On this page we have
the amazing story of an MIT student who helped doctors find a
baseball-sized tumor in his brain. Doctors performed surgery and
removed the tumor. Later, the student gave a presentation to cancer
researchers. A video of the presentation is included on that page.
Now I know what you
are probably expecting – something like a wheelchair-bound
presenter somehow managing to very slowly communicate by using some
technology like that used by Stephen Hawking. But amazingly, the
young man seems to show no sign whatsoever of a damaged mind. He
walks and talks normally, and seems to have slick presentation skills
sufficient to land him a job as a host on a morning TV show. The
page tells us that this young man is now pursuing a PhD in mechanical
engineering.
In the presentation,
the young man tells us that the doctors removed about 12 billion
neurons in his brain.
The anomaly
discussed here is one of many in the medical literature in which
people have lost large portions of their brains, and suffered little
or relatively little damage. Now for another
similar anomaly that is even more amazing. This is a case in which a
human managed to function well in society as a French civil servant,
even though he had almost no functional brain.
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.
According to the
recent scientific paper published here, Lorber's findings have been confirmed
by others:
John Lorber
reported that some normal adults, apparently cured of childhood
hydrocephaly, had no more than 5% of the volume of normal brain
tissue. While initially disbelieved, Lorber’s observations have
since been independently confirmed by clinicians in France and
Brazil.
How can we explain
such anomalies under the theory that the brain is the sole producer
of your consciousness? One glib nonexplanation is the idea of
degeneracy. The idea is that natural selection may have helpfully
given us a brain that can lose most of its neurons but keep doing
pretty much what it was doing before.
But no one can
plausibly explain how such a thing could have evolved because of
natural selection. Explaining the origin of human consciousness and
man's mental traits is a nightmare enough without throwing in the
additional difficulty of explaining how such functionality could have
evolved in a way so that you could lose large parts of your brain (or
even most of your brain) while still largely retaining your
intellect.
I may note there is
apparently no “degeneracy” at all in the human cardiac system.
If one little artery gets blocked, you can die of a heart attack. If
one little heart valve stops working, you also die. Why would
evolution have given us “degeneracy” in the brain while not
giving us “degeneracy” in the cardiac system?
There's a better
explanation – that your human consciousness is not solely produced
by the brain. Your consciousness may be an output that comes from the
combined inputs of your brain and some totally mysterious “X
Factor” from outside of your skull or outside of your body. That
may be why human consciousness and intelligence can survive with
relatively little damage when huge parts of the brain are lost. It may also be why people have reported floating above their bodies during near-death experiences.
As
the scientific paper cited here states (in a challenge to
materialistic orthodoxy), “the
scope of explanations must not exclude extracorporeal information
storage.”
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