-5 centimeter thickness
of brain tissue...there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a
millimeter or so. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid.” Lorber found other similar cases. Here is a link discussing his work.
These
accounts seem to stand in stark opposition to the conventional theory
that your consciousness is entirely produced by your brain. Under
that theory, someone with the conditions described here should have
been dead, in a vegetative state, or at best persisting with the
intelligence of a squirrel – not working successfully as a French
civil servant, or being an honors student with an IQ of 126. But
these cases are perfectly compatible with the receptacle theory of
consciousness I have suggested. If the brain is mainly just a
receptacle for consciousness (consciousness which comes from some
unknown external source), then it might not matter all that much if
the receptacle is much smaller.
I
am not saying that these cases show the likelihood of the receptacle
hypothesis I have suggested, but they do make you wonder about whether such a hypothesis may be true, along with the other items I have listed in this post.
Montage of mysteries
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