Erring Experts #15

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making. 

Erring Experts #14

 Here is the latest in a series of short videos I am making. 

Neuroscientists Often Sound Like They Never Seriously Studied Psychical Research

Serious scientific research into paranormal phenomena and mysterious facets of the human mind has gone on for at least about two centuries. Such research has gone on since at least the year 1826, the beginning of the French Royal Academy of Medicine's five-year inquiry into the phenomena of hypnotism, which was then called Mesmerism, artificial somnambulism and animal magnetism. The literature documenting such investigations is vast, and includes the writings of scientists such as Alfred Russel Wallace (co-founder of the theory of evolution) and Sir William Crookes, one of the most accomplished physicists of the 19th century. But amazingly today's scientists often sound they are ignorant about all of this careful work that was done.  An example is an essay this year by neuroscience researcher Marc Wittmann, one with the title "Scientists Are Finally Taking Altered States of Consciousness Seriously." 

The title of that essay gives you the extremely wrong idea that scientific research into altered states of consciousness is something that has only recently begun.  Such a narrative is a false one, for two reasons. The first reason is that altered states of consciousness (such as in hypnotism and the trances of mediums) have been abundantly studied by researchers for about two hundred years.  Among some highlights were:

• The astronomer Camille Flammarion's monumental three-volume work Death and Its Mystery (which you can read here, here and here);
• Flammarion's also monumental opus The Unknown;
• Catherine Crowe's long book The Night Side of Nature;
• The often cited work two-volume Phantasms of the Living by Gurney, Podmore and Myers, which you can read here and here;
• Natural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance by James Esdaille MD, written by a doctor who was very successful in getting very large numbers of patients to be pain-free during surgery without anesthesia (using only hypnosis);
• Extra-sensory perception after sixty years; a critical appraisal of the research in extra-sensory perception by Joseph Rhine, J. B. Pratt and others; 
• The very long two-volume work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death by Frederic Myers, which you can read here and here;
• From the Unconscious to the Conscious by Gustave Geley;
• Researches into the Phenomena of Modern Spiritualism by Sir William Crookes, one of the most accomplished physicists of the nineteenth century (see here and here and here for related writing by the same author);
• Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism, by William Gregory M.D. professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh University,  a book abundantly documenting the reality of clairvoyance, as discussed here; 
• New Frontiers of the Mind by J. B. Rhine, the foremost twentieth century researcher on ESP;
• After Death -- What? by Cesare Lombroso;
• Thirty Years of Psychical Research by Charles Richet, a Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine;
• Out-of-the-Body Experiences by Robert Crookall;
• More Astral Projections by the same author, containing some fascinating cases I discuss here;
• The Seeress of Provost by physician Justinus Kerner, an astonishing case history described here; 
• An Introduction to the Study of Animal Magnetism by the Baron Dupotet de Sennevoy, a book that abundantly testifies to the reality of clairvoyance during hypnotic trances; 
• The "Report on Spiritualism" by the Dialectical Society of London, a document of more than 400 pages containing some of the most shocking and interesting testimony ever given (the contents of which are discussed here); 
• Supernormal Faculties in Man by Eugene Osty, one of the most carefully documented accounts of clairvoyance, including the very interesting case discussed here;
• The Celestial Telegraph by Louis Alphonse Cahagnet, a book notable for its report of extreme clairvoyant or mediumistic skill in Adele Magnot, as I describe in my post here; 
• Man and His Relations by Samuel Byron Brittan, a very long and little-known classic of parapsychology with contents described here; 
• Glimpses of the Unseen by B. F. Austin, a 500+ page book documenting a great variety of paranormal experiences;
•  The 633-page book "Psychical and Supernormal Phenomena, Their Observation and Experimentation" by Dr. Paul Joire, which you can read here (it includes the extremely interesting case I discuss here);
• The Watseka Wonder by E.W. Stevens,  a contemporary account of one of the most notable cases in the history of the paranormal, discussed here; 
• Psychic Science: An Introduction and Contribution to the Experimental Study of Psychical Phenomena by Emile Boirac, which you can read  here;
• Forty Years of Psychic Research by Hamlin Garland, which you can read here;
• "Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn enigma : an authentic statement of facts in the life of Mary J. Fancher, the psychological marvel of the nineteenth century,"  which can be read here. 

