BRAIN FEVER

As a theory of everything The Brain has definitely won the Gold Medal in this year’s Memes Olympics. Everybody’s got the brain on the brain  – if it’s not the brain, it’s the genes that’s the fashionable theory of everything. Neuroscience has it all licked, or soon will have. It will not be long before everything about human nature is known and treatable.

Promises, Promises, promises !

 Your actual scientist may not say this much, but he allows the public to be blinded with science.

The brain is this miracle computer in your head with a hundred billion neurons that manages everything: perception, language, memory, emotions, planning, learning, social interaction etc; and each part of the brain has its allotted function. The external world is not at all what it seems – its all a vast phantasmagoria promulgated by your brain. A person who is brain dead may appear alive – there may be a heartbeat, they may look like they're breathing, their skin may still be warm to the touch – but they are dead. So runs the last word in medical science.

But what about the case of a man with hydrocephalus (water on the brain). His brain had shrunk to a thin sheet of tissue due to a build up of fluid in his scull, reports Dr. Lionel Feuillet of Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille. Intelligent tests showed that the patient had a IQ of 75.  The British neurologist John Lorber was tempted to ask if the brain was really necessary. ‘He scanned the brains of more than 600 people with hydrocephalus and found that about 60 had more than 95% of the cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Some were seriously retarded, but others were more or less normal, and some had IQs of well over 100. One young man who had an IQ of 126 and a first class degree in mathematics, a student from Sheffield University, had ‘virtually no brain at all’.

Some neurologists, clinging to their place in the sun, have suggested that the brain is marvelously adaptable. But one has to ask how is it possible for a brain that isn’t there to be adaptable ?

By rights that Sheffield University student shouldn’t have been able to recognise his own mother, never mind get a degree in mathematics. No, something is seriously wrong with our materialistic assumptions about human beings.

‘Cases such as these undermine established beliefs about the relationship between the human brain and consciousness and so are largely ignored by mainstream medical science. ¹

Rupert Sheldrake writes that there is no evidence for the materialist claim that the mind is nothing more than the activity of the brain. ‘No one has ever seen a thought or an image inside someone else’s brain or inside his or her own brain. When we look around us, the images of things we see are outside us, not in our heads. Direct experience offers no support for the extraordinary claim all experiences are inside the brain. Direct experience is not irrelevant to the nature of consciousness:  it is consciousness’. 2

What difference does it make?

Quite a lot when you begin to regard yourself, not just as a physical organism, not just as a lump of meat – but primarily as a psychological being.

¹   http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/science/is_the_brain_really_necessary.htm

²   Sheldrake, R. The Science Delusion. Coronet, 2012.  pp 214