The basis of this piece is physical. If a person without much brain thinks and acts normally, something other than the brain is at work.
"The brain has a backup system": Why people missing much of their brain can miraculously recover
I read this piece in Reuters Science about a French civil servant who was 44 years old. He went to the hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. The doctors performed a lot of scans, and what they found was that he had hardly any brain tissue.
His head was full of cerebral spinal fluid. [The doctor] in Marseilles was quoted as saying the images were most unusual. The brain was virtually absent. The patient was a married father of two children. This is what really got me going. The patient was apparently leading a normal life, despite having cranium filled with spinal fluid and very little brain tissue. When I read that, I started looking into the literature and I soon found that there were a lot of reports and children, for example, who have had hemispherectomies, meaning that one half of their brain was removed because of epilepsy.
I looked also at adults who have had large parts of their brain removed. In most cases, not all of them, but a large majority of cases, it did not seem to affect their intelligence or their cognition, their thought processes or behavior. When I thought about that, it occurred to me that if people who lack a large of the brain can function normally, or even relatively normally, there must exist some kind of a backup system like we have in our computers that somehow makes up for what's lacking and will send messages to the brain — whatever is left of it — so that the person can function normally.
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That's also what I'm saying about the embodied mind. That it is all. It's really a network that is constantly vibrating and changing. You can't say it's the brain, or you can't say it's the heart. It's the whole body.
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"The brain has a backup system": Why people missing much of their brain can miraculously recover
I read this piece in Reuters Science about a French civil servant who was 44 years old. He went to the hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. The doctors performed a lot of scans, and what they found was that he had hardly any brain tissue.
His head was full of cerebral spinal fluid. [The doctor] in Marseilles was quoted as saying the images were most unusual. The brain was virtually absent. The patient was a married father of two children. This is what really got me going. The patient was apparently leading a normal life, despite having cranium filled with spinal fluid and very little brain tissue. When I read that, I started looking into the literature and I soon found that there were a lot of reports and children, for example, who have had hemispherectomies, meaning that one half of their brain was removed because of epilepsy.
I looked also at adults who have had large parts of their brain removed. In most cases, not all of them, but a large majority of cases, it did not seem to affect their intelligence or their cognition, their thought processes or behavior. When I thought about that, it occurred to me that if people who lack a large of the brain can function normally, or even relatively normally, there must exist some kind of a backup system like we have in our computers that somehow makes up for what's lacking and will send messages to the brain — whatever is left of it — so that the person can function normally.
...
That's also what I'm saying about the embodied mind. That it is all. It's really a network that is constantly vibrating and changing. You can't say it's the brain, or you can't say it's the heart. It's the whole body.
...