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 The black areas are areas in which normal brain tissue is gone, having been replaced by fluid.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. 

They Did Well After a Huge Loss of Brain Tissue

The 1935 newspaper account below (which you can read here) is entitled "Half a Brain Good As Whole." We read of operations removing a half a brain, "without the least reduction of intellectual  ability."

An article on Buzzfeed.com is entitled "Autopsy Professionals Are Revealing The Most Bizarre Anomalies They've Seen, And Wow, The Human Body Is Truly A Wonder."  We hear some amazing stories about autopsies revealing brains that are mostly gone. 

The accounts are anonymous, giving them less credibility than testimony from named witnesses. But only a very tiny fraction of the population seems to realize the philosophical significance of an autopsy report showing someone who had few symptoms had huge brain tissue loss. So we can rather safely assume that these stories are not being made up to score points in the debate about whether the brain is the source of the mind. 

One user reports this coming up in an autopsy:

"An old woman with an incredibly thick skull all the way around. Her brain was much, much smaller than it should have been, but according to her family, she was fully functional and displayed no deficits of any kind. She actually ran her own cheese-making company and died from a carbon monoxide leak. Strangest case I ever saw!"

Another user reports this:

"I did an autopsy of a young kid, around 10 years old, who had hydrocephalus and was quadriplegic, yet retained some of his normal functions, like talking and understanding — albeit minimally. When I opened his skull, there was no brain. I was shocked. This was my first time witnessing something like this. There was approximately 1.5 liters of fluid and just an empty skull. The brain was so severely atrophied it was smaller than a golf ball."

How can someone do talking and understanding without a brain? Only if the brain is not the source of your mind. 

Another user reports this:

"I observed a lot of things during my professional autopsies. The most notorious was a guy with four .22 bullets in his cranium. He didn't claim pain and apparently lived a normal life."

We can only imagine how much brain tissue must have been lost in total when the last of these four bullets appeared in the person's brain. But nonetheless we are told he "lived a normal life."

Compared to such a case, the case reported below is much less impressive:

"An 85-year-old patient had a tumor in her brain. It was the size of a golf ball on her right lobe — unknown to her before death." 

The 2024 article here is entitled, "Doctors Successfully Remove a Tennis Ball-Sized Tumor in an 8-Hour Surgery." We read of a woman who had a huge brain tumor of 7 to 8 centimeters. We have a visual showing the tumor. The tumor appears as a whitish mass. 

We get a vague listing of some symptoms the patient suffered, without  much of anything in the way of specifics. Referring to resection of the tumor (which means removal) we read this:

"Radhika underwent a successful bifrontal craniotomy, guided by navigation and tumor fluorescence technology, allowing for complete excision of the tumor. Remarkably, within one week of the surgery, she returned to her normal life."

She returned to her normal life? That's not what we would expect after the removal of so large a part of the brain, under the hypothesis that your brain makes your mind. 

The story below (which you can read here) describes children who had half of their brains removed to treat epilepsy. The story flatly states that the children "do not lose any of their intelligence, but their fits and antisocial behavior disappear, according to Dr. Eugene P. Spitz of Children's Hospital, Philadelphia." 

Below (from the news account here) is a description of tests on the surgical removal of half of the brain of monkeys. The result is one we might expect under the idea that the brain is not the source of the mind. 

Here is a new story from 1933 noting "no changes in intellect" after an operation that removed "almost all of the right half of a woman's brain."

Below we have a 1937 newspaper account (which you can read here) of a woman who had the right half of her brain removed in an operation. We are told that after this operation she had an IQ of 115, which is 15% higher than average. This is not what we would expect under the hypothesis that the brain is the source of the human mind. 

Below from a 1957 newspaper is another case of someone doing very well intellectually after the removal of the right half of the brain. 

In the news story here, we read that "Mark, of Palm Bay, Fla., is reading better and playing longer since the left side of his brain was removed in May." Note the exact words: "reading better," not reading worse. The news article here tells how a brain tumor of between 5 and 7 centimeters (about 2 to 3 inches) was discovered in the brain of the manager of a major league baseball team. The tumor was in the left front part of the brain, the same part reputed to be involved in executive functions. The manager had just successfully managed the American League team to victory in the All Star game. 

The news story here documents a very clear case of the preservation of memory after the removal of the left half of the cerebrum. We read of a 47-year-old man who had the left half of his cerebrum removed. We read this:

"Dr. Smith said the patient's memory of events before the operation 'was well preserved, much better than anyone expected.' Tests following surgery show Coe can perform many functions traditionally thought impossible after removal of the brain's dominant hemisphere. Immediately following surgery, Coe still had the ability to speak spontaneously."

A report like this does not merely contradict the claim that the brain is the source of the mind. It also contradicts the claim that the brain is a storage place of memories. 

The 1963 newspaper account here is entitled "Monkeys With Half a Brain." We read this:

"Fifty monkeys have had half of their brains removed. Their memories appear to be as complete as before surgery. Until this experiment was made, even doctors thought that such surgery would affect memory....Not only is memory retained; the monkeys are alert, intelligent, sociable, and have the same enthusiasm as doing things as before....What are some of things the team has discovered from observation of monkeys with half their brain removed? The monkeys remember how do things taught them before surgery. Such as which of two blocks of wood place under them has a reward under it -- a raisin or other food. Fears are recalled....'While the rhesus monkeys we test remember everything taught them before surgery, it takes them twice as long to learn something new as monkeys with both half of their brain,' explains Dr. Kruper. 'But the important thing is that they DO learn, even if it does take them longer.' "

I have by now published posts describing many different cases in which learned knowledge and episodic memories were well-preserved after the destruction of the left half of the brain. I have also published posts describing many other cases in which learned knowledge and episodic memories were well-preserved after the destruction of the right half of the brain. You can read about such cases in the text above and in my posts here, here and here. Such cases are all cases deserving the closest study by any neuroscientist claiming that brains store memories. The failure of most neuroscientists to collect and study cases of this type is a severe example of dereliction of duty, and a bad example of people failing to study whether a very important claim such people are making (the claim that brains store memories) is supported or discredited by observational evidence. 

Then there is the case of Sharon Parker. She 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.' "

Brain Tumors Seem to Have Relatively Little Effect on Cognitive Function

One way to test the "brains make minds" hypothesis is to examine the effect of brain tumors on cognitive performance. Under the hypothesis that the brain makes the mind and the brain stores memories, we should expect brain tumors to have a huge effect on cognitive performance. That does not seem to be the case at all. 

The most common test of cognitive performance used by doctors is a test called the MMSE, which stands for the Mini Mental State Examination test. 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). 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."