Besides these books there are innumerable periodical publications between 1850 and 1950 documenting scientific observations of altered states of consciousness and mysterious psychic phenomena.  The site www.iapsop.com is a great site for looking into such periodicals. Some of the main periodicals published were:

• The Journal and Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. You can read the editions (many of which were book-length) from 1884 to 1950 using the page here or using the link here. 
• The Zoist, a scientific journal devoted to investigations of hypnotic phenomena, published between 1843 and 1856, which you can read using the page here. 
• The Spiritualist, a publication published between 1869 and 1882.  The pages of this publication would very often include the most detailed observational records of mysterious psychical phenomena (often involving altered states of consciousness).  The accounts would often be written by scientists or physicians, or by laymen who were following rules of observation more careful and commendable than are typically followed by those writing scientific papers today (rules such as telling exactly who observed something, where the observation occurred, and the exact date of the observation, important details typically omitted from scientific papers published these days). You can read editions of this publication using the page here.  Some of the more interesting accounts are summarized in my posts  here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
• The Annals of Psychical Science, which published for several years, and can be read here. 

There is another reason why the insinuation of Witttmann's article (that scientific research into altered states of consciousness is something that has only recently become serious) is a false narrative.  That reason is that there has been no great blossoming in recent years of research into altered states of consciousness. There continues to be all-too-little research into altered states of consciousness and anomalous mental experiences. Psychology and neuroscience continue to be dominated by attempts to back up the misguided dogmas prevailing in the belief communities of neuroscientists and psychologists, particularly the belief that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of human memories. Research is still dominated by a senseless "nothing spooky allowed" rule. 

Wittmann tries to back up his "only recently" erroneous narrative of "scientists are finally starting to take altered states of consciousness seriously" by first giving us a very poorly chosen example. He cites some research by Olaf Blanke, specifically Blanke's 2002 paper "Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions." Wittmann makes this inaccurate claim: "Under experimental conditions, Blanke triggered an out-of-body experience in a female neurological patient at the University Hospital in Geneva."  No, a careful look at the study shows it provides no good evidence that any such thing was done. 

The 2002 paper has some quotes by a subject in whom the authors had brain-zapped with electricity, by inserting electrodes in her brain. The authors have attempted to portray this as evidence of an artificially induced out-of-body experience. But the only sentence that the paper quotes from the subject is one that does not indicate a full out-of-body experience. That sentence is this: "I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk." That sounds like some weird electricity-induced perception anomaly that is not properly described as an out-of-body experience. During an out-of-body experience a person will typically report leaving his body and seeing his entire body (not just the legs and lower trunk) from outside of the body. Eager to report some experimental induction of an out-of-body experience, Blanke seems to have taken some account that does not match those of out-of-body experiences, and called that an out-of-body experience.  Blanke make this claim: "Two further stimulations induced the same sensation, which included an instantaneous feeling of 'lightness' and 'floating' about two metres above the bed, close to the ceiling." Since this is not an actual full-sentence quote from the subject, it has very little value as evidence. A second-hand account of a person's weird experience during brain zapping (by some other person who did not have that experience) is pretty worthless as evidence. What would we have read from a transcript of what the subject said, one including any questions the subject was asked? We have no idea. 

Reading a transcript of the interviews that went on in a similar but later experiment (done by other researchers) involving zapping people's brains with electricity, I found no good evidence that any genuine "out-of-body experience" had been produced. What I did find was abundant evidence of researchers improperly using "loaded questions" or "leading questions" that seemed designed to elicit from subjects (by the power of suggestion) some kind of account sounding a little like an out-of-body experience.  Is that what went on in the paper by Blanke that Wittmann referred to? We can't tell, because Blanke did not  publish any interview transcript that would allow us to tell what the subject said, and whether the subject's answers were responses to "leading" questions or "loaded questions." Without such a transcript, Blanke's paper has very little value as evidence. 

So the very paper that Wittmann cites as evidence for scientists "finally taking altered states of consciousness seriously" is no such thing. It's just another example of scientists following bad research methods while engaging in shoddy low-effort attempts to debunk reports of extraordinary human experiences.   Wittmann then makes this claim:

"But what has enabled such a shift in scientific approach, whereby these 'speculative'  phenomena more and more are being examined by mainstream researchers? Perhaps it is thanks to a new generation of researchers, who completed their education in a society — reflected in its universities — that is moving toward greater social and psychological openness."

