7 May 2025
No Brainers and
Common Sense
When
this writer attended medical
school in Houston, TX, 50 years ago, Neuroscience
was highly esteemed and Joe Wood – the department
head – had huge expectations for brain and nerve
studies. Psychiatry by then was and still is
largely an offshoot of neurology. The three
disciplines were revered and imagined to be the
“hope of the future” for understanding mental
illness and producing cures for a wide swath of
human disorders – since stress is implicated in
many, many diagnoses.
Ah but, the
future has arrived and practically all the
predictions of Joe Wood and all thousands of
psychiatrists and neuroscientists have come to
nought. The simple fact is that brain-based
psychology and psychiatry are limited for a host
of reasons. Neuroscience continues to rule the two
professions, even though generations of studies
have failed to show that the mind is a product of
the brain. Some day, we will be able to grasp the
wonders of the Universal Mind, the Collective
Conscious, and then the Personal Conscious which
exist beyond the realm of the physical brain and
the material world. Minds work through brains, but
are not limited to them by any means.
How far off that
understanding may be, we dare not guess. Still,
science and medicine are beginning to move slowly
in that direction. They are already helping to
show mind as having much greater import than body
and brain. Heading in this direction, let us
consider some of the current information which
indicates the true relationship of mind to brain:
• In his book
Space, Time and Medicine, Larry Dossey
discussed the research of a British neurologist,
John Lorber, whose work questioned the premise
that “an intact cerebral cortex is even required
for normal mentation.”
Dr. Lorber
utilized computerized brain Xrays to study
hundreds of patients with hydrocephalus, a
condition in which fluid gradually replaces brain
tissue. “He discovered that many of his patients
had normal or above-normal intellectual function
even though most of the skull was filled with
fluid. Normally, humans have a cerebral cortex
measuring four and one-half CENTIMETERS in
thickness, containing 15 to 20 billion neurons. In
one patient, however, a college mathematics
student who was referred to him because his
physician suspected that his head was slightly
enlarged, the brain scan revealed a cerebral
cortex of only one MILLIMETER in thickness.
Functioning, with only a tiny rim of cortical
brain tissue of 1/45 normal thickness, this
student proved to be gifted on standard IQ testing
(he had an IQ of 126) and was normal not only
intellectually but socially.”
Dr. Dossey also
cited exceptional cases of individuals who had
entire hemispheres removed from their cerebral
cortex as treatment for intractable epileptic
seizures. These procedures are commonly followed
by permanent paralysis, speech disturbances, and
memory or reasoning deficits. Yet, there are
numbers of patients who do not react in typical
ways. They recover fully and sometimes become
truly gifted people.
• To bring
Dossey’s observations nearer in time and place, we
can recall the tragic shooting in Tucson, AZ, in
January 2011. Six were killed, and 15 injured
including US Representative Gabrielle Giffords who
was maimed with a blast at close range to her head
while she was meeting with constituents outside a
supermarket. The bullet entered near her left eye
and passed through the left side of her brain
before exiting at the back of her skull.
Both she and her
husband, now US Senator Mark Kelly, had been
hard-charging, service-oriented Americans
then – and still are. But, their lives were
already changing prior to that incident – and
traumatically changed thereafter. Even fourteen
years ago, Gabby had noted a sense of the
nastiness which seethed around her political
world, sensing it was “almost like people are
going to get violent.” And, they did. And, one
killer acted so on that fateful day.
Gabby Giffords’s
recovery and rehabilitation were considered
extraordinary. Kelly told that 95 percent of
people experiencing such wounds die immediately.
He recognized that “the brain is still a mystery,”
while Gabrielle slowly regained most of her usual
abilities.
Initially, she
suffered paralysis as well as aphasia, like many
stroke victims. Always fun-loving, quick-witted,
and smart, Gabby understands everything going on
around her. But after a dozen years, words still
don't come readily to her. It takes a lot of work.
Beyond routine
physical and speech therapy, Giffords has returned
to playing the French horn which she first started
at age 13. In recent years, she has been taking
lessons again – five days a week. Music and
singing have been definite helps for Gabby on her
long path to recovery. She has used music to help
with words – understanding and speaking them.
Music is still
inside her. Where might that be? But reading sheet
music is hard. Relearning to hold her French horn
and getting the fingerings right were challenging.
Music therapy is thought to work by inducing
“brain plasticity.” But unsurprisingly, “Just how
it works remains unclear.” Still, Gabby Giffords
keeps playing. Gabby, by Mark Kelly
• In recent days,
the story of Mora Leeb has circulated around the
internet telling that when Mora was four months
old, she began experiencing seizures. To early
outward appearances, all had been well for mother
and child until … For the first three months Mora
made her milestones: She nursed; she rolled over;
she smiled — and then a standstill. Seizures began
when she was 4 months old, barely noticeable at
first — but by February 2008 they were clustering
20 per minute, hundreds in a day.
Brain scans were
interpreted to suggest major damage to Mora’s left
hemisphere resulting in the epileptic seizures. No
explanation was given as to how the infant
developed normally for her first months with the
brain damage believed to be due to “a massive
stroke she had experienced in utero.”
Doctors tried to
control the seizures with medication, but the
drugs had little effect. In June 2008, when Mora
was 9 months old, neurosurgeons operated and
removed her damaged brain tissue – the left half
of her brain.