Another widely used test of mental function is the Raven's Colored Progressive Colored Matrices test, called the RCPM. The test has a maximum score of 36. According to the paper here, an average score for an elderly person is about 26. 

The study here ("THE EFFICACY OF RAVEN’S COLORED PROGRESSIVE MATRICES FOR PATIENTS WITH BRAIN TUMOR") gives MMSE and RCPM scores for 43 patients, before and after surgery for a brain tumor.  We read about some remarkable results: "Median pre- and post-operative MMSE scores were 29 points (14– 30) and 29 points (21–30), respectively. Median pre- and post-operative RCPM scores were 33 points (25–36) and 35 points (18–36), respectively."

Let us consider how much this result contradicts the "brains make minds" dogma. The results for the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) test were almost perfect for the 43 subjects with brain tumors. They scored a median of 29, only one point less than a perfect score of 30.  For the Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices test, the median score of the brain tumor patients after brain surgery was an almost perfect score of 35, only one point less than the maximum of 36. Moreover, after the brain surgery the score for these patients improved from 33 to 35.  Nothing is done in a brain tumor surgery to cognitively fix a brain. The sole purpose of the surgery is to remove the cancerous tumor, hopefully in some way that will prevent the tumor from reappearing. Very often the amount of brain tissue removed is greater than the amount that looks grossly cancerous. Under the hypothesis that the brain makes the mind, we should not at all expect patients to be getting better scores on mental tests after they had surgery to remove a brain tumor. 

Another interesting study is the study "Cognitive reserve and individual differences in brain tumour patients." The study involved about 700 brain tumor patients who were cognitively tested. The patients included 143 low-grade glioma patients, and 181 high-grade glioma patients. High-grade glioma patients are those with really bad brain tumors.  The study has the limitation that it fails to give us the average or median cognitive test scores that it analyzed.  All that we are given is some analysis expressed by using correlation coefficients. A correlation coefficient is a number between 0 and 1 telling us about how much one thing is correlated with another. A correlation of 0 indicates no causal relation, and a correlation of 1 indicates a perfect causal relation. 

Table 4 of the study indicates there was virtually no correlation between the volume of the tumor and performance on the Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices test, a negligible correlation of only −0.0345. The same table indicates there was virtually no correlation between performance on the Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices test and whether the tumor was a high-grade glioma, a negligible correlation of −0.0310. We see a much higher correlation of .349 for "fronto-parietal" tumors, but Table 1 says there were only six patients with "fronto-parietal" tumors, so it's too small a sample size of "fronto-parietal tumor" patients to be very significant evidence. 

Table 3 of the paper here ("Pre-Surgery Cognitive Performance and Voxel-Based Lesion-Symptom Mapping in Patients with Left High-Grade Glioma") gives the results of cognitive tests on 85 people with high-grade glioma in the left hemisphere. Under the dogma that the brain makes the mind, we would expect most of these people with severe brain tumors to have performed poorly on such tests. But the table does not show that. Instead we see that on 17 out of 18 tests most of the patients did not perform in a "pathological" manner.  Only on a "verb naming" task did most of the subjects perform poorly, with 61% performing poorly. On 17 out 18 tests an average of only about 25% of the subjects performed poorly. 

The paper here ("Quality of life in patients with stable disease after

surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy for

malignant brain tumour") analyzed cognitive data on 57 brain tumor patients with malignant brain tumors, a particularly severe type. We read this: "Separate Mann Whitney tests did not show any differences between the tumour and control groups in terms of score for FLIC (U=476.5, p=0.031), ADL (U=674, p=0.89), STAI1 (U=502, p=0.059), STAI2 (U=641, p=0.65), SRDS (U=618, p=0.49), Raven’s coloured progressive matrices (U=533, p=0.11), attentional matrices (U=624, p=0.53), trail making test part A (U=673.5, p=0.91) and B (U=624, p=0.53), or story recall scores (U=637, p=0.62)."  The average score on the Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices test for the brain tumor patients was about 28 (27.86).  The patients with severe malignant brain tumors scored higher than control subjects on this test, who got an average score of only 26.0.  According to the paper here, an average score for an elderly person is about 26. So the people with the malignant brain tumors (a particularly severe type) scored higher on the cognitive test than normal people of their age. 

The paper here ("Evaluation of mini-mental status examination score after gamma knife radiosurgery as the first radiation treatment for brain metastases") gave the MMSE cognitive test on 119 patients before and after treatment for brain surgery. We read, "In 16 of 37 patients (43.2 %) with pre-GKS MMSE scores ≤27, the MMSE scores improved by ≥3 points, whereas 15 of all patients (19.7 %) experienced deteriorations of ≥3 points." It sounds like the number of increases in cognitive scores was as high as the number of decreases.

The study here ("Episodic Memory Impairments in Primary Brain Tumor Patients") studied problems with memory in 158 people having brain tumors. Using a method that sounds as if it was trying to report as many people as possible as having memory problems, the study claims that only 42% of those with brain tumors had any memory problems. It reports that "No correlations between specific tumor locations and types of episodic memory impairment were found, except for the association of encoding deficits with corpus callosum infiltration (Logistic regression: OR 4.36, β = 1.68, 95% IC 1.37–12.58, p = .02)."  Since the people with brain tumors are typically old people, and maybe something like 40% of old report report some type of memory problem, we have no clear evidence that brain tumors are causing memory problems.  This study follows a frustrating methodology in which it refuses to report the degree of dysfunction in any of the people reported as having memory problems. We have a claim about what percentage of brain tumor patients have some kind of memory problem, without any details on how bad such problems were.   This is just what we would expect if only tiny performance differences were found. 

We get a "memory problem criteria" description that sounds like it is trying to place as many people as possible in a category of "people with memory problems":

"Each of the nine scores recorded (number of word recalled at immediate recall), free recalls (1, 2, 3, delayed) and cued recalls (1, 2, 3, delayed) were considered abnormal when it corresponded to a performance equal to or under the fifth percentile of the healthy controls normative data (van der Linden et al., 2004). An encoding deficit was diagnosed when the immediate recall was abnormal (the assumption being that the items were not present in the working memory immediately after they have been red, and so not encoded). A failure in free recalls corresponded to at least 2/4 abnormal scores and a failure in cued recalls corresponded to at least 2/4 abnormal scores (the test is composed of four free and four cued recalls). A storage deficit was diagnosed in the case of a failure in free recalls associated with a failure in cued recalls. This means that the cues didn’t improve the number of items recalled, assuming that the items was not stored. A retrieval deficit was diagnosed in the case of a failure in free recalls isolated (normal cued recalls). Indeed, the cues improved the number of items recalled comparably to healthy controls, giving a proof that items was stored in the memory but not available at the moment. Furthermore, an association of storage and retrieval deficit was diagnosed in the case of a failure in free recalls and a failure in cued recalls, but with limited improvement (incomparably to healthy controls) of the total number of items recalled with cue."

