A Bullet to Their Brains Caused Little Mind Damage

 One of the very great investigation failures of today's psychologists and neuroscientists is their tendency to only search scientific papers when writing scientific papers. The fact is that there are huge additional sources of information providing very important cases of medical case histories. Those include newspapers and magazines. It is not hard to search for medical case histories documented in newspapers. For example, the free Chronicling America site allows you to search through more than 100 years of American newspapers. You can use the site by using the link below:

https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/about-this-collection/

 Below are some of the very interesting cases I get on that site when using the search phrase "brain gone." An account you can read here is entitled "Part of Brain Gone, But Galloway Lives."  We read of a man who tried to kill himself, by shooting himself in the head. We hear that he seemed to recover well, and "talks rationally" despite the fact that he destroyed part of his brain. We read nothing mentioning any mental damage. 

Another account similar to the one above is the account below, which you can read here. We read of a man who lost four ounces of his brain (about 8 percent) after shooting himself in the head. Despite the bad brain damage, after shooting himself the man learned how to play checkers (which he had not learned before), and also apparently played checkers very well. Soon after the shooting he died. 

A similar account is below. We read of a young boy who is of an "unusually bright mind" even though he was accidentally shot through the head.

A similar account is below, from 1910. We read of a boy who "carries on an intelligent conversation" even though he has lost "five square inches" of his brain. We may presume the "five square inches" means "five cubic inches," which is about 7% of a boy's brain. 

A similar account is below. In the 1908 account we read of a man who was shot through the head, losing about 4 ounces of brain, about 6% of the brain. But after this bad brain damage, he is "appparently...in possession of all his mental faculties."

The article below appeared in the New York Times. We read of a person who was left with half a brain after he shot himself in the head, with the wound being treated by surgeons removing additional brain tissue. The patient is described as "rational." We are told "it was believed a few days ago that he would recover completely." No one would have said such a thing unless the subject had relatively little damage to mind and memory. 

The 1912 article below (which you can read here) discusses the case of a soldier who was left with about half a brain, after he was accidentally shot by another soldier, and after surgeons operated on him. We are told that after five weeks the man was "about again as usual." We hear of damage to his ability to read and write, which was restored after five months of training. Other than that, we read no mention of any damage to his memory or intellect.  The claim that he was "about again as usual" five weeks after losing half of his brain suggests there was no very great damage to his mind or memory or speaking ability. Damage to reading and writing skills could be caused by damage to perceptual and muscle ability, and does not necessarily involve any memory loss. 

Her Mind Was "Much Improved" After They Removed a Huge Part of Her Brain

 One of the very great investigation failures of today's psychologists and neuroscientists is their tendency to only search scientific papers when writing scientific papers. The fact is that there are huge additional sources of information providing very important cases of medical case histories. Those include newspapers and magazines. It is not hard to search for medical case histories documented in newspapers. For example, the free Chronicling America site allows you to search through more than 100 years of American newspapers. You can use the site by using the link below:

https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/about-this-collection/

Another good site for this purpose is the University of California site here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/

 Below is one of the very interesting cases I get when using the phrase "brain gone." We get a 1935 account of a woman whose mind was "much improved" after "an operation that removed nearly the entire 'thinking portion' of her brain." We can presume this "thinking portion" of her brain was the prefrontal cortex or the frontal lobes, as those were presumed at 1935 to be the "thinking portion" of the brain.  You can read the account here. We read that the woman's intelligence was average despite this loss of so much of her brain. We read that the woman's power of concentration sharply improved after this removal of most of the supposed "thinking portion" of her brain. The whole story is the opposite of what we would expect under "brains make minds" assumptions. 

Read my post here for a discussion of other cases in which intelligence reportedly increased after much brain tissue was removed. 

At the University of California site, using the search phrase "brain gone," I get the interesting account below, which you can read here. We read that after a bad accident, sixty grams was removed from the frontal lobe of the brain of Martin Strabowski. This was about 12 percent of his frontal lobes, because the frontal lobes of the human brain weigh about 500 grams. Despite the removal of this big chunk of the part of the brain claimed to be responsible for thought, the removal apparently caused no damage, because the story tells us that Martin's mind "fully recovered."

