He Had Half a Brain But "Superior Intelligence"

The failure of neuroscientists to adequately study minds is a very severe failure. You can get a PhD in neuroscience while making only a perfunctory study of human minds.  An examination of the courses required to get a Master's Degree in neuroscience will typically show that only one or two courses in psychology are required. Doing a neuroscience PhD dissertation typically involves some highly specialized research on some very narrow topic, research that does not require much in the way of additional study of human minds and the mental capabilities and mental experiences of humans.  The topic of human minds and human mental experiences is a topic of oceanic depth, requiring years of deep study for someone to get a good grasp of the full range of human mental states, human mental capabilities and human mental experiences. Very strangely, a typical neuroscientist is someone who will feel qualified to pontificate about what causes mental experiences, mental states and mental capabilities, even though he typically has done little to very deeply study mental experiences, mental states and mental capabilities.

Ask a neuroscientist to describe the best examples of high capacity and high accuracy in human memory recall, and you will be likely to get a shrug of the shoulders, or an answer that is wrong.  Ask a neuroscientist to describe the best examples of human performance in tests of extrasensory perception (ESP), and you will be likely to get a shrug of the shoulders, or an answer that is wrong. Ask a neuroscientist to describe the best examples of humans learning or memorizing things very quickly, and you will be likely to get an answer showing no study of such a topic. Ask a neuroscientist to describe the fastest examples of human calculation involving no use of any objects such as pencil, paper or blackboards, and you will likely get an answer that fails to describe the most impressive cases. 

Rather amazingly, it is also true that very many neuroscientists are not very deep and broad scholars of the topic of human brains. A typical neuroscientist may be able to tell you in very great detail about some narrow facet of human brains, and may be able to tell you in the greatest detail about how to use some machine that is used to study brains. But the same neuroscientist may have failed to properly study the topic of human brains in a way that involves learning about every relevant thing you could about human brains. Ask that neuroscientist to tell you what happens when you remove half of a human brain, and you may get an answer that is wrong. Ask that neuroscientist to tell you how reliably chemical synapses transmit nerve signals (action potentials), and you may get an answer that is wrong. Ask that neuroscientist to tell you how quickly a brain electrically shuts down when the heart stops (reaching a state called asystole), and you may get an answer that is wrong. 

Part of the job of properly studying brains is to study very thoroughly all of the most impressive cases of high mental performance despite very high brain damage. Relatively few neuroscientists show signs of having studied such a topic. In order to properly study such a topic, you must study unusual medical case histories.  Very many of the most important and relevant medical case histories are recorded in books, newspapers and magazines. But can you ever recall reading of a neuroscientist searching newspapers for unusual case histories in neuroscience? I can never recall reading of such activity by a neuroscientist. 

Luckily there are some web sites that contain very many of the most relevant examples of such medical case histories that are relevant to the question of whether the human mind is the source of the mind and whether the human mind is the storage place of human memories. One of those sites is the very site you are reading.  In my series of posts labeled "High Mental Function Despite Large Brain Damage," which you can read here, I describe many of the most important case histories that are  relevant to the question of whether the human brain is the source of the mind (keep pressing Older Posts at the bottom right to read the whole series). Now let me provide another such case, one I learned about from searching old newspaper articles for a use of the phrase "half a brain." The 1976 case is one that you can read about using the link here. Below are some excerpts from the newspaper article.

We read of a young man named Bruce Lipstadt who had a hemispherectomy operation when he was five years old, an operation that removed the left half of his brain.  Operations of that type are only done when someone is being plagued by very severe seizures, and the seizures cannot be controlled by medication.  The operation was done because as a young boy Bruce was suffering from 10 to 12 seizures a day. 

We are told that despite having the left half of his brain surgically removed, Bruce can ride a bike, swim and play sports. We are told that Bruce got an A grade (the best grade) in a course on statistics at a university. We are told Bruce's speech is normal. We are told that "although not a genius, Bruce has superior intelligence." We are told that Bruce works as a traffic controller, and that next spring he will get a degree in sociology from a university. 

The 1976 newspaper article here gives us some more details on Bruce Lipstadt. We read that his IQ tests showed his verbal IQ to be 126, well above the average IQ of 100. We read this:

A verbal IQ of 126 in a subject who had the left half of his brain removed is a result that would seem to "make mincemeat" out of claims that the brain is the source of the human mind. One of the accounts above mentions an authority named Sugar. The Bruce Lipstadt case seems to be the same one mentioned in the scientific paper here co-authored by Oscar Sugar MD, one entitled "Development of above normal language and intelligence 21 years after left hemispherectomy."

Below is a news account from 1937.

Even more dramatic cases of this type can be found by studying the cases of John Lorber, who reported above-average intelligence in quite a few subjects who had lost almost all of their brains due to disease. A scientific paper states this:

"[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."

The newspaper account here tells us of a young girl who had the right half of her brain removed, and who can "speak clearly" after having had 80% of the right half of her brain removed.  The newspaper article here tells us more about the same girl. After describing the operation that removed almost all of half of her brain, the article states, "Many of her memory functions, such as her bilingual speech and comprehension skills, have remained intact, Friedman said."

The importance of such an observation can hardly be overemphasized. Bilingual speech (speaking in two languages) requires a massive amount of previous learned information. If the human brain stored memories, we should never expect bilingual speech to survive the removal of half of the brain. 

The article here tells us of Christina Santhouse had the right half of her brain removed in a hemispherectomy operation to stop seizures. We hear no mention of any loss of memory. We get a depiction of a 14-year-old child entering high school, just as a normal 14-year-old would do. 

The writer gives some creative but nonsensical explanations for the lack of any big mental effect from removing half of the brain. We are told the fairy tale story that neurons "haven't decided what they want to do when they grow up."  We are told the groundless claim that one side of the brain takes over the functions of the removed half. A much better explanation is that the functions attributed to brains were never actually produced by brains, so you can lose half a brain with relatively little effect. Your biggest laugh when reading the article is the writer's claim that "memory resides in both hemispheres of the brain, so there is little danger of losing it" when half of the brain is removed. This is as silly as claiming that you wrote your diary by filling up two thick diary books, so you won't be losing information if you burn one of those two thick diary books. 

A similar account can be read in the 1987 story here, where we learn of the preservation of learned knowledge and memories in Beth Usher, despite an operation removing the left half of her brain. 

The newspaper article here notes a case of a man who had the right half of his brain removed with "apparently no mental changes at all after the operation."