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."

Studies New and Old Fail to Show a Big Link Between Brain States and Minds

A prediction of the dogma that your brain makes your mind is that the more brain injuries you have had, the worse off your mind should be. But a paper in the journal Science ("Effects of Penetrating Brain Injury on Intelligence Test Scores") refers to "the large number of reports describing 'negative' findings -- that is, the absence of demonstrable deficits in test performance, despite the presence of large cerebral lesions, especially in the frontal lobes." The 1957 paper compared IQ tests for 60 armed force members who had their intelligence tested before penetrating brain injuries, and also had their intelligence tested after their brain injuries. Speaking of results on IQ tests, the paper states, "These analyses demonstrated that lesions of the frontal and occipital lobes did not produces a significant decline in score, and that only lesions of parietal or temporal lobes of the left hemisphere showed a significant decrease." The soldiers with lesions in these areas actually performed higher on IQ tests after their penetrating brain injuries, with an average of about a 7% increase:

The left nonparieto-temporal region

The right parietal region

The right temporal lobe

The right parietotemporal lobe

The right nonparieto-temporal region

The only decrease in IQ scores occurred with injuries to the left parietotemporal lobe. These results contradict the results of a new paper entitled "Graph lesion-deficit mapping of fluid intelligence." Instead of finding a decrease in intelligence after right frontal damage as reported by that new paper, the 1957 study found no decrease in intelligence after right frontal damage. The 1957 study used the Army General Classification Test, which is a more reliable test for intelligence than the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices test used by the "Graph lesion-deficit mapping of fluid intelligence" study. One study found less than a 50% correlation between the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices and full-scale IQ. The Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices test is a test designed for people of above average intelligence, and is not very suited for testing intelligence damage in people of average intelligence. 

There are other reasons for doubting the "Graph lesion-deficit mapping of fluid intelligence" paper. The study hinges upon estimates of "premorbid IQ," someone's IQ before they had some brain damage. The study claims to have something called the "NART IQ," which is an IQ based on a test called the National Adult Reading Test. The National Adult Reading Test can be described as a "quick and dirty" way of very roughly estimating intelligence. It is used by doctors to get a rough idea about a patient's intelligence. Estimates of the correlation between a person's performance on the English NART test and the person's IQ have tended to be about .7, which is a fairly strong correlation, although not a very strong correlation. But a study tested the Dutch version of the NART test and found that it "its current form is not appropriate anymore to estimate premorbid IQ in both young and older adults," having a correlation with intelligence of less than .5. 

The study here ("The Relationship of Brain-Tissue Loss Volume and Lesion Location to Cognitive Deficit")  tested IQ on 98 veterans with "penetrating brain wounds," finding those with wounds on the right side of the brain to have a mean IQ of 103, and those with wounds on the left side of the brain to have a mean IQ of 99. The paper "Neuropsychological and neurophysiological evaluation of cognitive deficits related to the severity of traumatic brain injury" studied the IQ of 90 patients, dividing them into three categories: mild traumatic brain injury, moderate traumatic brain injury, and severe traumatic brain injury. The mean IQ in each of these groups was about the same, being either 103 or 104. We read that "a surprising finding was that specific intelligence subtests did not show [sensitivity] even for differentiation between severe and mild injury." Such a result is surprising only to those who think your brain makes your mind, not those who reject such an idea. 

A recent study was one that attempted to correlate brain volume and intelligence in 262 healthy brain-scanned persons with an age between 55 and 80. An objectionable aspect of the study is that intelligence was measured using only a type of test that young people are known to do better on. We are told, "The Block Design test from the revised form of Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale [41] was used to assess visuospatial ability and fluid IQ."  If we follow the link in that statement, we come to a page telling us, "The results from this test show worse performance in older individuls."

Despite having a chosen a test that is not a good general test of intelligence, presumably to get a more statistically significant result, the authors report only a mild correlation between gray matter change and cognitive change: an R of only .21. The upper left part of their figure 2A (shown below) shows more than 25 cases of people with less gray matter and more intelligence. The result fails to show any clear link between gray matter loss in aging and intelligence. 

 If the authors had used a better measure of intelligence (the full Wechsler Adult Intelligence test rather than only its Block Design test which seniors do worse on), the authors would have probably got a correlation smaller than the unimpressive correlation of only .21 that they report. 

Recently a team of researchers decided to test the brain damage causes memory damage idea by using retirees of the National Football League, people who had played for years in the rough sport known as American football. Although they wear protective helmets,  people who have played a long time in the National Football League tend to have had one or more concussions, particularly if they played in positions where concussions more often (such as offensive lineman positions or defensive lineman positions).  Described in the press release here, the study "included 53 former NFL players age 50 or older as well as 26 healthy controls and 83 individuals with mild cognitive impairment or dementia who did not play collegiate or professional contact sports and matched as closely as possible to the NFL retirees by age and education." The retired NFL players in the study "had an average of 5.63 concussions, 8.89 years in the NFL, and 115.12 games played." 

The press release for the study has a headline of "Head trauma doesn't predict memory problems in NFL retirees, UT Southwestern study shows."  We read this:

"Previous studies have reported mixed findings on the relationship between head-injury exposure and neuropsychological functioning later in life. While some investigations have suggested former NFL players may exhibit lower verbal memory and executive function scores, others have not found differences compared to control groups, according to a review of the literature ...The [UT Southwestern] researchers report that retired football players had slightly lower memory scores compared to healthy peer controls but did not find this to be significantly associated with head-injury exposure."

The scientific paper states that except for such slightly lower memory scores "no other group differences were observed, and head-injury exposure did not predict neurocognitive performance at baseline or over time."  There was little difference between people who had an average of six concussions and those who had no concussions. 

The 2014 paper "No strong evidence for lateralisation of word reading and face recognition deficits following posterior brain injury" has some very good data comparing scores of people with strokes in the rear brain and controls. Table 3 shows no significant difference (denoted as NS) on 16 out of 19 of tests.

 A 1996 paper is entitled "Impaired Retrieval From Remote Memory in Patients With Frontal Lobe Damage." There were 7 patients, two of whom had about 50 milliliters of damage (about 5%). Their recognition scores on the Public Events test were only slightly less than normal, with testing covering recognition from 4 decades (Figure 2). The free recall of subjects with frontal lobe damage was a little less than average, and they showed no damage to recognition of Famous Faces (Figure 3), but were a little below average on free recall and cued recall. Figure 4 shows that after an "adjustment" there was basically no difference between the controls and the subjects with frontal lobe damage:

More Evidence of High Mental Function Despite Large Brain Damage

In another post on this site, I presented many cases showing that people can have very high mental function despite massive brain damage. In this post I will look some additional cases showing such a thing.

First let's look at some results concerning strokes. This article in US News and World Report says, "It’s important to recognize that strokes do not cause a drop in overall intelligence.” This paper refers to “the generally minor effect of stroke on IQ” in children. 

A paper here noted a case of retrograde amnesia (failure to remember previous memories) that went across many domains of knowledge. But the paper noted, "Across all domains tested, LSJ showed losses of knowledge at a level of breadth and depth never before documented in retrograde amnesia."  Note the "never before documented."  If brains are storing our memories, you would think that many such cases would have been previously documented, because of all the people suffering brain jury from disease, cancer, or car accidents. 

The recently published scientific paper here is entitled “A Lesion-Proof Brain? Multidimensional Sensorimotor, Cognitive, and Socio-Affective Preservation Despite Extensive Damage in a Stroke Patient.” Here is an astonishing report from the paper's abstract, describing a patient who seems mentally undamaged despite massive brain injury:

At age 43, patient CG sustained a cerebral hemorrhage and a few months later, she suffered a second (ischemic) stroke. As a result, she exhibited extensive damage of the right hemisphere (including frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital regions), left Sylvian and striatal areas, bilateral portions of the insula and the amygdala, and the splenium. However, against all probability, she was unimpaired across a host of cognitive domains, including executive functions, attention, memory, language, sensory perception (e.g., taste recognition and intensity discrimination), emotional processing (e.g., experiencing of positive and negative emotions), and social cognition skills (prosody recognition, theory of mind, facial emotion recognition, and emotional evaluation).

Below is the paper's startling discussion of the very well-preserved memory in this patient who had suffered heavy brain damage from two strokes:

Even more striking are her mnemonic skills: her procedural and semantic knowledge is fully preserved, as shown in her smooth execution of various action routines (e.g., handling her cell phone, tying her shoe laces) and her intact naming and classification skills (e.g., she could flawlessly denominate all the objects she had thematically organized in different sections of her purse); furthermore, her declarative memory is extremely detailed for events which happened weeks, months, and even years ago. She could describe scenes from her childhood and adolescence, she meticulously narrated episodes occurring immediately before and after her strokes, she remembered the names, specialties, and suggestions of all her doctors, and she could recount details of dozens of books she had read throughout her life.

