A Neuroscientist Mentions "Bad Brain but Good Mind" Cases, But Fails to Put Two and Two Together

 An article this year co-authored by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga is entitled "Is Your Brain Really Necessary for Consciousness?" The article begins by discussing some important case histories of people with very badly damaged brains but good minds.  We read references to these cases:

• The 72-year-old woman with "asymptomatic hydrocephalus."  The woman's case is reported in the paper "Asymptomatic Hydrocephalus" which you can read here. We see brain scan photos showing the brain of a woman whose brain tissue was almost entirely replaced by watery fluid. But the woman is described as "asymptomatic," a word meaning "without symptoms."  We read this: "The patient lived independently...Her developmental history was unremarkable; she had finished high school and had worked in various retail jobs. When our team examined her, she was alert and oriented, and did not report headache, visual disturbance or cognitive changes; her neurologic examination (including a Mini-Mental State Examination) was normal." The MMSE examination referred to is a test of cognitive ability often used to detect dementia.  You can only get a "normal" score on such an exam by doing most of a series of mental tasks such as counting backwards by 7 and correctly naming the current date and remembering three random words you were asked to speak five minutes ago. 
• The bilingual guitar-player with near-normal language skills but little brain tissue. The title of the paper (which can be read here) was "Volumetric MRI Analysis of a Case of Severe Ventriculomegaly."  We have brain scan visuals showing that almost all of the 60-year-old man's brain was gone, with only a thin sheet remaining. But nonetheless the man's verbal IQ was a near-normal 88 (100 is average).  He could also speak two languages, and we are told he "plays guitar well."
• The French civil servant. The case is discussed here in a Reuters 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 is as if the authors tried to make these facts be noticed by as few as possible, by giving their story the dullest title they could. 

Below  is Figure 1 from the paper here describing the first case discussed above We see the "almost gone" brain of a woman who scored "normal" on a standard cognitive test (the MMSE). Photos B and C are closeups of particular brain portions. Photos A, D and E show the full brain from different angles. The black part are cavities filled with watery fluid, where the brain was hollowed out. 

At first when reading the beginning of this article I foolishly had a fleeting glimmer of hope that maybe Michael Gazzaniga had been able to put two and two together after analyzing such cases. But such a hope was quickly dashed. In the rest of the article Gazzaniga gave us the silliest sophistry in response to such cases. 

What we got from Gazzaniga was the most bungling example of the fallacy of equivocation.  The fallacy of equivocation is what goes on when you use some reasoning that depends on a switch of the definition of a word, a switch that goes unannounced. Here is an example of reasoning guilty of the fallacy of equivocation:

Premise 1: It is not disputed by those in the music industry that Taylor Swift is a star. 

Premise 2: A star is defined by astronomers as a giant self-luminous sphere of gases such as hydrogen and helium. 

Conclusion: Therefore Taylor Swift is a giant self-luminous sphere of gases such as hydrogen and helium. 

Of course, this reasoning is nonsensical, and depends on an unannounced switch in the definition of the word "star" between Premise 1 and Premise 2. (In English the word "star" is defined both as a major entertainment person such as a well-known singer or well-known actor, and also an astronomical body such as the sun.)

It is just such equivocation nonsense that Gazzaniga engages in. He attempts to explain cases like the ones in the bullet list above, by arguing that we should not be surprised that brains can work well when their volume is low, because music can be good even when played at volumes that are low.  Gazzaniga states this:

"The volume of music is not the sole determinant of whether a song is good. The volume – the overall amount of sound participating at any given time—is one dimension of music, but there are many other components: the rhythm (low frequency waves which entrain the entire song), the harmony (higher frequency waves which structure the sound), the melody (highest frequency waves which tell the story). Music is the elaborate interplay between waves of sound, or vibration, in small, medium, and large (fast, medium, and slow), which braid together in a way that seems beautiful.

Similarly, the 'volume' of brains is not the sole determinant of whether a brain is good. The volume —the overall amount of brain participating at any given time—is one dimension of brain activity, but there are many other components: the circadian rhythms (low frequency waves which entrain us to the Sun and seasons), the central pattern generators (higher frequency waves which structure our heartbeat and our breathing), the real-time brain activity (highest frequency waves which allow us to analyze the world and tell the story)."

Notice the goofy equivocation word trick going on. Without any announcement of the change in definition, the definition of "volume" has been changed in the second paragraph. In the first paragraph "volume" means "the loudness level." In the second paragraph a switch is made to an entirely different definition of "volume," a definition of "the amount of space occupied by something."  The fact that the quality of music does not depend on the volume that music is played has no relevance to explaining cases of mostly-vanished brains combined with good minds. While giving this goofy equivocation fallacy reasoning, Gazzaniga goes off the rails by claiming that mere brain waves "allow us to analyze the world." The erroneous standard story of neuroscientists is that brains think, not that brain waves think. 

Gazzaniga continues this equivocation nonsense in three later paragraphs I won't quote, again making unannounced switches of the definition of the word "volume," trying to make it sound as if the volume at which music is played has some relevance to the anomaly that minds can function very well when there is very little volume of brain tissue. The two topics have no relevance to each other. 