Despite this method, which sounds as if it was designed to make as many as possible be categorized as people with a memory problem, only 42% of those with brain tumors were classified as having a memory problem. We are left here with no good evidence of brain tumors causing substantial memory problems.  The finding that "no correlations between specific tumor locations and types of episodic memory impairment were found" (with only one minor exception) is consistent with the idea that memories are not actually stored in brains.

Another study of 121 patients with severe brain tumors (Stage III and Stage 4) gave four tests of working memory and two tests of episodic memory, finding that only 10%, 17%, 22%,  23%, 28% and 18% had a "clinically relevant deficit." Referring to radiation therapy to treat brain cancer, the paper "Effects of Radiotherapy on Cognitive Function in Patients With Low-Grade Glioma Measured by the Folstein Mini-Mental State Examination" says that "Only a small percentage of patients had cognitive deterioration after radiotherapy."

The study "Efficacy and Cognitive Outcomes of Gamma Knife Radiosurgery in Glioblastoma Management for Elderly Patients" studied 49 patients with the most severe type of brain tumor, a glioblastoma. Table 1 tells us the patients had a median tumor size of 5.4 centimeters (about two inches). According to Table 2, a year after radiation therapy, the average MMSE score of the patients was about 25, slightly below average, but still pretty good. Before the surgery, when the patients had lost a lot of their brain tissue due to tumors, the average MMSE score was a fairly good 27 (30 being the highest score possible). 

The study "Detrimental Effects of Tumor Progression on Cognitive

Function of Patients With High-Grade Glioma" is one of those studies that makes it hard to extract the most relevant data from it. The most relevant fact that I can extract from it is found in Table 1, where I see that the number of patients with very bad brain tumors (high-grade glioma) and normal cognitive scores (as tested by the MMSE) was 757, and the number with abnormal MMSE scores was only 389. 659 of these 757 patients with normal cognitive scores had Grade 4 brain tumors, the worst type. 

The paper "Prospective memory impairment following whole brain

radiotherapy in patients with metastatic brain cancer" gives us the MMSE cognitive test scores for 81 patients before and after they had treatment for metastatic brain cancer. The average score before the treatment was 27, and the average score after the treatment was 26 (Table 2). So there was no big difference. The link here says that a score of 24 or higher on the MMSE is considered "normal." According to Table 1, 23 of the patients had a brain tumor larger than 3 centimeters (1 inch). 

Below is a quote from the paper "Meningiomas and Cognitive Impairment after Treatment: A Systematic and Narrative Review."  The paper summarizes other papers studying the cognitive effects of a common type of brain surgery. The quote below refers to studies that compared cognitive function before and after brain surgery. We see some studies discussing a negative cognitive effect, but relatively few. The reported fractions are not very high.  There is also reference to a number of studies showing improvements in cognitive abilities after brain surgery. 

"Worsening of verbal, working and visual memory (9/22 studies) 

Worsening of complex attention and orientation (1/22 studies) 

Worsening of executive functioning (3/22 studies) 

Worsening of language and verbal fluency (2/22 studies) 

Worsening of cognitive flexibility (4/22 studies) 

Worsening in all neurocognitive domains (1/22 studies) 

Improvement in verbal, working and visual memory (3/22 studies) 

Improvement of complex attention and orientation (3/22 studies) 

Improvement of executive functioning (2/22 studies) 

Improvement of cognitive flexibility (1/22 studies)."

The same paper summarizes studies comparing those who had brain surgery with normal control subjects. We seem to have only scanty evidence of worse performance after brain surgery, because the reported fractions are low:

"Worse verbal, working and visual memory (2/22 studies)

Worse complex attention and orientation (1/22 studies)

Worse executive functioning (1/22 studies)

Worse language and verbal fluency (2/22 studies)

Worse cognitive flexibility (4/22 studies)."

The fractions quoted are small fractions such as 5% or 10%, and we don't know how much of a decline the "worse" refers to. When you also take into account that neuroscientists will typically be biased towards reporting declines in function after brain surgery rather than improvements or no differences (in accordance with their dogma that brains produce minds), it is not clear that we have here any very clear evidence of decline in cognitive function after this type of brain surgery. 

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).

Overall, these results are quite compatible with the idea that you brain does not make your mind, and the idea that your brain is not any storage place of your memories. 

I can recall a personal experience here. Years ago I traveled to see a beloved relative who died by the spread of metastatic breast cancer. When I met her I saw a very noticeable tumor protruding from her head. I seem to recall the skull protrusion being about the size of a fist, or nearly as large. I can assume that a very large part of the brain had been destroyed by the cancer. But when I talked to her, I could notice no change in her cognition. I asked her an important question about events in the past, and she gave a meaningful, detailed answer with relevant examples provided.  I left, and a few weeks later she died. The lack of disturbance in cognition, speech and recollection in someone with a very visually noticeable brain tumor was striking. 

Postscript: CNN has a long interview here with a doctor who was found to have an 8-centimeter-wide brain tumor. The human brain is about 1300 cubic centimeters, and an 8-centimeter-wide tumor in the brain is about 512 cubic centimeters, or about 40% of the volume of the brain. In the interview the doctor says nothing about a memory problem. The transcript of his statements makes him sound like someone who had no intellectual problems caused by the brain tumor or the surgery to remove it. He speaks in long articulate intelligent-sounding paragraphs. 

A Report of "Unimpaired Faculties Without a Brain" (John Bly)

 An invaluable resource to the serious scholar of the human mind is the web site www.iapsop.com, which allows you to freely and conveniently examine many important sources of information about the human mind and human psychical experiences, much of it information that is hard to find elsewhere. Among the resources are very many editions of the Journal and Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. At such a site I am now enjoying reading editions of the publication The Metaphysical Magazine. On page 71 of Volume 5, the January-May 1897 volume, we have the astonishing report below:

BRAINS UNNECESSARY. 

"Dr. S. S. Koser, of Williamsport, Pa., has made a wonderful discovery, which will be a theme for discussion among medical men throughout the country. His knife has revealed a medical wonder, in which a man had unimpaired faculties without a brain. 