We know that Alzheimer’s disease can cause an inability to recall memories, although whether the memories are actually lost is debatable. What is remarkable is the fact that a large fraction of the brain can be ruined by Alzheimer’s disease before a patient can become noticeably poor at remembering things. Here is a quote from an expert on the disease:

One of the big challenges we face with Alzheimer's is that brain cell destruction begins years or even decades before symptoms emerge. A person whose disease process starts at age 50 might have memory loss at 75, but by the time we see the signs, the patient has lost 40 to 50 percent of their brain cells.

The same very astonishing thing is said in this article, which quotes an expert saying the following:

In Alzheimer’s, brain cells start to die 10, 15, or 20 years before symptoms appear. By the time we observe memory lapses, 40 percent to 50 percent of brain cells are gone, and it’s too late to make a difference.

These statements are astonishing. If our memories are all stored in our brains, why would you have to lose 40 to 50 percent of your brain cells before people started noticing your memory loss? Again, this suggests merely a low correlation between brain health and mental function.

On this page we have the amazing story of an MIT student who helped doctors find a baseball-sized tumor in his brain. Doctors performed surgery and removed the tumor. Later, the student gave a presentation to cancer researchers. A video of the presentation is included on that page. Amazingly, the young man seems to show no sign whatsoever of a damaged mind. He walks and talks normally, and seems to have slick presentation skills sufficient to land him a job as a host on a morning TV show. The page tells us that this young man is now pursuing a PhD in mechanical engineering. In the presentation, the young man tells us that the doctors removed about 12 billion neurons in his brain.

The paper here studied memory effects in 63 patients who had undergone surgery for brain cancer, in addition to other patients who had undergone both brain surgery and radiotherapy. 91% of these 63 patients experienced “no deterioration” in immediate recall; 80% experienced “no deterioration” in delayed recall; and 77% experienced “no deterioration” in recognition. This is a relatively low correlation between brain damage and memory, particularly considering that about half of the patients had 2 or more brain metastases (areas in which the cancer was growing).

Figure 8 of this paper gives us a graph that compares verbal IQ with brain tumor size in a variety of brain cancer patients. Under materialist assumptions, we would expect that there should be a strong inverse correlation between something like verbal IQ and the size of a brain tumor; the bigger the brain tumor, the lower your verbal intelligence should be. But what we see is only a low correlation – a correlation of only .28. High correlations have values like .75 or .85. Astonishingly, the person with the highest verbal intelligence had the biggest brain tumor, and the person with the second highest intelligence also has a very large brain tumor. We can easily account for the slightly-below-average IQ scores of brain tumor patients by simply assuming that in these brain tumor patients there would often be visual perception problems, muscular coordination problems, psychological distress, and head pain problems, which would tend to slightly decrease scores in pencil-and-paper IQ tests, without there actually being a decrease in intelligence.

It is part of the dubious folklore of neuroscientists that the prefrontal cortex is some center of higher reasoning. But the scientific paper here tells us that patients with prefrontal damage "often have a remarkable absence of intellectual impairment, as measured by conventional IQ tests." The authors of the scientific tried an alternate approach, using a test of so-called "fluid" intelligence on 80 patients with prefrontal damage.  They concluded "our findings do not support a connection between fluid intelligence and the frontal lobes." Table 7 of this study reveals that the average intelligence of the 80 patients with prefrontal brain damage was 99.5 – only a tiny bit lower than the average IQ of 100. Two of the brain-damage patients had genius IQs of higher than 140. This is not a result consistent with the claim that brains make minds. 

In a similar vein, the paper here tested IQ for 156 Vietnam veterans who had undergone frontal lobe brain injury during combat. If you do the math using Figure 5 in this paper, you get an average IQ of 98 for these 156 brain-damaged veterans, only two points lower than average. You could plausibly explain that 2 point difference purely by assuming that those who got injured had a very slightly lower average intelligence before they were injured. 

It also should be remembered that brain-damaged patients taking standard IQ tests may have higher intelligence than the test score suggests.  A standard IQ test requires visual perception skill (to read the test book) and finger coordination (to fill in the right answers using a pencil). Brain damage might cause reduced finger coordination and reduced visual perception unrelated to intelligence; and such things might cause a subject to do below-average on a standard IQ test even if his intelligence is normal.  And if you're a patient with a terminal brain tumor, you may have psychological distress and head pain that may cause a reduced score in your paper-and-pencil IQ test. 

There is a type of surgery called a hemispherectomy, and is sometimes performed on children experiencing severe seizures. The operation involves surgically removing half of the brain. The surgery is described in a Scientific American article entitled Strange but True: When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One. The article states: “Unbelievably, the surgery has no apparent effect on personality or memory.”

According to this link, 70% of the children who had half of their brains removed were able to speak well, and 42% older than 6 were able to read well. Given that only about 60% of the American population can read well, this 42% figure is amazingly high.  A paper here tracks the before and after IQ scores of 12 children who had a hemispherectomy operation to remove half of their brain (usually to treat severe seizures). Half of the children had higher IQ scores when tested two years after half of their brains were removed, compared to their scores before the operation. 

When we consider sudden traumatic injury to the brain, we also find some cases where the correlation between brain health and mental function seems to be merely a low correlation. One astonishing case is that of Gabby Giffords, a US congress representative who was shot at point-blank range in the back of the head. Not only did she live, but she has recovered to a remarkable degree, to the point of being able to bike, and speak clearly (although in shorter sentences). A similar case was the famous case of Phineas Gage, a nineteenth century railroad worker who had a thick iron railroad spike accidentally drive through his skull, piercing his frontal lobes. A physician reported after examining Gage that he was “quite recovered in his faculties of body and mind.” Gage seems to have had some personality changes later, which may or may not have been related to his injury. But such changes are trivial compared to what we would have expected from such an injury under materialistic assumptions about the brain. An expert on Gage has stated that the personality change “did not last much longer than about two to three years,” but Gage lived for 12 years after the accident.

A Lancet study involving nearly three million people found only a small relation between traumatic brain injury and the risk of dementia. Those with severe traumatic brain injury were only 35 percent more likely to develop dementia. Since the lifetime risk of dementia is less than 20 percent, this means that 70 percent or more of people who suffer traumatic brain injury do not get dementia.  With a correlation this small, we can't even be sure whether there is a causal relation. By comparison, you are 2300% more likely to develop lung cancer if you smoke. 

It has been estimated that the cerebellum contains between 50 percent and 80 percent of the neurons in the brain.  In China a woman was discovered to have no cerebellum at all. But her defects were relatively minor, such as slurred speech, a need to use something like a cane to walk, and a lack of athletic ability. The woman could understand speech well enough. According to a scientific paper describing her, she had merely "mild mental impairment." This is yet another case showing only a small correlation between brain health and intellectual ability. 

In the paper "Subtotal agenesis of the cerebellum in an adult," we read this: 

"We describe a 58-year-old asymptomatic woman with subtotal developmental absence of the cerebellum. MRI evaluation showed minute remnants of cerebellar tissue corresponding to the anterior quadrangular lobules."

Note the word "asymptomatic." This is a case of a woman who suffered no symptoms despite not having a cerebellum, the part of the brain where most neurons exist. Similarly, in the 1950 link here, on the far right, we read of a man who "was born without a cerebellum and seemed to suffer no noticeable disadvantage from the fact."

These cases all tell us the same thing: that there is merely a low correlation between brain health and mental function, and that people can often have very high mental function even when their brains are greatly damaged. As a scientific paper says, “There does not appear to be a direct relationship between the degree of brain pathology or brain damage and the clinical manifestation of that damage.”

Such cases are not at all compatible with the conventional thinking of neuroscientists that the human mind is merely the product of the brain. But such cases are compatible with the assumption that the human mind is mainly the product of some mysterious reality beyond our understanding: a soul or some cosmic consciousness infrastructure much greater than a human body.

But a mainstream might argue that we should believe our memories are all stored in our brains, on the grounds that brains are active when we are remembering, and very heavy brain damage may be associated with memory loss. The visual below illustrates why such

reasoning is not convincing.

Below is a very notable case of the almost complete destruction of a brain by a brain tumor, but with a high preservation of mental function. It comes from page 71 of the document here (and the newspaper story here repeats the same details).