There is no evidence that there has been such a shift.  We are still in blundering and blind age of psychology and neuroscience, in which research is dominated by Questionable Research Practices, and research into the paranormal and anomalous mental phenomena receives all too little attention.  Wittmann then makes this strange claim:

"Scientific dogmas and attitudes to life are scarcely ever changed through rational argument. Such shifts require life-changing experiences, of the 'road to Damascus' kind, that affect the researcher emotionally."

No, that isn't true. By very many long hours of scholarly research involving burying your nose in the relevant works, a person's belief in "scientific dogmas" (really just the dogmas of scientists) can be changed.  Wittmann's quote above sounds like some excuse for failing to do the work needed to seriously study the human mind.  It's a lame excuse.  People who keep on repeating the unwarranted dogmas they were taught in college, and who fail to do the study they should have done that would have caused them to doubt such dogmas are not excused for their decades of parroting the tall tales of academia on the excuse that they failed to have a "road to Damascus" life-changing experience. 

Wittmann ends his article discussed above with this triumphal note of book pitching:

"I have brought together empirical findings from various branches of the sciences to form a whole. From this emerges a clear picture of the psychological and neuronal foundations of our time consciousness, as it is linked to our consciousness of self." 

There is no neuronal foundation of our time consciousness.  Nothing in a brain can explain how you can tell the difference between ten minutes passing and ten hours passing.  Wittmann's paper "The inner sense of time: how the brain creates a representation of duration" fails to discuss any neuroscience findings that back up the claim that "the brain creates a representation of duration."  It's just yet another in the endless number of cases of psychologists or neuroscientists making groundless claims to have seen non-genetic  "representations" in brains that have no actual evidence of any representations other than DNA or genetic representations of amino acids.  

Brains really do have one type of  representation, a type that involves a system whereby particular triple combinations of nucleotide base pairs represent particular types of amino acids. There is no good evidence that any other type of representation exists in the brain. The idea that the brain would have a representation of a minute or an hour makes no sense, as such time units are arbitrary constructs of human society, constructs only a few thousand years old (in contrast to brains, which have not changed in structure for tens of thousands of years). Wittmann attempts to sell us on some implausible idea that there are something like water clocks in your brain, stating this:

"In the ‘dual klepsydra model’ (DKM)14, subjective duration is represented by the states of inflow–outflow units, which function as leaky integrators (FIG. 1). These units can be thought to function like water clocks (klepsydra is the Greek for water clock), with water flowing in at a constant rate and simultaneously flowing out (the ‘leakage’) at a rate proportional to the momentary accumulated state. The state of the integrator is thus a nonlinear (climbing) function of physical time." 

Once again, we seem to have a case of scientist pareidolia, in which a scientist seems to see some things that are not really there, but which he was hoping to find, rather like believers in animal ghosts eagerly scanning the clouds, and finding some cloud shapes that they think look like the shapes of animals.  But in this case, it's not someone saying he sees animals in the clouds, but someone saying he sees something like water clocks in the brain. 

See my widely read post here ("There Is No Evidence of a Neural Explanation for Out-of-Body Experiences")  for a discussion of quite a few papers that claim to provide some scientific explanation or neural explanation or clue in regard to out-of-body experiences. None of the papers sheds any real light on this topic.  In that post and the post here, I discuss many cases of misleading statements or shoddy methods in papers purporting to have a neural or natural explanation for out-of-body experiences or  near-death experiences. 

I often read neuroscientists making untrue claims that sound like claims that would only be made by someone who failed to seriously study the literature on psychical research. The failure of most neuroscientists to adequately study minds and human mental phenomena is something that undermines their credibility when making claims that brains make minds.  Examine the course requirements needed to get a master's degree in neuroscience and a neuroscience PhD. You will typically find that it involves almost no study of psychology. And given all of the taboos of modern psychology professors, who follow a "nothing spooky allowed" rule that excludes many important phenomena from being adequately discussed, studying psychology in a university would only give you a fraction of the knowledge about human mental experiences that you should have before claiming to know where human minds come from. The topic of human minds and human mental experiences is a topic of oceanic depth,  with many strange bays, gulfs and rivers that you will find properly examined only in books and publications on psychical research and paranormal phenomena.  A typical neuroscientist is someone who has not swum very long and deeply in such an ocean.  So why should such a person be regarded as someone qualified to lecture us on how our minds arise? 

Neuroscientists typically fail to study the red part in the diagram below, offering a lame excuse of "nothing spooky allowed!"