At the request of a number of prominent physicians of Philadelphia, Dr. Koser held a post-mortem examination of the remains of John Bly, of Watsontown. Bly, who was twenty years of age, for a long time suffered with a tumor, which grew into the very base of the brain, and occasioned his death. The growth had a visible effect upon his brain, and the case became a curiosity to the medical profession. The tumor was imbedded too deeply into the brain tissue to admit of an operation. It was found that the tumor was nearly as large as a billiard ball. It was so located as to demoralize the nerves of the sight centre, and as a consequence young Bly was blind for over three years. The most singular fact developed was that the entire brain had been hollowed out by the action of the tumor. The cavity was at least five inches in length, and was filled with pus. All that was left of the brain was a thin shell, composed of the tougher tissues where the brain matter gathers into nerves, which were less susceptible to the process of decay. When an incision was made in the shell the whole mass collapsed. 

The circumstances which made the case almost unprecedented in the annals of medical science was the manner in which the patient retained his rationality and faculties under the circumstances. He had the senses of touch, taste, hearing, and smell, had very tolerable control of his locomotor muscles, could talk, and, in fact, was comparatively discommoded in no other way than by the loss of vision. His retention of memory was remarkable. He was able to memorize poems up to within two weeks of his death.—Philadelphia Ledger."

The report (repeated here with the same details) should come as no great surprise to those familiar with other similar reports provided by the physician John Lorber. As discussed in this paper, Lorber studied many patients with hydrocephalus, in which healthy brain tissue is gradually replaced by a watery fluid. 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).

The paper says 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 article 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."

Then there is a case in which a human managed to function well in society as a French civil servant, even though he had almost no functional brain. The case is discussed here in a 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 was as if the authors had chosen a title which would cause as few people as possible to read the paper, because people reading the paper would stop believing the "brains make minds" dogma of neuroscientists. 

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. 

Some People Our Neuroscientists Don't Want You to Know About

In this post I will discuss some subjects with dramatic case histories that tell you very important things about the human brain and the human mind. Neuroscientists fail to mention these subjects with such important case histories. So we can assume that today's neuroscientists don't want you to know about such cases, because the cases contradict the dogmas that neuroscientists like to teach, such as the dogma that your brain makes your mind, the dogma that your brain stores your memories, and the dogma that there cannot be mysterious psychic powers inexplicable through any type of brain activity. 

