When a campus doctor from Sheffield was treating one of its students for a minor ailment, he noticed that his head was slightly larger than normal. The doctor referred the student to Emeritus Professor of neurology, Dr John Lorber, for further examination. The student in question was academically bright, he had an IQ of 126 and a PHD in mathematics. When he was examined by a cat scan however, Professor Lorber discovered there was virtually no brain.
Instead of two hemispheres filling the cranial cavity some 4.5 centimetres deep, the student had less than 1 millimetre of cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column. The student was suffering from hydrocephalus, the condition in which the cerebrospinal fluid, instead of circulating around the brain and entering the bloodstream, becomes dammed up inside. The condition is normally fatal in the first months of childhood. Even if the individual survives he or she is usually seriously handicapped. Somehow the student lived a perfectly normal life and achieved an honours degree in mathematics.
This case is not as rare as it seems, in 1970 a New Yorker died at the age of 35, He had left school with no academic achievements, but worked as a janitor and became a popular figure in his neighbourhood. The autopsy to determine the cause of his premature death revealed that he too had virtually no brain. Professor John Lorber has identified several hundred similar cases, some of them he describes as having “No detectable brain” yet they score up to 120 on IQ tests. Dr Patrick Wall is a professor of anatomy at University College London, he says “There are scores of similar cases, they litter the medical journals and they go back a long, long way. He also says “The important thing about Professor Lorber is he has done a long series of systematic scanning, rather than dealing with just anecdotes. He has gathered a remarkable set of data and he challenges us to explain it”
So how do we explain it ? How do we explain the presence of consciousness and the presence of the mind in people with no brains ? If, according to mechanistic science, consciousness is an epi phenomenom of the brain, why was consciousness present in the lives of people with no brains ? If, according to materialistic science, thoughts are produced by the brain as gastric juices are produced by the stomach, how does a student with “No detectable brain” achieve an IQ of 126 and a PHD in mathematics ?
In his book “the scalpel and the soul” Dr Allen Hamilton, a Harvard trained brain surgeon for 30 years says the following “Theres a technique used on a handful of awkward cases, they put the patient on a heart pump and then cool down the blood. The heart flutters and stops, there is no blood flow to the brain and no electrical activity. Now you can operate on a significant blood vessel while no blood is flowing through it. Once the procedure is finished and you realise you are within the twenty minutes time limit, everyone breathes a sigh of relief, then the team gets ready to slowly warm the patient up”.
“Sometimes we find some banter amongst the staff. One nurse said she was getting engaged, they had gone to this particular restaurant, they had gotten a ring at a particular store, ect. When the patient woke up she reported the entire conversation, while her heart was stopped, while her brain had no activity, she somehow remembered that conversation and that is scientifically impossible. If the brain is essentially dead, how can it make a memory ? A case like that really shakes you up, you,re getting very close to the holy grail. Is this what we mean by a soul ? Is this what we mean by an entity that can exist seperate from the physical body and the brain ?”.
“People think of science as rolling back the mystery of God, I see science as slowly creeping towards the mystery of God. Here i have an example of consciousness existing outside of the body and any physical parameters we assosciate with somebody being conscious. That really changes how i look at what happens when the functions that we assosciate with life disappear”.
Dr Allen Hamilton is not the only Harvard trained neurosurgeon to question the materialistic assumptions regarding the nature of life. Harvard trained neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander gave the following account :
“At around five o’clock on the morning of November the 10th 2008, i awoke with the early symptoms of what proved to be an extremely severe case of bacterial meningitis. As i wrote here three weeks ago, and as i narrate in my book Proof of Heaven, over the next several hours my entire cerebral cortex shut down. The part of my brain responsible for all higher neurological function went every bit as dark as the lower portion of New York City did during hurricane sandy. Yet in spite of the complete absence of neural activity in all but the deepest, most primitive portions of my brain, my identity, my sense of self, did not go dark. Instead, i underwent the most staggering experience of my life, my consciousness traveling to another level, or dimension, or world”.
“Since telling my story here, I’ve been amazed and profoundly gratified at how powerfully it has resonated with people all over the world. But I’ve also weathered considerable criticism, in large part from people who are appalled that i, a brain surgeon, could possibly make the claim that i experienced what i did. i can’t say i’m surprised. As a scientist, i know that the consensus of my tribe is that the self is created through the electrochemical activity of the brain. For most neurosurgeons and most doctors generally, the body produces the mind, and when the body stops functioning, the mind stops, just like a picture projected on a screen does if the projector is unplugged”.
“So when i announced to the world that during my seven days of coma i not only remained fully conscious but journeyed to a stunning world of beauty and peace and unconditional love, i knew i was stirring up a very volatile pot. Critics have maintained that my near-death experience, like similar experiences others before me have claimed, was a brain-based delusion cobbled together by my synapses only after they had somehow recovered from the blistering weeklong attack. This is certainly the assessment i would have made myself, before my experience. When the higher-order thought processes overseen by the cortex are interrupted, there is inevitably a period, as the cortex gets slowly back online, when a patient can feel deeply disoriented, even outright insane. As i write in Proof of Heaven, I’d seen many of my own patients in this period of their recovery, it’s a harrowing sight from the outside”.
“Most near-death experiences (NDE) are the result of momentary cardiac arrest. The heart stops pumping blood to the brain, and the brain, deprived of oxygen, ceases being able to support consciousness. But that, as I’d have been the first to point out before my own experience, doesn’t mean the brain is truly dead. That’s why many doctors feel that the term “near-death experience” is essentially a misnomer. Most people who had them were in bad shape, but they weren’t really near death”.
“But i was. My synapses, the spaces between the neurons of the brain that support the electrochemical activity that makes the brain function were not simply compromised during my experience, they were stopped. Only isolated pockets of deep cortical neurons were still sputtering, but no broad networks capable of generating anything like what we call “consciousness.” The e coli bacteria that flooded my brain during my illness made sure of that. My doctors have told me that according to all the brain tests they were doing, there was no way that any of the functions including vision, hearing, emotion, memory, language, or logic could possibly have been intact. That’s why, just as i now no longer doubt the existence of the world of expanded consciousness that NDE subjects, mystics, meditators, and countless other people have described for centuries, i also feel that my experience adds something new to those stories. It supplies a definitive new form of evidence that consciousness can exist beyond the body”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpjX9aHcjAo
“It seems to me pretty plain there is a third thing in the universe – consciousness – which i cannot see to be matter, force or any conceivable modification of either”. Biologist Thomas Huxley.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Max Planck.
“We can admittedly find nothing in physics or chemistry which has even a remote bearing on consciousness, yet all of us know there is such a thing simply because we have it ourselves. Hence consciousness must be part of nature or more generally reality. Which means that quite apart from the laws laid down in quantum theory, we must also consider laws of quite a different kind”. Nobel prize winner Niels Bohr.
“It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world leads to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality” Physicist, Nobel Laurette Eugene Wigner.
“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Erwin Schrödinger.
“Existence or consciousness is the only reality. Consciousness plus waking, we call waking. Consciousness plus sleep, we call sleep. Consciousness plus dream, we call dream. Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go. The screen is real, the pictures are mere shadows on it. Ramana Maharshi.”
http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf
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