April 8, 2004

• Found this article at the Alternative Science Website.

  
  

  Is your brain really necessary?

  
  

  {Paraphrasing commences with my comments in bold}
  

  Apparently the brain is not necessary for “normal” intelligence. According to the above article, a University of Sheffield campus doctor was treating one of the students for some slight illness when he noticed that the student’s head was a little larger than normal. So of course the doctor referred the student to another doctor for further examination. I’d have liked to have been in on that discussion… Do you know I think your head’s a little big? Maybe you should see someone about that.
  

  The student in question is noted to have a normal IQ and no learning disabilities or oddness, yet a CAT-scan showed that he had virtually no brain! In fact, the student had less than 1 millimetre of cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column.
  

  The student has a condition known as hydrocephalus, which causes the cerebrospinal fluid to become dammed up inside the brain. It’s normally fatal in the first few months after birth, and even those children that survive are usually seriously handicapped.
  

  But cases where death or severe handicaps did not occur are not at all rare. Apparently there’ve been several documented cases of people living perfectly normal lives who, upon death, were autopsied and found to have this condition. In fact the Professor who examined the student has identified several hundred people with the condition who are none-the-less normal in every way. “Some of them he describes as having ‘no detectable brain’, yet they have scored up to 120 on IQ tests.” Not too shabby for someone with no brain.
  

  The question is, how do these people function without a brain? I mean, maybe the Egyptians were right and it really is gunk to be scrambled and pulled out through the sinuses as waste before mummification. Well, if it’s all waste material, that explains my headaches.
  

  Some researchers theorize that there’s so much redundancy in a normal brain that what is left in a hydrocephalic brain adapts to compensate, but since the functions of the brain have been mapped and a high degree of specialisation has been found necessary for even the most general motor functions, this doesn’t seem to be the answer. The idea that we ‘only use 10 per cent of our brain’ and so a hydrocephalic brain might be the minimum of what is necessary for proper function is a misunderstanding drawn from early cerebral research in the 1930s. At the time, the functions of large areas of the cortex could not be determined and so were considered dormant. We now know these areas are linked to important functions like speech and abstract thought.
  

  My favorite theory is that “the brain is [not] a warehouse for memories…” but “…is more like a radio receiver for tuning into the past.” According to Dr Rupert Sheldrake in his book, A New Science of Life Memory, “Memory is not a recording process in which a medium is altered to store records, but a journey that the mind makes into the past via the process of morphic resonance.”
  

  I like that… the brain is like a radio picking up the cosmic thoughts of our souls. Makes me wonder about the brain and psychic ability. Like is the brain necessarily the “organ” responsible for psychic ability. For instance, I recall reading a story a couple years ago about a Medieval Christian “saint” who was mentally handicapped but could fly. This “miracle” was basically why he was sainted BTW, not for anything he actually did or said (or had done to him).

  
  

  So maybe intelligence and psychic ability are abilities of the soul rather than phenomena controlled by some physical “organ” of the human body. Makes you think, eh?

  
  

  We’re all just meat-puppets for the soul. heh

  
  

  
  

  

  • 1:53 pm
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