She Had Above-Average Intelligence With Only About 15% of Her Brain

 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 also seems true that most or very many neuroscientists are not very deep and very thorough scholars of the topic of human brains. A typical neuroscientist may be able to tell you in very great detail about some particular aspects 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. Ask that neuroscientist how quickly the average brain signal travels, and you will typically get an answer that is wrong, an answer failing to take into account all of the relevant factors such as the very strong slowing factor of cumulative synaptic delays, and the very strong slowing factor of the relatively slow transmission speed of dendrites. 

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? 

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 mind is the source of the mind. Now let me provide some more such cases. 

The first case involves a case of hydrocephalus. Hydrocephalus is a disease in which a brain has excessive watery fluid. In cases of hydrocephalus a brain may end up in a state that is mostly watery fluid. The brain scan of someone with severe hydrocephalus might look something like the schematic visual below. The black part in the middle is a watery fluid that has basically no neurons. 

The case of Sharon Parker is described in a 2003 news story entitled "Success of Nurse Who Lost Most of Her Brain." You can read the story here. We read this:

"When she was a baby, Sharon Parker's parents were told a rare and incurable condition meant she would not reach her fifth birthday.

She was left with only 15 per cent of her brain and there was little hope she could lead a normal life. But she defied the experts to become an astonishing success story.

Now 39, Mrs Parker is a nurse with a high IQ who is happily married with three children....She was diagnosed with congenital hydrocephalus - water on the brain - when she was nine months old. Doctors drained the liquid from her skull with a tube but her brain mass had been compacted in the outer edges of her skull, leaving a gaping hole in the middle....As a 16-year-old, she passed eight O-Levels and her IQ was later found to be 113, putting her in the top 20 per cent of the population.

The hydrocephalus has left her with a below-average short-term memory so she carries a notebook to remind herself to do things. However, tests have found that her long-term memory is better than average.

After leaving school, Mrs Parker decided to become a nurse and soon after starting her training, she met her future husband David, a builder who is now 45. The couple were married three years later and have three children...

She often participates in studies, including one recently in Ohio when she was examined by one of the world's leading experts on brain mass. Graham Teesdale, Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Glasgow, said she demonstrated how adaptable the brain can be even when it is incomplete. 'She shows how the brain has an immense capacity to cope and adapt,' he said. 'Some people with the same acute problem experience problems in thought processes but others are able to function totally normally.' "

A materialist who believes that the brain is the source of the mind may wince after reading about this case history. But there is another hydrocephalus case that may be even better as evidence that brains do not make minds. Coincidentally, this case also involves someone named Parker, but someone other than Sharon Parker: a male with almost no brain. 

We read about the case on the page here. 

"Parker was born on September 9, 2008, with hydrocephalus, or excess fluid on the brain. Parker’s parents received the diagnosis at 20 weeks in the pregnancy that there was a blockage between the third and fourth ventricles of Parker’s brain, which was preventing the cerebrospinal fluid from draining into the body. As a result, the fluid would build up and compress Parker’s brain matter against his skull, making it almost non-existent, threatening to severely hinder Parker’s early neurological development. At birth, the average baby has 90–95% brain matter and 5–10% fluid within the cranial cavity; Parker had over 98% fluid and less than 2% brain matter, amounting to a mere 8 millimeters of brain matter at birth."

Later on the same page we read this

"He attends a special-needs kindergarten class, where he continues to thrive and demonstrate an inexplicable intellect and remarkable social skills.

Parker is truly a miracle – the child who once was thought may never walk or talk now plays, dances, sings, never stops talking (having never met a stranger) and hopes to one day become a sportscaster. Parker has far exceeded every expectation of his doctors and also adds being named the 2015 Ace All-Star to his long list of remarkable achievements."

More Old Newspaper Stories Relevant to Whether Brains Make Minds

The Chronicling America web site allows you to make a full-text search of many decades of American newspapers. Below are some interesting clips from old newspaper articles, all having some relevance to whether the human brain makes the human mind.  

The news account below is from 1957:

You can read the report here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1957-09-02/ed-1/seq-3/

The account below is from the nineteenth century. We hear of a man who apparently did not suffer intellectual damage from losing half of his brain. 

