Is your brain you really necessary? The reason for my apparently absurd question is the remarkable research conducted at the University of Sheffield by neurology professor the late Dr. John Lorber. When Sheffield’s campus doctor was treating one of the mathematics students for a minor ailment, he noticed that the student’s head was a little larger than normal. The doctor referred the student to professor Lorber for further examination. The student in question was academically bright, had a reported IQ of 126 and was expected to graduate. When he was examined by CAT-scan, however, Lorber discovered that he had virtually no brain at all. Instead of two hemispheres filling the cranial cavity, some 4.5 centimetres deep, the student had less than 1 millimetre of cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column. The student was suffering from hydrocephalus, the condition in which the cerebrospinal fluid, instead of circulating around the brain and entering the bloodstream, becomes dammed up inside. Normally, the condition is fatal in the first months of childhood. Even where an individual survives he or she is usually seriously handicapped. Somehow, though, the Sheffield student had lived a perfectly normal life and […]
Tuesday, May 15th, 2007
Is Your Brain Really Necessary?
Author:
Source: Alternative Science
Publication Date: 14-May-07
Link: Is Your Brain Really Necessary?
Source: Alternative Science
Publication Date: 14-May-07
Link: Is Your Brain Really Necessary?
Stephan: When I was about 12 or 13, my father, an anethesiologist and professor of medicine and I were having lunch at the 'Doctor's Table' near the hospital where he worked. One of his best friends, a surgeon with whom he frequently operated, got deep into a conversation concerning a young woman who had been brought to the hospital after a terrible car accident. When they had opened her skull to relieve pressure they were sure was there they were stunned to discover that in place of her 'brain' she had a sack of fluid. Only the brain stem was present. Yet she was a cheerleader, an honors student, and about to go to Smith. They went round and round about this, but could reach no conclusion either could live with. By the end of the meal they were more frustrated than when they began.
Over the years, I would occasionally read about something similar and would track it as far up the information chain as I could get. By the 1970s, when I quit, I had 14 cases.
Like Savantism these reports suggested to me that the mind being the brain alone, simply doesn't work, either theoretically or in practise. This physicalist view lacks that aspect of self which exists outside time space, nonlocal consciousness.
Thanks to Brando Crespi.