Erring Experts #12

 Here is the latest in a series of short videos I am making. 

You Would Never Guess From Her Videos That She Has No Frontal Lobes

In previous posts such as "Preservation of Mind and Memories After Removal of Half a Brain" and "Cases of High Mental Function Despite Large Brain Damage," I have discussed at great length quite a few cases of people whose minds or memories functioned well despite very heavy brain damage.  These included cases such as these:

• 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. 
• 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."
• 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. 
• 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? 
• 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. 
• 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."
• 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. 
• Brown and Vahidassr's Case: The case was reported by these two in a paper with the misleading title "The Man Who Lost (Part) of His Mind." The paper discusses an 84-year-old without  mentioning any mental problems at all, conflicting with their title. The abnormality they report is that man had lost almost half of his brain, with an air cavity replacing the lost tissue. Despite this loss, no cognitive difficulty is reported, and we hear that except for some muscle weakness "there was no confusion, facial weakness, visual or speech disturbance, and he was feeling otherwise well," and that he was "independent with physical activities of daily living."
• 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

I recently learned of another case of this type. The case is particularly interesting because it helps to discredit the claim that the frontal lobes of the brain are necessary for language and thinking.  The case is reported in the paper "Early bilateral and massive compromise of the frontal lobes."  We read about an amazing case of an 8-year-old girl with good mental skills despite having basically no frontal lobes of the brain. We see an MRI scan showing a gigantic black empty region in the brain corresponding to missing frontal lobes.

We read that a brain scan at age three revealed this:

"GC's first report of frontal compromise at age three. MRI scans revealed no structures in the frontal lobe, covered with cerebrospinal fluid. Weighed-T1 MRI scans showed no recognizable frontal structures, expect for a small portion of the ventral frontal cortex. The mesencephalon, pons, and medulla oblongata were present, and so were all other lobes and the cerebellum."  

We read that a brain scan of the girl at age 8 showed basically the same results, with at most only a tiny of the frontal lobes existing. 

Under a heading of "Neurological and neuropsychological assessment" we read that "she could describe sensory and affective experiences, and reacted to environmental events with apparent emotional and cognitive congruency (e.g., pleasure, tiredness, playfulness, anger, and basic symbolization  Supplementary Video 1, Supplementary Video 2)." The links take us to a page of videos of the young girl. We see her seeming to act pretty much like a normal girl of her age. I recommend watching all of the short videos on the page. The girl with basically no frontal lobes stands, dances, seems to speak normally, and responds to requests to touch parts of her body, and show how she brushes her teeth. The person asking the questions to the girl speaks very rapidly, but the girl seems to have no difficulty understanding the questions, and the girl makes appropriate verbal and manual responses.  Asked to point to the questioner's thumb, the girl points to the right spot. Asked to point to the girl's eyes, the girl points to the right spot. Asked where she would wear a pair of glasses, the girl points to her eyes. Asked where she would wear a pair of shoes, she points to her feet. The girl is able to distinguish between herself and a fantasy character (Minnie Mouse), and says that she is not Minnie (Video 9). 

We hear in the text of the paper vague mentions about various types of "deficits," but we seem to get very little in the way of  specifics. None of the nine videos of the girl seem to show any signs of cognitive deficits. 

We see below a visual of the girl's brain, from Supplementary Video 11:

A much better title for the paper would have been "Good cognitive performance despite loss of the frontal lobes."  Why is that when neuroscientists discover cases that contradict their dogmas, that they report such cases using titles that fail to alert us of the important finding in conflict with their dogmas? It's as if they were trying as hard as possible to make such "inconvenient truths" as hard to discover as possible. Also, the authors have used language in their abstract that fails to alert any readers of this important case. Rather than referring to an absence of the frontal lobes (as they do in the body of the paper), they merely refer in the abstract to "nearly complete affectation of bilateral frontal structures," as if they were trying to prevent people from discovering this case that should shock a neuroscientist to the core. 

Our neuroscientists keep telling us that higher cognitive capabilities such as abstract thought and self-consciousness come from the frontal lobes of the brain. The case reported above shows that such a claim is untrue.  For many other reasons for rejecting such a claim, read my post here.  Referring to removal of brain tissue (resection), the paper here states that " intellectual or memory decrements are seldom found after frontal resections."

Erring Experts #9

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making. 

Erring Experts #7

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making: