On October 12, 1994, Vicky Wilmore, a ten-year-old girl in Manchester, England, complained of a headache. When it subsided she started writing letters and numbers upside down and backwards. Although Vicky could read what she wrote perfectly well, nobody else could, which caused her to cry in the classroom from frustration and the teasing of her friends. Several experts evaluated her, but none of them could make a diagnosis. Over the next eleven months Vicky’s handwriting got worse, eventually degenerating into illegible lines and squiggles. One of her pleasures was watching her favorite soccer team, Manchester United, on television. When they played on September 27, 1995, she got so excited she leaped out of her chair, fell back, and banged her head on the coffee table. The next day she could read and write properly again. Dr. Isabella Tweedie, a senior medical consultant, described her cure as incredible and said, “I have never come across anything like it before and neither has anyone that I know of.”[i]
In April 2010, a case was reported in which a 13-year-old Croatian girl awoke from a coma speaking fluent German. The girl, from the town of Knin in the Dalmatian hinterland, has just begun studying German at school and had been reading German books and watching German television to improve her skills, her parents said, but she was by no means fluent. But on awakening from coma, she was unable to speak her native Croatian, but was able to communicate perfectly in German. Various experts who examined her are baffled about what caused the flip in language.[ii]
It is likely that when these cases are fully investigated, conventional explanations will be found that relate to disturbances in the brain’s anatomy and physiology. But other challenges to the assumption that the brain is the controller of consciousness are really serious. In an article provocatively titled, “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?” British neurologist John Lorber questions whether an intact cerebral cortex is needed for normal mentation. Lorber did CT scans on hundreds of individuals with hydrocephalus. He found that many of them had normal or above-normal intellectual function even though most of the skull was filled with cerebrospinal fluid instead of brain tissue. Humans normally have a cerebral cortex measuring four and one-half centimeters thick, containing around 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 only one millimeter thick. Functioning with only a tiny rim of cortical brain tissue of around 2 percent normal thickness, this student proved to have an IQ of 126. He was not only gifted intellectually, he was normal socially as well. [iii]
One of our missions at Explore is to question the conventional assumptions about the nature of consciousness. We frequently publish rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific studies dealing with the remote, nonlocal actions of consciousness that often referred to as parapsychology or psi. These often involve human intention, and frequently are relevant to healing. We believe neuroscience is far from an understanding of the origins and nature of consciousness. Others agree, such as physicist Nick Herbert, who says, “Science’s biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.”[iv] And as the theoretical biologist and complex-systems researcher Stuart Kauffman puts it, “Nobody has the faintest idea what consciousness is…. I don’t have any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the philosophers of mind.”[v]
Follow Explore as we probe the mysteries of consciousness.
~ Larry Dossey, MD
Executive Editor, Explore
References
Jones, Tim. Girl’s bump cures mirror writing. London Times, December 7, 1995. Also: Mirror writing flips after bang on the head. Fortean Times. May 1996; 86:6.
Croatian teenager wakes from coma speaking fluent German. Telegraph.co.uk. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/croatia/7583971/Croatian-teenager-wakes-from-coma-speaking-fluent-German.html. April 12, 2010. Accessed April 13, 2010.
Lorber J. Is your brain really necessary? Science. 1980; 210:1232-1234.
Herbert N. Quantum Reality. New York, NY: Anchor/Doubleday; 1987: 249.
Kauffman S. God enough. Interview of Stuart Kauffman by Steve Paulson. Salon.com. http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2008/11/19/stuart_kauffman/index1.html. Accessed January 30, 2010.
rod altmann
September 18, 2010
I have a niece whose son is dying from a degenerative brain disease I have watched him lose all his functions but “he” is still there.Most of his brain is dead but his conscious is still there.
Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
October 26, 2010
Thank you for your comment.
There are many reasons to believe that consciousness is not produced by the brain and may survive the death of the brain and body, as I implied. For instance, as many people approach death they sometimes describe a near-death experience with stunning clarity and detail, and when they recover they retain complex memories of the event — all at a time when the brain is profoundly malfunctioning, and sometimes when there is no detectable brain activity at all. If consciousness were completely dependent on the brain, this should not be possible. For a further detailed discussion of the possible survival of consciousness, see the just-published book by Chris Carter, ”Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death.”
— Larry Dossey, MD