It was suggested
that it would be like a reset. But, progress
didn’t come easily or quickly for Mora. She began
walking at 23 months, didn’t speak in sentences
until she was 6, and she was 8 when she learned to
tie her own shoes. With much therapy and time,
Mora progressed well without half her brain until
…
Today, for this
18-year-old from South Orange, N.J., each ordinary
action Mora takes — walking, talking, reading a
recipe, dealing cards, joking — has involved a
painstaking learning process. She grew up with
only half a brain.
Still seven years
ago, Mora had a medical setback. Her seizures
returned which suggested toe medics the need for
more surgery. In August 2018, neurosurgeons went
back and removed the remaining tissue in hopes
that the seizures would stop. Mora managed to
recover quickly and was even dancing at a family
member’s wedding by December.
Mora has
continued to cope with medical complications — she
still takes anti-epileptic medication, she
receives Botox injections in her right hand, arm
and leg twice a year to keep her muscles loose and
she lives with Crohn’s disease as well.
Nearly three
years after her second surgery, in 2021, Mora
stood in front of her synagogue congregation, and
hundreds of others tuning in via Zoom, to give her
Bat Mizvah speech. “Personally, I can be described
as a ‘glass half full’ girl,” she told the crowd.
“There are challenges in my life. Things can be
difficult. As a family we know that well, but we
try to keep moving forward and hope for good times
ahead.” PEOPLE, October 2023.
• Noted
neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield wrote in The
Mystery of the Mind, “As Aristotle expressed
it, the mind is ‘attached to the body.’ The mind
vanishes when the highest brain-mechanisms cease
to function due to injury or to epileptic
interference or anesthetic drug. More than that,
the mind vanishes during deep sleep. On this
basis, one must assume that although the mind is
silent when it no longer has its special
connection to the brain, it exists in the silent
intervals and takes over control when the higher
brain-mechanism does go into action.”
Penfield went on
to say, “Because it seems to me certain that it
will always be quite impossible to explain the
mind on the basis of neuronal action within the
brain, and because it seems to me that the mind
develops and matures independently throughout an
individual's life as though it were a continuing
element, and because a computer (which the brain
is) must be programmed and operated by an agency
capable of independent understanding, I am forced
to choose the proposition that our being is to be
explained on the basis of two fundamental
elements. This, to my mind, offers the greatest
likelihood of leading us to the final
understanding toward which so many stalwart
scientists strive.”
• Nobel Prize
winning surgeon and researcher, Alexis Carrel,
concluded in his Man the Unknown that,
“Personality is rightly believed to extend outside
the physical continuum. Its limits seem to be
situated beyond the surface of the skin. The
definiteness of the anatomical contours is partly
an illusion. Each one of us is certainly far
larger and more diffuse than his body.”

image of the human mind
by
Edwin Babbitt
• Plant
physiologist Rupert Sheldrake in A New Science
of Life postulated “morphogenetic fields”
as invisible organizing fields which act across
time and space and are responsible for forms and
evolution, behavior and learning. Sheldrake
concluded that those fields “can be regarded as
analogous to the known fields of physics in that
they are capable of ordering physical changes,
even though they themselves cannot be observed
directly.”
• Candace Pert,
who performed groundbreaking research on
neuro-peptides at the National Institutes for
Mental Health, reported in Noetic Sciences
Review that “... it is possible now to
conceive of mind and consciousness as an emanation
of emotional information processing, and as such,
mind and consciousness would appear to be
independent of brain and body.”
She went on to
say, “A mind is composed of information, and it
has physical substrate that has to do with
information flowing around. Perhaps, then, mind is
the information among all these bodily parts.
Maybe mind is what holds the network together.”
Both Pert’s
fields of information and Sheldrake’s
morphogenetic fields help to explain mind and
consciousness, whether of an individual or of a
group. Minds of individuals overlap and intertwine
to become group, family, national and racial
fields of mind.
• It seems
appropriate to end by considering the idea of
cellular and tissue life in connection with
body-mind issues.
Our simple
proposition is to look at the memories that we all
carry in our own beings. It seems quite impossible
– in similar thinking to that as given by Wilder
Penfield offered above – to imagine that cells or
tissues even of the brain can in and of themselves
remember anything.
For the simple
reason that our body cells, even brain cells, are
dying off constantly to be replaced by new ones.
It is commonly held that the whole human body is
renewed evey five to seven years. Cells are dying
off and being replaced constantly – a million
every second. Neurons or brain cells have longer
life spans. But, they too are replaced during the
life of a human.
The obvious
implication is that constant change and renewal
within the body and the brain requires some
greater force for direction. Memory must therefore
be dependent upon more than body or brain tissues.
The brain is
controlled by the mind which holds the mystery and
wonder of memory.
“…
it will always be quite impossible to explain the
mind
on the basis of
neuronal action within the brain …”
Wilder Penfield
We could detail
further studies and reckonings regarding the
mind-brain relationship. Near Death Experiences,
Out-of-Body Experiences, Past Life Remembrances,
and other other phenomena can shed light on the
subject. But, sufficient has been shared to
“prove” that the mind works through the brain
rather than that the brain produces consciousness.
There is no doubt.
That
is a No Brainer and
Common Sense still
has place in the world.
Comments always welcome
at theportableschool at gmail dot com.
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