When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One
The operation known as hemispherectomy -- where half the brain is removed—sounds too radical to ever consider, much less perform. In the last century, however, surgeons have performed it hundreds of times for disorders uncontrollable in any other way. Unbelievably, the surgery has no apparent effect on personality or memory.
(Via Peter Watts' blog.)
Colin Bennett's "Politics of the Imagination" (a critical biography of Charles Fort) contains several intriguing accounts of functioning humans posthumously discovered to have effectively no brain.
If true, what's running the body? Can our "software" be incorporeal and, if so, why in some cases and not others?
4 comments:
Colin Bennett's "Politics of the Imagination" (a critical biography of Charles Fort) contains several intriguing accounts of functioning humans posthumously discovered to have effectively no brain.
Personally, I think some of these accounts are basically just urban legends.
--WMB as Anon
WMB? I'da thought you'd be the last person to disbelieve that; always thought you were into that "consciousness is more than the brain" thing?
- razorsmile anonypost
razor -- Well, consciousness like, you know, kind of NEEDS a brain to "run" on, at least for tuning in to the material plane. Pretty much the same way my Windows XP operating system NEEDS my home computer to run on. (But one would not EQUATE Windows XP WITH my home computer, now would one?) What I tend to rant about is the false IDENTIFICATION of mind and brain that seems endemic to the scientific establishment that purports to be studying either/both. (Whew! It's too early in the day for this whole philosophy thing!) But, BTW, yes I do think consciousness can exist independently of a physical brain, it just can't walk around and yak on a cell phone while doing so.
The reading I've encountered on the matter suggests a third possibility - that we simply need a lot less brain than we think we do. To use your computational analogy, Windows XP can run comfortably on a system from, say, 2000.
Where the analogy breaks down is in the 'installation' process i.e. when and how it occurs.
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