You can read the 1876 account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84038123/1876-01-21/ed-1/seq-1/

The newspaper account below is from 1898:

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1898-07-03/ed-1/seq-19/

Using an OCR feature of the page above, I get this quotation of its middle part:

"In instances in which it was discovered after death that the connecting bridge between the hemispheres

was entirely wanting, neither derangement in intellect was observed, nor any other abnormality of life in the way of movement or sensation. Thus, in the notable case of Bichat, one of the foremost anatomists of his day, one lobe of his brain was found markedly smaller than the other. He was, in fact, deficient in one-half of his brain, and yet his mental and physical life was in its way notably of a high order. In another case, reported by Cruveilhier, a man died in the hospital at the age of 42 years from heart disease. He exhibited no lack of intelligence, yet after his death it was discovered that his left brain was practically destroyed and replaced by a watery substance. Another case, reported by Andral, was of a man who died at the age of 2S. He had suffered from a fall when three years old, and as a result was paralyzed on his left side. The right half of his brain had practically disappeared, so that the parts below this half constituted the floor for an empty space. Andral says of this

man that he 'had received a good education, and had profited by it; he had a good. memory; his speech was free and easy; his intelligence was such as we should expect to find in an ordinary man.' "

Below is a news story from 1938. We read of a girl "with half a brain" who carried on in a "remarkably satisfactory manner":

You can read the news story here:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A1837343?solr%

We have below a report that is not at all what we would expect if the brain produces the mind.  The report is of patients who underwent surgeries that surgically severed the two halves of their brain. But instead of this producing a drastically different mind, or two minds, we have apparently minimal effects:

You can read the story using this link:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2307311?solr%5Bquery

The 1905 newspaper account below tells us of a man who seemed to have suffered little mental damage from losing most of his brain:

You can read the account here:

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=teh19051201-01.1.8&srpos=6&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22half+a+brain%22---------

Here is a news account from 1987 telling us of a big improvement in reading ability after half of a girl's brain was removed. 

You can read the full story here:

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=jou19870907-01.1.4&srpos=3&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22half+her+brain%22---------

A fact contrary to all claims that brains make minds is the fact that very severe pain can be completely cancelled by the use of hypnosis. Below is a news story documenting the effect. 

On pages 27-28 of a book by Dr. James Esdaile he lists a host of dramatic painless surgeries he performed without using anesthesia, but only hypnosis on patients. The list includes about 20 amputations, and 200 removals of scrotal tumors ranging from 10 pounds in weight to more than 100 pounds in weight. Another book on this topic by Esdaile can be read here. 

In the following quote from a nineteenth century work, we learn of a great irony: that physicians took up a chemical method of anesthesia, one which would often kill people, rather than using hypnotic methods of anesthesia that were proving very safe and effective:

"In Dr. Brown Sequard's lectures upon 'Nervous Force,' delivered in Boston in 1874, he speaks of this form of anaesthesia as follows : 

'As regards the power of producing anaesthesia, it seems to me unfortunate that the discovery of ether was made just when it was. It was, as you well know, in 1846 or 1847 that the use of ether as an anaesthetic was begun. It started from this city (Boston). At that time in England, Dr. Forbes was trying to show from facts observed in England, and especially in India, from the practice of Dr. Esdaile, that something which was called Mesmerism, but which, after all, was nothing but a peculiar state of somnambulism induced in patients, gave to them the idea that they were deprived of feeling ; so that they were in reality under the influence of their imagination, and operations were performed that were quite painless. I say that it was a pity that ether was introduced just then, as it prevented the progress of our knowledge as to this method of producing anaesthesia. My friend Dr. Broca took it up in 1857-8 and pushed it very far; and for a time it was the fashion in Paris to have amputations performed after having been anaesthetized by the influence of Braidism or Hypnotism. A great many operations were performed in that way that were quite painless. But it was a process that was long and tedious, and surgeons were in a hurry and gave it up. I regret it very much, as there has never been a case of death from that method of producing anesthesia, while you well know that a great many cases of death have been produced by other methods.' "

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. As I discuss at length here, 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 realizing 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. 

Terminal Lucidity Helps to Discredit Claims That Brains Make Minds

Terminal lucidity is a phenomenon in which some very sick person  believed to be very close to death or with a very damaged brain or demented mind suddenly shows a brief period of intellectual clarity before dying from his disease. This often can occur after a long period of stupor or mental incapacity. 

In a previous post I included an image of a 1936 article mentioning cases of terminal lucidity. I should quote the entire text, particularly for any readers reading this blog in a non-English version (as you can do  using the Translate widget at the top right of this blog). Here is the text of that article, found on page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the journal Light, which you can read here. 