• Dandy's patients: The case of Dandy's patients are reported in the American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Jul., 1934), pages 500-503. We read this: "Dandy has completely removed the right cerebral hemisphere from eight patients. He has performed total extirpations of one or more lobes much oftener... There are tabulated below certain generalizations on the effects of removing the right hemisphere.... The operation was the complete extirpation of the right frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes peripheral to the corpus striatum. The weight of the tissue re moved varies, with the pathological conditions involved, from 250 to 584 grm [grams].Coherent conversation began within twenty-four hours after operation, and in one case on the afternoon of the same day. Later examinations showed no observable mental changes. The patients were perfectly oriented in respect of time, place, and person; their memory was unimpaired for immediate and remote events; conversation was always coherent; ability to read, write, compute, and learn new material was unaltered. Current events were followed with normal interest. There were no personality changes apparent; the patients were emotionally stable, without fears, delusions, hallucinations, expansive ideas or obsessions, and with a good sense of humor; they joked frequently. They showed a natural interest in their condition and future. They cooperated intelligently at all times throughout post-operative care and subsequent testing of function." How could the memory of patients be "unimpaired for immediate and remote events" if memories are stored in brains?
• Patient P. G. Described in the 1966 paper "Long-term changes in intellect and behaviour after hemispherectomy," Patient   P.G. had an IQ of 128 before the right half of his brain was removed. After the right half of his brain was removed, he scored 142 on the same IQ test, improving his score by 14 points. The paper tells us that this man with half a brain “obtained a university diploma after operation” and “has a responsible administrative position with a local authority.” If your brain makes your mind, how could taking out half of someone's brain cause their IQ to increase by 14 points, with an end result so far above average?
• Patient D. W. Described in the 1966 paper "Long-term changes in intellect and behaviour after hemispherectomy," Patient D.W.  had an IQ of 97 before the left half of his brain was removed. After the left half of his brain was removed, he scored 100 on the same IQ test, improving his score by 3 points.
• 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. 
• Christina Santhouse. In an article in the New Yorker magazine, we are told of a Christina Santhouse who had the right half of her brain surgically removed: “When I met her, she had taken her S.A.T.s and just finished high school, coming in seventy-sixth in a class of two hundred and twenty-five.”
• Beth Usher. Beth was mentioned in an article in the LA Times, which stated this: "How is it that 8-year-old Beth Usher of Storrs, Conn., can lose her left hemisphere, yet retain her large repertoire of knock-knock jokes? Beth’s memories survived not just the loss of brain tissue, but also the 32 days that she spent in a coma, the result of some brain stem swelling that occurred in response to the trauma of surgery. Shortly after Beth regained consciousness, her father began quizzing her about people and places from her past. Brian Usher didn’t get very far. 'Dad,' Beth interrupted, with a trace of impatience. 'I remember everything.'" Of course, there's a very easy answer to the question asked: the answer that memories are not actually stored in the human brain. 
• Borgstein and Grootendorst's 7-Year-Old. In 2002 in The Lancet these two published a paper "Half a Brain." They reported this on the child who had the left half of her brain surgically removed: "Though the dominant hemisphere was removed, with its language centres and the motor control for the left side of her body, the child is fully bilingual in Turkish and Dutch, while even her hemiplegia has partially recovered and is only noticeable by a slight spasticity of her left arm and leg. She leads an otherwise normal life."
• The Johns Hopkins 58 hemispherectomy patients. In a scientific paper ("Why Would You Remove Half a Brain? The Outcome of 58 Children After Hemispherectomy −−The Johns Hopkins Experience: 1968 to 1996") we read about surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medical School who performed fifty-eight hemispherectomy operations on children over a thirty-year period. At least eleven had the left half of the brain removed; and more had the right half removed. The paper states this: 
  "Despite removal of one hemisphere [i.e. one half of the brain], the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved....It is tempting to speculate, that the continuous electrical activity of these severely dysfunctional hemispheres interferes with the function of the other, more normal hemisphere. This might explain why motor function improves after hemispherectomy and why language recovers after removal of the dysfunctional left hemisphere, but does not seem to fully transfer before surgery. Perhaps it also partially explains intellectual improvement in these children after removal of half of the cortex. We are awed by the apparent retention of memory after removal of half of the brain, either half, and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humor."  An appropriate response to such observations would be not mere awe, but the questioning or discarding of belief dogmas such as the dogma that brains store memories (which cannot be found by microscopically inspecting brain tissue). 
• Kim Peek.  Kim Peek suffered from a lack of a corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. Instead of this resulting in two minds in a single body (as we would expect from the "brains make minds" dogma), the result was a single mind and personality with an exceptional memory and astonishing calculation abilities. A newspaper report said Peek could accurately tell the contents of 12,000 books he had read, and the wikipedia article on him says he could "remember almost everything he had read." He could quickly tell strangers which day of the week they were born when they merely told him their birthdays. 
• Martel's boy. In a scientific paper ("Discrepancy Between Cerebral Structure and Cognitive Functioning") we read of a case of a boy who was "mentally unimpaired" until death (despite progressive loss of the senses), and who was found in an autopsy to have almost no brain. We read this: "Martel (1823) described a boy who died at the age of 10. During the first years of his life, he seemed healthy, but eventually, his health deteriorated considerably. He had severe headaches, gradually lost all his senses except hearing, developed fits, and became confined to his bed, but he nevertheless seemed mentally unimpaired until his death. His head appeared enlarged, and upon autopsy, apart from 'residues of meninges,' 'no trace of a brain' was found inside the skull (Martel, 1823, p. 20)." 
• John Lorber's patients. Lorber was a physician who had patients who lost the great majority of their brain due to a disease that replaces brain tissue with a watery fluid. Lorber was astounded to find that many of the patients had above-average intelligence, including a patient that had almost no brain but still had an IQ of 144. His patients are discussed here. 
• Masdeu's 44-year old. In the paper "Ventricular Wall Granulations and Draining of Cerebrospinal Fluid in Chronic Giant Hydrocephalus," Joseph C. Masdeu MD and others report a case of a 44-year-old woman with a huge fluid-filled hole in her brain, one that seemed to have replaced most of the tissue in her brain (judging from the photos in the paper). The paper reports the woman had an IQ of 98, worked as an administrator for a government agency, and could speak seven languages. 
• 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. 
• Egnor's Katie. In an article Michael Egnor MD tells of a patient he had named Katie who only "had a third of the brain that her sister had," her fraternal twin. Egnor tells us that Katie "sat and talked and walked earlier than her sister," "made the honor roll," and "will soon graduate high school."
• Antonio M. Battro's Nico. A page describes a book by Battro, a book entitled "Half a Brain Is Enough" about a boy named Nico. The page states this: "Half a Brain is Enough is the extraordinary story of Nico, a three-year-old boy who was given a right hemispherectomy to control his severe intractable epilepsy. Antonio Battro, a distinguished neuroscientist and educationalist, describes his work with Nico over several years and explains how a boy with only half a brain has developed into a bright child with relatively minor physical and mental impairment. Eight years later, he runs and plays with only a slight limp. So far, there is no significant cognitive or affective disorder and it appears that Nico's so-called right-hemisphere skills--mathematics, visual arts, and music--have migrated to the left hemisphere. At school, he performs as a child of his age in arithmetic and music; only his draftsmanship and handwriting are poor for his age, but he has not lost his cognitive spatial ability. Battro and his colleagues have been studying and teaching Nico with computers and he is mastering written language with a word processor and is able to make good graphic designs with a computer. Nico performs well above average verbally, a left-brain skill."
• Julie Klingelhofer.  Julie's case is described in the 1987 news article here. We read that even though Julie Klingelhofer "lost the left frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal lobes of her brain" during brain surgery for epilepsy, her IQ increased by 10 points after such a huge reduction of her brain tissue. 
• The Birjand Cyst patient:  This patient's case is reported in the paper "Giant Brain Hydatid Cyst in an Adult: A New Case Report." We are shown a photo of a giant hole in the patient's brain. We are told "The patient only complained of headache in the last two weeks and had no symptoms of visual or speech impairment." We are told the patient had no psychological problems. Surgery removed a fist-sized brain cyst that was 90 millimeters long and 40 millimeters wide. No mention is made of any mental or memory problem. 
• John Bly.  In The Metaphysical Magazine, on page 71 of Volume 5, the January-May 1897 volume, we have an astonishing report entitled "Brains Unnecessary." The report is based on an article in the newspaper The Philadelphia Ledger. We read that a Dr. S. S. Koser of Williamsport, Pa made a wonderful discovery, revealing "a man had unimpaired faculties without a brain." We read this: " Dr. Koser held a post-mortem examination of the remains of John Bly, of Watsontown. Bly, who was twenty years of age, for a long time suffered with a tumor, which grew into the very base of the brain, and occasioned his death...The most singular fact developed was that the entire brain had been hollowed out by the action of the tumor. The cavity was at least five inches in length, and was filled with pus. All that was left of the brain was a thin shell, composed of the tougher tissues where the brain matter gathers into nerves, which were less susceptible to the process of decay. When an incision was made in the shell the whole mass collapsed." We read this: "The circumstances which made the case almost unprecedented in the annals of medical science was the manner in which the patient retained his rationality and faculties under the circumstances. He had the senses of touch, taste, hearing, and smell, had very tolerable control of his locomotor muscles, could talk, and, in fact, was comparatively discommoded in no other way than by the loss of vision. His retention of memory was remarkable. He was able to memorize poems up to within two weeks of his death."
• The 500 gram cyst girl. This patient's case is reported in the paper "Primary Giant Cerebral Hydatid Cyst in an 8-year-old Girl." Doctor's discovered a giant brain cyst of 500 grams measuring 20 cm × 15 cm × 12 cm, and they said "in our search this is the largest brain hydrated cyst in the literature." This was probably more than half the size of her brain, since the average adult female brain is about 1200 grams, and since an 8-year-old female would have a brain of less than 1000 grams. Despite having so large a brain cyst there was "no history of neurological deficits" and "no changes in behavior." A month after the removal of the cyst, the patient is described as "vitally stable, thriving well, no complaints, no neurological deficits, and with the normal neurological examination." No mention is made of any mental or memory problem. 
  
