He's Strangely Seeking Memories in Cells Below the Neck

Psychiatrist Thomas R. Verny has written a very interesting article entitled "Enduring Memory."  Below the title we read the line "How can animals whose brains have been drastically remodelled still recall their kin, their traumas and their skills?"

In the first sentence of the article Verny mentions a concept he calls "cellular memory," and which he defines as "the idea that memory can be stored outside the brain, in all the body’s cells."  This is an idea that is completely contrary to what our scientists have been teaching for many decades, that memories are stored in the brain.  The term "cellular memory" is a poor term for such a concept, since anyone hearing such a term would think of memory being stored in brain cells.  A better term for such an idea would be "below-the-neck cellular memory." 

Verny discusses some reasons for rejecting claims that memories are stored only in the brain. He mentions the case of a French civil servant who was found to have only a thin sheet of brain tissue, since almost all of his brain had been gradually replaced by a watery fluid.  He fails to give us a link to the original story, which can be read here. By following that link you can see photos that show how almost-empty the brain was of that person with an IQ of 75.  

Verney discussed other similar cases. He states, "Following hemispherectomy – where half the brain can be removed to control seizures – most children showed not only an improvement in their intellectual capacity and sociability but also their apparent retention of memory, personality and sense of humour."  By reading my post here, you can read many specifics about such cases, including papers giving IQ scores before and after removal of half of a brain, showing little change. The details given in that post back up the claim of Verney I just quoted. Verney fails to mention the cases documented by the physician John Lorber, who showed that quite a few patients with much less than half of a brain had above-average intelligence. 

Verney then makes a statement that makes no sense. He states, "If people who lack a large part of their brain can function normally, or even relatively normally, then there must exist, I thought, some kind of back-up system that can kick in when the primary system crashes."  The phrase he should have been using in such reasoning is  "half of their brain or most of their brain," since we know from hemispherectomy operations and hydrocephalus cases that people can function relatively normally when half or most of their brain is lost.  

There is no warrant from the cases discussed above for the idea that there exists some "back-up system" that "can kick in" when half or most of the brain is lost, replacing function that was previously carried out by the brain.  Instead, the evidence discussed above should cause us to conclude that the brain is not the source of our intellectual functions and is not the storage place of our memories. Such cases support the idea that human memory and human cognition are aspects of a human soul or spirit rather than products of the brain or any other physical part of the body.  Just as there is nothing in the brain that bears any resemblance to a system for storing and retrieving memories, there is nothing below the neck that bears any resemblance to a system for storing and retrieving memories. 

Without doing anything to substantiate his speculation about memories stored below the neck, Verny then goes into a discussion of evidence that animals can maintain memories despite massive brain damage.  He discusses evidence from planarian experiments, which I discussed in my post here. There is evidence that decapitated planarians can retain memories they have learned. Verny also mentions studies showing that animals can retain memories very well after hibernation, which causes large loss of brain cells. He also discusses evidence that caterpillars turning into butterflies can retain as butterflies things they learned as caterpillars, despite the almost total reorganization of the organism during metamorphosis. 

Failing to provide any evidence of memories being stored in any cells (either below the neck or above the neck), but merely evidence of organisms remembering things despite heavy brain damage, Verny concludes by stating this:

"It seems credible to conclude that memory, in addition to being stored in the brain, must also be encoded in other cells and tissues in the body. In other words, we are all endowed with both somatic and cognitive memory systems that mutually support each other. In aggregate, the evidence suggests that aspects of intelligence and consciousness traditionally attributed to the brain have another source as well. Our memories, our tastes, our life knowledge, might owe just as much to embodied cells and tissues using the same molecular mechanisms for memory as the brain itself. The mind, I conclude, is fluid and adaptable, embodied but not enskulled."

Other than facts suggesting the brain cannot be the source of human thinking and the storage place of human memories, there are no reasons to believe the idea of cognition and memory coming from cells below the neck. We know that a person can lose very many of his cells below the neck without any effect on cognition or memory. Specifically:

• A person will not lose any of his memories or cognitive abilities if he loses an arm, both arms, a leg or even both legs. 
• A very overweight person may gradually lose half of his weight through either dieting or food deprivation, but this will have no effect on his memories or cognitive abilities.
• A person may have a lung transplant, but this will have no effect on his memories or cognitive abilities. After getting such a transplant, he will not have some knowledge he did have before, that was learned by the person from whom the lung came. 
• A person may have a heart transplant, but this will have no effect on his memories or cognitive abilities. After getting such a transplant, he will not have some knowledge he did not have before, that was learned by the person from whom the heart came. 

Before 1800 no one ever lost half of their brain because of surgical operations. Hydrocephalus that damages the brain occurs in about 3 cases in 1000, but cases involving major brain damage are much more rare, involving fewer than 1 case in 1000.  It is hardly believable to assume that evolution would have provided some back-up cognitive system to deal with such rare cases. Believing such a thing would be like believing that some organism would evolve a parachute-like organ on its back, to cover the maybe 1 case in 1000 when organisms of that type might fall off a cliff.  We have no evidence in the natural world that organisms have systems that serve only to cover extremely rare unfortunate events. 

The posts on this blog discuss many reasons for disbelieving the claim that memories are stored in brains, and quite a few of these reasons would apply in equal force to claims of memories stored below the neck. I will give one example. One of the greatest wonders of the human mind is the wonder of instantaneous memory recall, such as occurs when you instantly provide information on a topic after hearing a single word or name.  For reasons discussed here, such a capability cannot be explained by neural action, because the brain is completely lacking in anything like an indexing system, a coordinate system, or a position notation system that would allow the exact position of some stored memory to be instantly found.  Exactly the same objection applies to the body below the neck, which is also completely lacking in anything like an indexing system, a coordinate system, or a position notation system.  And just as there is no evidence of anything in the brain that could write learned information or read learned information, there is no evidence of any such thing existing below the neck (except for hands that don't write inside the body).  

We have no evidence of memories being physically stored below the neck. We do have very much evidence that humans have something like souls.  A major part of this evidence is what occurs during out-of-body experiences, in which people (with not diminished minds and memories) report floating out of their bodies and observing their bodies from a higher elevation. Such experiences (which have never been explained in a credible manner by materialists) are reported by significant fractions of the population. The source here discusses a variety of surveys taken to try to determine how common out-of-body experiences are.  It gives  numbers which suggest that out-of-body experiences occur to significant fractions of the human population, something like between 10% and 20%. Observation of a person's body from some height above the body is extremely common in near-death experiences, which are reported by significant fractions of the population. 

In the long paper here, 14 cases of out-of-body-experiences are discussed. We read this: "In all of the cases that we have described in this paper, the experiencer reported all three features that we discussed earlier as having the most relevance for the question of survival of consciousness: normal or enhanced mentation when the physical body is ostensibly unconscious, seeing the physical body from a different position in space, and perceiving events beyond the normal range of the physical senses."

Rather than assuming that memories that cannot be found in the brain exist in the body below the neck, a better assumption is that memory is a fundamental aspect of the human soul.