"In one of his lectures last year to the L.S.A., the Rev. Cruwys Sharland related how a one-time pupil of his, after suffering for many years from disintegration of the brain, when approaching his death, suddenly recovered complete mental control and gave those present a long circumstantial account of a walking tour he had undertaken when quite a boy, in company with Mr. Sharland, then his tutor. Every detail was correct, every fact rightly placed, as Mr. Sharland himself testified. 

Psychica quotes several analogous cases from the German Wahres Leben. A young girl, imbecile for eight years, one morning informed the doctor of the asylum in which she lived that she would die the following night—which she did—and discussed various points with him with full mental awareness. M. Martensen Larsen has recorded the case of an Army doctor confined for homicidal mania, who, just prior to his passing, recovered his sanity and wrote several letters asking the forgiveness of those he had attempted to injure. M. G. W. Surya writes of a friend of his who was summoned to the asylum in which his brother had for years been confined with complete softening of the brain. He found his brother perfectly normal and anxious to make certain suggestions to him. He died the same day, and autopsy revealed that the brain had entirely disintegrated.

How can we account for his complete lucidity before death ? 

Similarly, the well-known Berlin anatomist, Benecke, assured his students that Schinkel, the architect, died in possession of all his faculties, in spite of the fact that his cranium was subsequently proved to have been, ' so to speak, empty.' ” 

We have here not just one but three different cases in which it is stated that someone with the most severe brain damage seemed to gain or have normal mental function shortly before dying. In two cases it is reported that the person acting normally or with normal cognition just before death had the most extreme disintegration or wasting of the brain, leaving basically no brain left. 

At the bottom of page 79 of the book you can read using the link here, we have an account by a person who says this about her grandmother: "An hour before she passed, this old lady suddenly woke up from the stupor that she had been in for six long years." We then hear an account of the grandmother speaking well, and acting as if she saw apparitions of the dead (a common occurrence for the dying, even those without any brain problems). 

On page 410 of the book Irreducible Mind we read this:  

"Myers (1892b) had referred to the 'sudden revivals of memory or faculty in dying persons' (p.316)...The eminent physician Benjamin Rush...observed that 'most of mad people discover a greater or less degree of reason in the last days or hours of their lives' (p. 257). Similarly, in his classic study of hallucinations, Brierre de Boismont (1859) noted that 'at the approach of death we observed that ... the intellect, which may have been obscured or extinguished during many years, is again restored in all its integrity' (p. 236). Flournoy (1903, p. 48) mentioned that French psychiatrists had recently published cases of mentally ill persons who showed sudden improvements in their condition shortly before death. In more recent years, Osis (1961) reported two cases, 'one of severe schizophrenia and one of senility, [in which] the patients regained normal mentality shortly before death' (p. 24)." 

The paper "End-of-Life Experiences and the Dying Process in a Gloucestershire Nursing Home as Reported by Nurses and Care Assistants" is one that reported dreams that seemed to foretell a death, and many other hard-to-explain phenomena.  What is remarkable is the amount of hard-to-explain phenomena reported in such a small facility. Questions were asked of workers in Kingsley House, a small facility handling no more than 31 persons at a time, and reporting only about 13 deaths per year. We read of these results, coming from the ten who responded:

• "7 reported unconscious or confused residents who unexpectedly became lucid enough just before they died to interact with relatives and carers," a phenomena sometimes called "terminal lucidity."
• "6 reported dreams that help to prepare for death, and 2 reported dreams or visions that held significant meaning for the dying to help with unfinished business." The "Dreams" section of the paper on page 200 gives several examples, some involving dreams that seemed to foretell a death. 
• "5 reported the dying seeing dead relatives visiting just before death, and 4 reported the dying seeing dead relatives sitting on or near the bed." This is the well-documented phenomenon called deathbed apparitions or deathbed visions, described in my eight posts here. 
• "4 reported the synchronistic appearance of birds or animals around or just before the time of death." 
• "4 reported a change of room temperature around the time of death," with one saying, "sometimes the room is freezing," and that "at other times it is really, really hot."
• "3 reported synchronistic events at the time of death, such as clocks stopping and bells ringing in rooms of those who had recently died." Read here for examples of the clock stopping at death phenomenon. 