• The asymptomatic man with a giant brain cyst. This patient's case is reported in the paper "Asymptomatic giant arachnoidal cyst." 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), had a 3-year history of mild migraine without aura." We are told that "neurologic examination and standardized cognitive assessment revealed normal findings." The man was found to have a giant cyst "occupying the anterior two thirds of the left hemisphere." We see a photo showing a huge hole in the person's brain, so big that it took about one third of the person's brain mass. How could you lose one third of your brain and have no symptoms, if a person's brain makes his mind? 
• 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 high-school graduate with average grades but a mostly-destroyed brain.  We read about the woman in 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." 
• The man with half a brain but superior intelligence. The newspaper here discusses the case of Bruce Lipstadt, Lipstadt had a hemispherectomy operation when he was five years old, an operation that removed the left half of his brain.  Operations of that type are only done when someone is being plagued by very severe seizures, and the seizures cannot be controlled by medication.  The operation was done because as a young boy Bruce was suffering from 10 to 12 seizures a day. We are told that despite having the left half of his brain surgically removed, Bruce can ride a bike, swim and play sports. We are told that Bruce got an A grade (the best grade) in a course on statistics at a university. We are told Bruce's speech is normal. We are told that "although not a genius, Bruce has superior intelligence." We are told that Bruce works as a traffic controller, and that next spring he will get a degree in sociology from a university. The 1976 newspaper article here gives us some more details on Bruce Lipstadt. We read that his IQ tests showed his verbal IQ to be 126, well above the average IQ of 100.
• Patient E.C.. Patient E.C. is discussed here, in a book chapter you can read online. which on page 109 tells of three cases of the removal of the left half of the brain, telling us that "speech and verbal comprehension were present immediately after left hemispherectomy in all three cases." We read nothing about any loss of knowledge or loss of episodic memories in any of these cases. In the discussion of patient E.C. we read of an adult patient who underwent a hemispherectomy that removed the left half of his brain. We read  that "immediately following hemispherectomy" the patient had an "ability to follow simple verbal commands."  We read on page 107 that "the patient spontaneously articulated words and short phrases fairly well immediately after the operation." As described in my post here, patient E.C. was given six weeks after his operation a Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and performed well, and also performed well on such a test several months after his operation. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test is effectively a test of the preservation of learned knowledge. These results indicated learned knowledge was well-preserved in patient E.C., despite the loss of half of his brain. The patient's case history constitutes evidence against the idea that memories are stored in brains. 
• The 57-year-old who described doctor's efforts to resucitate him while his heart had stopped.  The original  AWARE study authored by Sam Parnia and others did not succeed in its attempt to get people to identify images that were placed out of their sight in hospitals. But the study did report a case of a 57-year-old patient who successfully described the efforts of medical personnel to revive him while his heart was stopped. We read this: "The other, a 57 year old man described the perception of observing events from the top corner of the room and continued to experience a sensation of looking down from above. He accurately described people, sounds, and activities from his resuscitation (Table 2 provides quotes from this interview). His medical records corroborated his accounts and specifically supported his descriptions and the use of an automated external defibrillator (AED). Based on current AED algorithms, this likely corresponded with up to 3 min of conscious awareness during CA [cardiac arrest] and CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation]." The man said that a woman appeared in a high corner of the room, beckoning him to come up to her. He said that despite thinking that was impossible, he found himself up in the high corner of the room, looking down on the medical team trying to revive him. The man described specific details of the revival efforts, including the presence of a bald fat man with a blue hat, a nurse saying, “Dial 444 cardiac arrest,” his blood pressure being taken, a nurse pumping on his chest, a doctor sticking something down his throat, and blood gases and blood sugar levels being taken. Here we have a man apparently floating out of his body and viewing the efforts of medical personnel to restart his heart, something that should have been impossible if the human mind is produced by the brain. It is known that brains become electrically inactive within about 10 or 20 seconds of a person's heart stopping, and that people become unconscious only a few seconds after their heart stops. 
• Pam Reynolds. The late Pam Reynolds was a 35-year old with a large brain aneurysm when she underwent a very complicated operation that involved pumping out her blood and chilling her body temperature to only 60 degrees. Some twenty medical personnel worked on the complex operation. After the successful operation was over, Reynolds reported having a near-death experience during the operation. She reported floating out of her body, and witnessing her operation. She accurately reported details of some medical equipment that was used to cut her skull open, describing it as a “saw thing...like an electric toothbrush,” with “interchangeable blades” that were stored in “what looked like a socket wrench case.” She reported someone complaining that her veins and arteries were too small. These details were later verified. This was despite the fact that during the operation Reynolds eyes were covered throughout the operation, and her ears were plugged with earplugs delivering noise of 40 decibels and 90 decibels (not to mention that her body was chilled to a level at which consciousness should have been impossible). Reynolds said that she then encountered a tunnel vortex, saw an incredibly bright light, heard her deceased grandmother calling her, and encountered several of her deceased relatives. Reynolds says she was told by her uncle to go back through the tunnel, and to return to her body. These details were originally reported in the 1998 book Light and Death by Michael Sabom MD. That book includes diagrams of the medical equipment used to cut open Reynold's skull. They match her descriptions very well.
• Buckley's test subjects. A nineteenth century work Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism by William Gregory (professor of Chemistry at one of England's oldest universities) gives some very specific numerical details relating to clairvoyance in hypnotic trances (referred to below as "mesmeric sleep"):  "Major Buckley has thus produced conscious clairvoyance in 89 persons, of whom 44 have been able to read mottoes contained in nut-shells, purchased by other parties for the experiment. The longest motto thus read, contained 98 words. Many subjects will read motto after motto without one mistake. In this way, the mottoes contained in 4860 nut-shells have been read, some of them, indeed, by persons in the mesmeric sleep, but most of them by persons in the conscious state, many of whom have never been put to sleep. In boxes, upwards of 86,000 words have been read; 'in one paper, 371 words. Including those who have read words contained in boxes when in the sleep, 148 persons have thus read. It is to be observed that, in a few cases, the words may have been read by thought-reading, as the persons who put them in the boxes were present; but in most cases, no one who knew the words has been present, and they must therefore have been read by direct clairvoyance. Every precaution has been taken. The nuts, inclosing mottoes, for example, have been purchased of 40 different confectioners, and have been sealed up until read. It may be added, that of the 44 persons who have read mottoes in nuts by waking or conscious clairvoyance, 42 belong to the higher class of society; and the experiments have been made in the presence of many other persons. These experiments appear to me admirably contrived, and I can perceive no reason whatever to doubt the entire accuracy of the facts." 
• Alex, who did not start speaking until the left half of his brain was removed. A scientific paper describing the case says that Alex “failed to develop speech throughout early boyhood.” He could apparently say only one word (“mumma”) before his operation to cure epilepsy seizures. But then following a hemispherectomy (also called a hemidecortication) in which half of his brain was removed at age 8.5, “and withdrawal of anticonvulsants when he was more than 9 years old, Alex suddenly began to acquire speech.” We are told, “His most recent scores on tests of receptive and expressive language place him at an age equivalent of 8–10 years,” and that by age 10 he could “converse with copious and appropriate speech, involving some fairly long words.” Astonishingly, the boy who could not speak with a full brain could speak well after half of his brain was removed. The half of the brain removed was the left half – the very half that scientists tell us is the half that has more to do with language than the right half. 
  