Gazzaniga tries fruitlessly to beef up his glaringly fallacious reasoning about music and brains and minds, by making various false assertions. He claims that the brain is physically arranged like a symphony orchestra. That is not true, because viewed from a balcony a symphony orchestra is like a flat plane rather than something with a height as great as the width, and the left side of a symphony orchestra is not the mirror image of the right side. Gazzaniga makes this mostly untrue claim: "Neuroscientists have determined which part of the brain does what—we can point to a spot on a brain scan and tell you who sits there and what part they play—language is here, vision is there, memory is in that section." To the contrary, neuroscientists have failed to identify any part of the brain where memories are stored, and microscopic examination of brain tissue has never discovered any learned knowledge anywhere in the brain. No one has ever found a single word of human language by microscopically examining brain tissue. 

Gazzaniga has failed to pay attention to the case histories he has mentioned. The case history of the 72-year-old woman with almost no brain tissue (because of the replacement of brain tissue by a watery fluid) is a case of a woman who got a "normal" score on the Mini-Mental State Examination, an examination requiring good language skills for you to get a "normal" score. That case is inconsistent with the localization-of-function claims Gazzaniga is making. 

In his "memory is in that section" claim, Gazzaniga is probably appealing to the myth that the hippocampus is necessary for memory (a myth that collapses upon careful study, as shown in my post here).  It is interesting that Gazzaniga's own words later in the article help to discredit that myth. Referring to the case histories he mentioned (discussed in my bullet list above), he says, " Our friends above proved you can lead full and functional lives with 'only' a cortex." But that statement contradicts claims that the hippocampus is necessary for memory, because the hippocampus is not part of the cortex, and not near the cortex. You cannot live a "full and functional" life without having memory. 

In the remainder of the article, we have more music-analogy nonsense from Gazzaniga. Gazzaniga starts using the word "consciousness" to describe the human mind, using the trick I call shadow-speaking, which is when one misleadingly describes something to make it look like a mere shadow of what it is. Making one of the sillier statements I have ever heard a neuroscientist make, he states, "Consciousness is not an object—it’s a rhythm." 

Let us consider this word "consciousness."  It is basically the most tiny-sounding word you could possibly use to describe the human mind. According to one very common definition, consciousness merely means awareness.  So consider an ant that is aware there is a bread crumb next to itself. Is that consciousness? It would seem so. Is that awareness? It would seem so.  We see then how ridiculously diminutive the word "consciousness" is.  It is a word so slight-sounding that it can be reasonably used to refer to what goes on for a mere ant.

Is the term "consciousness" an appropriate word to use to describe the human mind? No, it is not.  You are engaging in very bad shadow-speaking if you use the word "consciousness" to describe the human mind. The reason is that human minds are almost infinitely more complex than mere consciousness. 

 The problem of human mentality is the problem of credibly explaining the thirty or forty most interesting types of human mental experiences, human mental characteristics and human mental capabilities. These include things such as these:

• imagination
• self-hood
• abstract idea creation
• appreciation
• memory formation
• moral thinking and moral behavior
• instantaneous memory recall
• instantaneous creation of permanent new memories
• memory persistence for as long as 50 years or more
• emotions
• speaking in a language
• understanding spoken language
• creativity
• insight
• beliefs
• pleasure
• pain
• reading ability
• writing ability
• ordinary awareness of surroundings
• visual perception
• recognition
• auditory perception
• attention
• fascination and interest
• the correct recall of large bodies of sequential information (such as when someone playing Hamlet recalls all his lines correctly)
• eyes-closed visualization
• extrasensory perception (ESP)
• dreaming
• volition
• out-of-body experiences
• apparition sightings 

Explaining these things is a very big and wide problem that we can call the problem of human mentality origination. It is a huge mistake to try to shrink that problem into some million-times smaller problem that you call "the problem of consciousness," and to speak as if it was merely consciousness that needs to be explained. 

Gazzaniga goes "all in" on this silly reductionist shadow-speaking, by first talking as if we had a mere problem of explaining "consciousness," and then further engaging in shadow-speaking by telling us that consciousness is a rhythm.  It's an enormously misleading trick in which Gazzaniga is trying to make the human mind sound like almost nothing. 

Deceptive shadow-speaking trick #1: Keep describing the human mind (something a million times more complex than mere consciousness) as "consciousness."

Deceptive shadow-speaking trick #2: Describe consciousness as a mere rhythm.

Engaging in equivocation, misleading statements and shadow-speaking, Gazzaniga  has failed to learn the main lesson taught by such neuroscience case histories he has discussed, cases of people with little brain tissue  or very damaged brains but normal or near-normal minds. For every case he discussed, there are more than ten other cases just as dramatic, and you can read about them in my post here, describing dozens of such cases. Gazzaniga seems like someone who just cannot put two and two together on the topic of whether brains make minds. He spent quite a few years studying cases of split-brain patients, patients without the nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. Such people with two separated brain halves retained a single unified mind, contrary to what we would expect under "brains make minds" assumptions.  Gazzaniga failed to put two and two together by learning the very obvious implication of such cases of split-brain patients with a single unified mind and cases of people with little brain tissue but high mental abilities: the implication that the brain is not the source of the human mind.