The year 2021 scientific paper "Spontaneous Remission of Dementia Before Death: Results From a Study on Paradoxical Lucidity" discusses many cases of terminal lucidity.  We read this:

" Detailed case reports of 124 dementia patients who experienced an episode of paradoxical lucidity were received. In more than 80% of these cases, complete remission with return of memory, orientation, and responsive verbal ability was reported by observers

of the lucid episode. The majority of patients died within hours to days after the episode..... More than 80% of the patients in this study appeared to have experienced a full, albeit brief, reversal of often profound cognitive impairment in advanced and end-stage dementia."

In the paper we read this: "Macleod (2009) observed 100 consecutive deaths in a hospice in New Zealand and found six cases of unexpected, spontaneous return of cognitive functions and verbal ability within 48 hr before the death of the patient."

Recently there was published the paper "Terminal Lucidity in a Pediatric Oncology Clinic," which reported some similar cases of terminal lucidity. You can read the full paper here. One or more of the  authors interviewed the physicians involved in the cases.  Before discussing its fascinating account of terminal lucidity in a patient identified as Patient One, I should mention that the term "encephalopathic" typically refers to a severe brain pathology, most often involving a brain infection or a failure of the immune system to protect the brain from infection. In the paper we read this:

"The patient was a three-year-old Hispanic female with prolonged medical treatment history for her diagnosis of hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a complex and often life-threatening medical condition resulting from an uncontrolled and ineffective immune response, leading to extreme inflammation in many organs/tissues. After over a year of intense treatments, she underwent an umbilical cord blood transplant, which is the only known cure for this condition. Unfortunately, the transplant was rejected, and while attempts were made to find another option for a second transplant, she had a re-emergence of her HLH and was admitted to the hospital for chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Despite some initial improvements, she developed progressive organ damage and deterioration over the next several weeks, prompting transfer to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), with worsening liver and pulmonary failure. She became severely jaundiced and encephalopathic, and was no longer speaking, eating, or responding to parents/providers. The ICU physicians were worried that she was an aspiration risk, prompting intensification of Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate (DNR/DNI) conversations with her parents. As all the known treatments available were exhausted and her condition worsened, the focus shifted to providing palliative care. Although initially resistant, after nearly two weeks of intense conversations with parents (including family members and a Catholic priest) and further deterioration in their daughter’s condition, a DNI and modified DNR status change was agreed. That evening, the patient awoke and asked for her usual comfort items (i.e., Lion King movie, parents, toys) and food. She showed no indication of mental impairment and regained the ability to sit up in bed and participate in coloring and other simple age-appropriate tasks. She spoke using logical, organized full sentences, and had multiple conversations with her parents that evening, which they and the bedside nurse described as 'like a miracle.' During the conversations with her parents, she reviewed all the important people in her life and prayed for them. She indicated awareness of transitioning to death and reassured loved ones of the need not to be concerned about her. She also seemed to be communicating with people who were not visible to others. After several hours, she asked to 'go to bed' and returned to her comatose state. During the next 24-48 hours, she never awoke again, and she ultimately died peacefully of cardiac arrest in her parents’ arms."

We also read in the new paper of a Patient Three:

"The patient was a 19-month-old boy who underwent a bone marrow transplant at 16 months of age for ill-defined immune deficiency. He was recovering with typical transplant complications until he developed fevers and progressive neurologic symptoms with loss of ability to communicate, loss of motor function, and loss of cognition.... Prior to the lucid event, he was not responding to healthcare providers and was giving parents only minimal response/eye contact. Three days prior to his death, he became much more alert and interactive, in stark contrast to his steady decline of the prior three months, which was preceded by his parents having decided they would not proceed with further life-saving medical interventions (i.e., surgeries, intubation, etc.). He was noted to be able to move, talk, eat, and communicate for 24-48 hours prior to a rapid decline and death. On the night before his death, he communicated with his parents that he 'was ready to go home' and that 'he and parents would be OK' using verbal and sign language. He talked about joining his brother who was a still-birth, and he told his parents he was going to be fine. Subsequently, he returned to severe mental impairment and died within 24 hours."

No such thing as terminal lucidity should occur if your brain was producing your mind. Once a mind-producing brain had deteriorated, such a deterioration would be irreversible. A brain producing a mind would no more suddenly restore itself than a book missing many of its pages would suddenly restore such pages. 