• Patient BL: The paper "When only the right hemisphere is left: Studies in language and communication" reports on the case of a patient BL of "above normal intelligence" who underwent a left hemispherectomy at age five. Despite lacking the left half of his brain, BL "attended regular elementary and high school and graduated from college with a Bachelor's degree with a double major in business and sociology," he "played the baritone horn in a band," and worked "several years as an accountant in international business." The paper reports BL scoring normally on most of the cognitive tests he took. 
• The woman with half a brain and an IQ of 115. Her case is reported in the newspaper story here. 
• Patient EG. An article discusses her case: "When EG went in for an unrelated medical scan, she discovered she was missing her entire left temporal lobe...Despite missing a large chunk of her brain, EG was living a totally regular life... She could read normally, had a better-than-average vocabulary, and even spoke Russian as a second language."  A scientific paper describing her says, "She performed within normal range on all language assessment tasks...EG performed within normal range on both general cognitive assessments."
• The honors student (IQ=126) with only 3% to 10% of a brain. in the scientific paper "Long-Term Memory: Scaling of Information to Brain Size" by Donald R. Forsdyke of Queens University in Canada, he quotes the physician John Lorber on an honors student with an IQ of 126: "Instead of the normal 4.5 centimetre thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. The cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid. … I can’t say whether the mathematics student has a brain weighing 50 grams or 150 grams, but it’s clear that it is nowhere near the normal 1.5 kilograms." Forsdyke notes two similar cases in more recent years, one from France and another from Brazil.  Forsdyke says, "Three independent studies agree that there are, among us, people leading normal lives with approximately 5 % of the quantity of brain tissue found in others."
• Christopher who spoke 16 languages. On page 63 of the book Bright Splinters of the Mind by Beate Hermelin, we read this about a gifted subject: "Christopher can understand, talk, read, write and translate from Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Welsh." We then read about detailed tests of this subject. Cases such as that highlight the inadequacy of all neural explanations for human language abilities.   
• Stephan Ossowiecki. In the paper "An experiment with the Polish Medium Stephan Ossowiecki, which can be read here, E.J. Dingwall describes a very careful test of clairvoyance. Dingwall says that when alone by himself, he drew a crude picture of a bottle, writing on it, "The vineyards of the Rhine, Moselle and Burgundy produce excellent wine." He says he put the paper in an "opaque red paper envelope," which was "then inserted flap end first into an opaque dull black envelope, into which it fitted closely." He says, "This envelope, again unsealed, was then inserted flap end first into a brown paper envelope, into which it again fitted closely," and that "the flap of this envelope was then pasted down and a single seal affixed to the lowest part of the flap where it adhered to the envelope." He gave the envelope to another researcher, who took the sealed envelope to Stephan Ossowiecki, asking him to guess the contents before witnesses. The contents were correctly identified by Ossowiecki, without the package being opened. Dingwall (who was given back the package) states, "The envelopes appeared to be wholly intact and no evidence whatever was discernible that the packet had been opened. I had no doubt that the test was valid and that the knowledge of the contents had been ascertained by M. Ossowiecki through channels not generally recognised.... In discussing this case it is necessary to bear in mind that the result of the experiment showed, I think, quite definitely that coincidence can be wholly excluded." Similar feats were performed innumerable times in public exhibitions by the clairvoyant Alexis Didier, discussed here, who was often able to identify the contents hidden in locked or sealed boxes. 
• Mrs. Croad. The case of Mrs. Croad is told in my blog post here, which quotes at length from the original report here. Suffering from a variety of medical ailments, she was bedridden for 14 years, and reported as blind and deaf. But J. G. Davey M.D.  reported that the blind Mrs. Croad could read by touching ordinary text with her fingers, even after she had been heavily blindfolded with blindfolding including heavy cotton wadding. Davey also reported that Mrs. Croad could read the contents of letters inside sealed envelopes, and stated, "It is said also by those near and dear to her that such is Mrs. Croad's prevision that she has been known to have foretold my own visits to her ; what I mean is, that on my approach to the house she occupies and when at a distance from it, and unseen by anyone about her — in fact, not within sight— she has said, ' Dr. Davey is coming ; he will be here directly.' "  The case resembles the case of Mollie Fancher discussed next. 
• Mollie Fancher. Like Mrs. Croad, Mollie Fancher had a very bad vision problem. Fancher was described at various times as either blind or very nearly blind.  Mollie had suffered terrible injuries even worse than Mrs. Croad's, including a fall from a streetcar. Both Mrs. Croad and Mollie Fancher were bedridden, and Mollie stayed bedridden for decades. Witnesses very often reported that Mollie Fancher would announce who had arrived at her door, before she could even see who had entered (something also reported of Mrs. Croad).  Both Mollie Fancher and Mrs. Croad passed with flying colors the most stringent tests of clairvoyance while securely blindfolded. Both Mollie Fancher and Mrs. Croad went in and out of trances.  Both Mollie Fancher and Mrs. Croad had long periods of time in which they seemed to neither eat nor drink, with such an abstinence occurring for much longer periods with Mollie Fancher.  A newspaper called the Brooklyn Eagle published an account of Mollie Fancher which stated this: ""When in the quiet condition of rigidity, the patient is in a trance. Her eyes closed, the ears are dead to sound, the muscles cease to act, respiration is hardly perceptible, and once or twice a state of ecstacy indicative of mental unsteadiness has resulted. These seasons last for four days, or two hours each. When in this condition, she is powerfully clairvoyant in her faculties. She can tell the time by several watches variously set to deceive her, read unopened letters, decipher the contents of a slate, and repeat what 'Mrs. Grundy says,' by serving up the gossip of the neighborhood. She appears to possess the faculty of second sight to a remarkable degree." The Mollie Fancher case is described in my post here, and in the long book here.
• Mother Davis. The astonishing case of an old black woman named Mother Davis is told in B. F. Austin's extremely interesting book Glimpses of the Unseen, which has many very interesting similar accounts (the book can be read here).  Austin includes beginning on page 110 an account written by James L. Hughes, an inspector of public schools in Toronto, Canada. Hughes says that when he was twenty he met an old woman who looked strange, as if half-demented. The woman suddenly said, "Young man, I can tell anything you ever did or anything you want to know." Hughes started asking questions of this woman he had never before seen, and was astonished he got from her answers that were correct. The woman was able to correctly tell Hughes his last name, his father's name, his mother's name, how many sisters he had (seven), how many brothers he had (three), what he did before coming to Toronto (farming),  and what was the worst accident he had.  The old woman predicted that Hughes would become a teacher in the school he now attended, which turned out to be true, even though Hughes thought at the time that nothing could be more absurd. The woman predicted, "Before you take your tea to-night a gentleman will come to see you who will be a relation of yours by your marriage." The one man who came to Hughes before he took his tea turned out to be the cousin of the woman Hughes would marry. Hughes said that this Mother Davis "could read minds fluently," and that the accuracies of her prophecies about him were inexplicable, because "no foundation of even the most shadowy kind existed" by which she could logically base such prophecies. 
• Solomon Shereshevsky. Neuroscientists love to talk about people with a memory problem, but such neuroscientists almost never tell us about cases of exceptional memory. The reason is that such cases greatly worsen the explanatory shortfall of "brains store memories" claims, which cannot explain ordinary memory facts such as instant recall, instant learning and life-long preservations of memories, and which seem all the more "on the wrong track" when we consider exceptional memories. One such person with an exceptional memory was Solomon Shereshevsky, called "S" in the book The Mind of a Mnemonist by Alexander Romanovitch Luria. A scientific paper says this about Shereshevsky: "According to Luria, Shereshevsky could' 'easily remember any number of words and digits' and 'equally easily he memorizes whole pages from books on any subject and in any language.'  He could accurately quote information from a decade earlier, including tables of numbers and strings of nonsense words....What Luria learned was that Shereshevsky’s memory differed from that of the vast majority of individuals; time did not erode his memories. Neither did a new stimulus affect his memory of an earlier one." Similar cases of exceptional memory are described in my post here. 
• The patient of Smith and Sugar. In their paper "Development of above normal language and intelligence 21 years after left hemispherectomy," Smith and Sugar state that "Neuropsychologic follow-up studies of a 5-year-old boy who had left hemispherectomy for seizures showed that he had developed superior language and intellectual abilities." This was a boy who had the left half of his brain removed, but who ended up with "superior language and intellectual abilities."
• Patient B.M. Patient B.M. had the right half of her brain removed, in an operation called a right hemispherectomy. She  had difficulty recognizing faces, a problem called prosopagnosia. But according to a paper on her, her "intellectual and cognitive functions were otherwise normal or only slightly impaired," despite the loss of half of her brain. 
• Patient H.W. Patient H.W. is a man born without any corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. Contrary to a prediction of the "brains make minds" theory (that such a shortfall should have caused great disfunction such as two minds in a single body),  Patient H.W. led a normal life and performed very well on a wide variety of tests of intellectual and psychological function. An article on the man is entitled "This Elderly Man Was Born With His Brain Hemispheres Disconnected. Did It Affect His Life? Hardly." The relevant scientific paper is here, and its title describes the man as one with "minimal neuropsychological impairment." 
•  Patient E.B. A Wired story on this patient says, "Researchers reported the remarkable case of a boy who recovered his language abilities to near-normal levels after losing almost his entire left hemisphere at age two and a half."  He had surgery to remove almost the entire left half of his brain. But he underwent rehabilitation, and “EB's language fluency improved remarkably over the ensuing two to three years until no language problems at all were reported at school or in the family home.” Now how is that possible? If the light (consciousness and intelligence) is all coming from the 100-watt light bulb (the brain), how do you get almost 100 watts of light when you slice the light bulb in half?
• Patient CG: The 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.
• Sharon Parker.  She 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.' "

