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."

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. 

Hydrocephalus Studies Confirming Low Correlation Between Brain States and Intelligence

One of the strongest challenges to claims that brains make minds came from the research decades ago of the physician John Lorber. Lorber studied many human patients with hydrocephalus, in which healthy brain tissue is gradually replaced by a watery fluid. Lorber's research is described in this interesting scientific paper. 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).

In the paper we are told 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 paper 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."

Believers in the "brains make mind" dogma have sometimes tried to suggest that maybe Lorber was just some erring researcher who got things wrong. But an examination of scientific papers by other authors will produce some results similar to those of Lorber.  For example, consider the paper "Intellectual Development in Shunted Hydrocephalic Children," which has its full text hidden behind a paywall.  The study examined the intelligence of 200 children who had lost varying amounts of their brain due to the brain-wasting disease of hydrocephalus. The abstract contains no specific numbers on IQ. But we read this:

"The following groups were found to be of normal intelligence: white patients with internal hydrocephalus and with meningomyelocele, and black patients with meningomyelocele and with external hydrocephalus. Intelligence quotient was found to be unrelated either to number of shunt revisions or severity of hydrocephalus prior to initial surgery, but was related to age at initial shunt placement and shunt function. Children with internal hydrocephalus and hydrocephalus with meningomyelocele whose shunts were kept functioning were found to be of normal intelligence."

Here we have a remarkable claim indeed: that there was no relation between IQ and the severity of the devastating brain-wasting disease hydrocephalus. A paper on the same topic is the paper "Psychometric intelligence after infantile hydrocephalus." In this case the full text of the paper is available for free online.  The paper tested examined IQ in 48 children who had the brain-wasting disease of hydrocephalus.

The paper gives us the interesting graph below.  Each third of the graph shows a different type of IQ measurement. 

I can summarize these results and comment on them:

• 14 of the 48 children could not be tested for intelligence using IQ tests. There are various reasons why brain damage might make someone unsuitable for participating in IQ tests, such as damage that might cripple vision or coordination or speech capabilities. Being unable to participate in an IQ test does not necessarily mean very low intelligence. 
• Of the severely brain damaged children who could participate in IQ tests, IQ ranged from 55 to 130, with the average being not far from the average IQ of 100.
• Very notably, 16 out of 34 of the severely brain damaged children who could be tested for verbal IQ scored higher than average for verbal IQ, scoring above 100. 
• Four of the severely brain damaged children scored above 115 on the verbal IQ test, with one of these children having a "genius" score on the verbal IQ test, a score higher than 130. 

Overall the results of this paper corroborate John Lorber's results. We are left with an anomaly that is very hard or impossible to explain under the "brains make minds" dogma, but easy to explain under the hypothesis that brains do not make minds. 

A related study was reported in the Scientific Reports sub-journal of the very prestigious journal Nature, and had the title "Life without a brain: Neuroradiological and behavioral evidence of neuroplasticity necessary to sustain brain function in the face of severe hydrocephalus."  The study examined a rat named R222 that had lost almost all of its brain because of a disease caused hydrocephalus, which replaces brain tissue with a watery fluid. The study found that despite the rat having lost almost all of its brain, "Indices of spatial memory and learning across the reported Barnes maze parameters (A) show that R222 (as indicated by the red arrow in the figures) was within the normal range of behavior, compared to the age matched cohort."   In other words, the rat with almost no brain seemed to learn and remember as well as a rat with a full brain. The authors stated, "It was not possible from these images of R222 to identify the caudate/putamen, amygdala, or hippocampus." Contrary to the frequently stated but incorrect claim that a hippocampus is crucial for memory, the rat without a hippocampus managed to learn just fine.