Cases such as these are hints that the brain is not the source of the human mind. They are part of a very large body of evidence that minds can operate normally when brains have undergone the most severe damage. Countless other cases are discussed in my posts you can read here and here. Such cases are only some of the innumerable reasons for rejecting the dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind. When studying such cases and reasons (discussed in the most voluminous detail in the posts of this blog), we should remember: nature never told us that brains make minds. It was merely professors who told us that, jumping to conclusions that were never warranted by observations. 

Postscript: In the paper here, we have an account of terminal lucidity. We read this:

"We provide biographical background information about the two principal witnesses who reported this case. It concerns the death of Anna Katharina Ehmer, a 26-year-old woman with severe mental disabilities who lived in an institution for people with mental disorders, and who had allegedly never spoken a single word during her life. Yet, she was reported to have sung dying songs for a half hour before she died."

He Had Almost No Brain, But Was Bilingual With Near-Normal Verbal Skills

Neuroscientists are members of a belief community dedicated to preserving the dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind. So when neuroscientists discover case histories that seem to defy such a dogma, neuroscientists tend to write up the results with papers having a title not likely to be noticed. An example of this was when neuroscientists discovered that a French civil servant had almost no brain. The case was written up in the British medical journal The Lancet with a paper having the title "Brain of a White Collar Worker," as if the authors were trying to get as few readers as possible by creating the dullest-sounding title they could create.  The paper had the visual below, in which missing parts of the brain are shown in black:

The 2007 paper told us that the subject had an overall IQ of 75 and a verbal IQ of 84, and that he was a father employed as a civil servant (a government worker). Such occupational success with so little brain defies claims that the brain is the source of the human mind. The Reuters story here discusses the case. 

An equally dramatic case of high mental function and very little brain was discussed in a 2018 paper with a title that also seemed chosen to attract as little attention as possible. The title of the paper (which can be read here) was "Volumetric MRI Analysis of a Case of Severe Ventriculomegaly," a title that sounds as dull as dishwater. But the case is a fascinating one. We read of a bilingual 60-year-old man with near-normal verbal skills but very little brain. 

We are given the visual below, which shows on the left the brain of the 60-year-old man, and on the right what a normal brain looks like. The black areas are areas in which normal brain tissue is gone, having been replaced by fluid. 

We read this about tests performed on the person whose brain is 

"The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III; Wechsler, 1997) revealed a borderline IQ of 79, with a verbal IQ of 88, non-verbal performance IQ of 74, poor working memory IQ of 71, verbal comprehension IQ of 93, and visual-spatial IQ of 80. The patient had difficulty completing tasks requiring working memory, which was in the 3rd percentile, and processing speed was extremely slow (in the 1st percentile)."

A verbal IQ of 88 is near-normal, and a normal verbal IQ is about 100. 

We read that this person with little brain tissue was bilingual (in other words, someone who could speak two languages). We read that he "plays guitar well." We hear some vague, vacuous speculation trying (in the thinnest way) to offer a bit of explanation of how someone with so little brain could have "preserved function, including being fluent in two languages and mastering playing a musical instrument."

I have another example of a neuroscientist paper with a dull-as-dishwater title but a sensational case of high mental function and little brain tissue. It is the paper "Colpocephaly in adults" which you can read here. We read of a 60-year-old woman who had the great majority of her brain destroyed by a congenital disease, apparently one present from birth or from early childhood. We read this:

"Growing up, she had a reading learning disability; however, she graduated from high school with average grades, married in her 20s and had one child. She worked in a factory and most recently as a home health aide. At the time of presentation...She was alert, appropriately oriented and had normal language function."  

Below is what the woman's brain looked like. The black areas are areas hollowed out by the congenital disease. 

The cases discussed here are only a fraction of the cases of high mental function despite extremely severe brain loss. You can read of many more such cases in my post here. Collectively the cases provide one of the strongest reasons for thinking that the brain is not the source of the human mind. 

Her Mind Was Normal, Though She Had Almost No Brain

 Neuroscientists are members of a belief community dedicated to preserving the dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind. So when neuroscientists discover case histories that seem to defy such a dogma, neuroscientists tend to write up the results with papers having a title not likely to be noticed. An example of this was when neuroscientists discovered that a French civil servant had almost no brain. The case was written up in the British medical journal The Lancet with a paper having the title "Brain of a White Collar Worker," as if the authors were trying to get as few readers as possible by creating the dullest-sounding title they could create.  The paper had the visual below:

The 2007 paper told us that the subject had an overall IQ of 75 and a verbal IQ of 84, and that he was a father employed as a civil servant (a government worker). Such occupational success with so little brain defies claims that the brain is the source of the human mind. 