• Penfield's patient who was normal after his prefrontal lobes were removed. On page 287 of the main work by the leading brain expert Donald Hebb, Hebb tells this account of a person whose IQ and mental health increased after the person had his frontal lobes removed:

  "The first and most effective piece of evidence is the history of a patient both of whose prefrontal lobes were removed by Dr. Wilder Penfield, with results that radically changed the possibilities of surgical therapy m the frontal area Before this time, it was universally accepted that loss of both frontal poles must be followed by gross deterioration of personality and intellect. Dr. Penfield's patent completely reversed the prediction, by being psychotic before operation (when the damage was relatively small) and quite indistinguishable from a normal person afterward (when the total destruction was increased in size— with the simultaneous removal of a source of physiological disturbance).

  The history is that of a boy of sixteen whose skull was fractured, with damage to both frontal lobes, and who ш the following ten years developed severe epilepsy and became (much of the time) an irresponsible and rather dangerous charge. The condition varied, not only with the occurrence of attacks but also between attacks—apparently owing to subclinical seizures: the IQ, on the basis of an uncompleted testing on one day, was estimated to be below 70, next day a completed test gave an IQ of 84. After operation, the IQ was consistently close to 96, no evidence of intellectual loss could be found їп any one test or in the pattern of test scores as a whole, and the psychotic behavior completely disappeared. Clinically and socially he was 'normal' and was able to take full control of his own affairs on the last examination he had been doing so for more than five years. He enlisted m the army and served satisfactorily overseas for ten months until he had another fit—at which time the medical officers caught up with him and he was discharged."

• Hebb's genius missing a prefrontal lobe The leading brain authority D. O. Hebb asks this question at the beginning of his most famous work: "How can it be possible for a man to have an IQ of 160 or higher after a prefrontal lobe has been removed (Hebb, 1939), or for a woman (described by Rowe, 1937) to have an IQ of 115, a better score than two-thirds of the normal population could make, after losing the entire right half of the cortex?" We have the claim (apparently backed up by first-hand research by Hebb) that a man who had a prefrontal lobe removed had a genius IQ of 160, which is better than 98% of all people. In the same sentence he mentions another case equally striking: a woman who had above-average intelligence despite losing the cortex on the right half of her brain. 
• Patient HS4. This patient is discussed in the paper "Intrinsic Functional Connectivity of the Brain in Adults with a Single Cerebral Hemisphere.'" The paper discusses attempts to measure brain connectivity in patients who had half of their brain removed to treat very frequent seizures. The half-brain patient with the highest intelligence was patient HS4, with an IQ of 99 (according to the Supplemental Information of the paper). But this very patient had the smallest brain of the six half-brain patients. This patient HS4 had an average brain connectivity score of only .30, which is the same as one of the group of controls with normal brains, and less than the brain connectivity of the other group of controls with normal brains.   So the smartest person with half a brain (who had an IQ of 99) did not at all have any greater brain connectivity that can explain his normal intelligence with only half a brain. How can this subject HS4 have had a normal intelligence with only half a brain?  In this case, favorable brain rewiring or greater brain connectivity cannot explain the result.  

The half brain of subject HS4, IQ of 99, average brain wiring