A Report of "Unimpaired Faculties Without a Brain" (John Bly)

 An invaluable resource to the serious scholar of the human mind is the web site www.iapsop.com, which allows you to freely and conveniently examine many important sources of information about the human mind and human psychical experiences, much of it information that is hard to find elsewhere. Among the resources are very many editions of the Journal and Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. At such a site I am now enjoying reading editions of the publication The Metaphysical Magazine. On page 71 of Volume 5, the January-May 1897 volume, we have the astonishing report below:

BRAINS UNNECESSARY. 

"Dr. S. S. Koser, of Williamsport, Pa., has made a wonderful discovery, which will be a theme for discussion among medical men throughout the country. His knife has revealed a medical wonder, in which a man had unimpaired faculties without a brain. 

At the request of a number of prominent physicians of Philadelphia, Dr. Koser held a post-mortem examination of the remains of John Bly, of Watsontown. Bly, who was twenty years of age, for a long time suffered with a tumor, which grew into the very base of the brain, and occasioned his death. The growth had a visible effect upon his brain, and the case became a curiosity to the medical profession. The tumor was imbedded too deeply into the brain tissue to admit of an operation. It was found that the tumor was nearly as large as a billiard ball. It was so located as to demoralize the nerves of the sight centre, and as a consequence young Bly was blind for over three years. The most singular fact developed was that the entire brain had been hollowed out by the action of the tumor. The cavity was at least five inches in length, and was filled with pus. All that was left of the brain was a thin shell, composed of the tougher tissues where the brain matter gathers into nerves, which were less susceptible to the process of decay. When an incision was made in the shell the whole mass collapsed. 

The circumstances which made the case almost unprecedented in the annals of medical science was the manner in which the patient retained his rationality and faculties under the circumstances. He had the senses of touch, taste, hearing, and smell, had very tolerable control of his locomotor muscles, could talk, and, in fact, was comparatively discommoded in no other way than by the loss of vision. His retention of memory was remarkable. He was able to memorize poems up to within two weeks of his death.—Philadelphia Ledger."

The report (repeated here with the same details) should come as no great surprise to those familiar with other similar reports provided by the physician John Lorber. As discussed in this paper, Lorber studied many patients with hydrocephalus, in which healthy brain tissue is gradually replaced by a watery fluid. A mathematics student with an IQ of 130 and a verbal IQ of 140 was found to have “virtually no brain.” His vision was apparently perfect except for a refraction error, even though he had no visual cortex (the part of the brain involved in sight perception).

The paper says that of about 16 patients Lorber classified as having extreme hydrocephalus (with 90% of the area inside the cranium replaced with spinal fluid), half of them had an IQ of 100 or more. The article mentions 16 patients, but the number with extreme hydrocephalus was actually 60, as this article states, using information from this original source that mentions about 10 percent of a group of 600. So the actual number of these people with tiny brains and above-average intelligence was about 30. The article states:

"[Lorber] described a woman with an extreme degree of hydrocephalus showing  'virtually no cerebral mantle' who had an IQ of 118, a girl aged 5 who had an IQ of 123 despite extreme hydrocephalus, a 7-year-old boy with gross hydrocephalus and an IQ of 128, another young adult with gross hydrocephalus and a verbal IQ of 144, and a nurse and an English teacher who both led normal lives despite gross hydrocephalus."

Then there 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 in a story entitled “Man lives normal life with abnormal brain”:

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.”

But this same man, with almost no functioning brain, had been working as a French civil servant, and had his IQ tested to be 75, higher than that of a mentally retarded person. The Reuters story says: “A man with an unusually tiny brain managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, caused by a fluid buildup in his skull.” The case was written up in the British medical journal The Lancet in a paper entitled “Brain of a white-collar worker.” It was as if the authors had chosen a title which would cause as few people as possible to read the paper, because people reading the paper would stop believing the "brains make minds" dogma of neuroscientists.