But occasionally there will be an neuroscience paper by authors brave enough to give a paper a title that correctly describes some case history clashing with the "brains make minds" dogma. One such paper is the paper "Asymptomatic Hydrocephalus" by neurosurgeons Amit R. Persad, Victoria Bass and Kotoo Meguro, a paper you can read here. They report the case of a 72-year-old woman with a very severe case of hydrocephalus, a brain-robbing disease in which brain tissue is replaced by a watery fluid. Brain scans of the woman showed that she little brain tissue. But (as the title tells us) the woman was "asymptomatic," meaning she had no symptoms. Her mind was normal, even though almost all of her brain had been lost. 

Below  is Figure 1 from the paper. 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. 

The woman came to the doctor not because of any mental difficulties she was having, but because she had a seizure.  The paper describes the woman's normal mental capabilities and cognition:

"The patient lived independently and had no previous history of seizures or diagnosis of hydrocephalus. 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 only pertinent physical finding was a long-standing gait disturbance related to hip dysplasia. An electroencephalogram showed epileptiform discharges, and we prescribed levetiracetam (500 mg administered orally twice daily) and stopped treatment with phenytoin. The patient also had an urinary tract infection (UTI), which was treated with trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole. After 2 days in hospital, she was discharged with follow-up in the adult hydrocephalus clinic. She was well at 6-month follow-up, with no further seizures." 

The Mini-Mental State Examination referred to above is the most common test of cognitive performance used by doctors. The link here gives you some of the questions used on the test. An example question is that you are asked to count backwards from 100, going back 7 in each steps (for example, 93, 86, 79,  72, and 65). Another example question is that you are asked to identify where you are, giving the state, county, town, building name and floor number or room number (with each item correctly named scoring 1 point). Or you might also be asked to name the day of week and exact date (day, month and year), as well as the season of the year.  Another example question is that someone points to a watch and asks you to name what type of object it is, with a similar question being asked about a pencil. The MMSE test has a maximum score of 30. Adults with normal cognitive functions will tend to score about 29 on the test. The link here says that a score of 24 or higher is considered "normal."

To get a "normal" score on a Mini-Mental State Examination, a person needs to have almost all of these mental capabilities:

• The ability to understand instructions orally spoken by the person giving the examination;
• the ability to visually recognize common items and name what type of item they are;
• the ability to do simple mathematical operations such as backwards subtraction by 7; 
• the ability to remember details about your current position in time (such as date, month and year); 
• the ability to remember details about your current position in space (such as the current day, month and year, and the day of week); 
• the short-term memory ability to remember words you were asked to speak five minutes ago. 

But how if most of these things are required to get a "normal" score on the MMSE test, how could someone get a normal score when almost all of their brain had been replaced by watery fluid? It would seem that this could only happen if the brain is not the source of the mind. 

The paper discussed above has a citation of a similar type of case, a citation of a 2012 paper entitled "Asymptomatic Giant Arachnoid Cyst" which you can read here. In a brain cyst is a cavity filled with fluid. A giant cyst sounds like a very large cavity in the brain. But the 51-year-old man having the cyst is described as "asymptomatic" (a word meaning having no symptoms), and the man is described as a bricklayer (an occupation requiring procedural exactitude). 

Amazingly, this is not the only published paper with a title of  "Asymptomatic Giant Arachnoid Cyst." A 2003 paper (which you can read here) had the same title, and discusses an entirely different case. We read of a "39-year-old right-handed man, with a high-school education, good social and job functioning, and good command of three foreign languages (English, Spanish, and, in part, Arabic)."  We read that he had "a giant congenital supratentorial arachnoidal cyst occupying the anterior two thirds of the left hemisphere." Two-thirds of the left hemisphere of the man's brain was a mere fluid-filled cavity.  We are given this picture of the man's brain. The white area in the left photo and the black area in the right photo are the areas consisting of only a fluid-filled cavity. We read that "neurologic examination and standardized cognitive assessment revealed normal findings."  Apparently the man's mind was none the worse after such very heavy brain damage.