More Mind and Brain…
The last thing man will understand in nature is the performance of his brain
John C Eccles
Just to add to the bewilderment of how the brain/mind works, perhaps we should spend a few moments on the mystery of vision.
We see through the eyes. Light bounces off things and enters our eyes. It passes through the lens, registers on the retina, and is then converted into electrical signals at an estimated rate of ~9Mbps: a decent broadband rate. Note: ‘visible light’, is converted into invisible electrical pulses. The pulses reach the visual cortex (the most massive system in the human brain) where it is processed. How can the brain, which is only a bag of chemicals, convert invisible electrical impulses into comprehensible visible scenery or a recognisable picture of a loved one, in full motion and full colour?
§ We can’t claim that ‘television and computers do this so why not brain cells?’ because televisions and computers are designed by and run by intelligence, purpose and will, not mindless chemicals.
What’s more, the visual cortex is at the back of the head. So how do we get the impression that we are seeing something beyond the front of the head: ‘out there’?
Now add the fact that the information processed by the technically simple lens comes out upside down, and that the left eye field is passed over to the right side of the brain, and vice versa, and the picture quality is pretty fuzzy, optically speaking. Add also that the information leaving the eye is shuffled and compressed before being sent to the back of your head.
§ Apparently some 130 million photoreceptors absorb light, but only 1.2 million channels transmit the pulses from the retina to the brain.
What’s more, according to a BBC Horizon programme of October 2010, the information arriving via the eyes provides only 10% of the total information that goes into our actual perception. The other 90% comes from other (ie, non-optical) areas of the brain. The implications of this for our understanding of ‘reality’ are enormous. Again ‘thoughtforms’ come to mind… As in that 90% of extra input, which supplies the Big Picture from memories, expectations, etc, when prompted by the 10% of new input.
So what have we got? A blindingly baffling puzzle. How do we see electricity? And see it as pin-sharp, right-way-up, left-right balanced, stereoscopic, full-colour, full-motion pictures of ‘out there’ instead of an incomprehensible fuzzy mess of brain matter in the pitch-black back of the head, which has no access to the outside world except via the optic nerve which sent the electrical pulses to it in the first place?
§ Also, we cannot, literally speaking, actually see light. If we could, the night sky would be a uniform wash of brilliant white. All we can perceive are light rays that point directly into our eyes. All the light radiating out from stars in every other direction is invisible to us. Thus, we cannot, strictly speaking, ‘see light’. Closer to home, we only see light rays that are reflected off a surface and directly into our eyes. All the lateral rays, we do not see… otherwise the visible world would be a meaningless jumble of splodges of moving colour. And, of course, a wavelength of light is precisely that: a measurable physical zigzag, as on a graph, like any other wave pattern. There is no trace of colour in it or implied by it. All the colour is added, somehow, by the Mind. So what on earth is it that we ‘see’? And how on earth do we see it?
The conversion from ‘visible light’ into electric pulses may just be some sort of electromagnetic transformer job and not a change in kind at all. It doesn’t seem to help though. Doesn’t help me, at any rate. All that is apparent to me is that light is an enormous mystery, which might turn to be the greatest mystery of all.
***
Even though vision is as baffling as ever to standard brain science, we have at least come a long way since the early twentieth century when hard-line Materialism was at its fiercest. The Behaviorists, for example, claimed that Mind literally did not exist; nor did Consciousness. They assumed that animals were mindless, thoughtless, and senseless: just ‘stuff’. In 1962 a Behaviorist isolated a monkey’s brain and attached it to the blood supply of another animal. Other ethically challenged researchers latched onto the opportunities such a brutalist dogma offered.
§ The Behaviorists discounted any inner self-guiding thought or source of creativity: any ‘I’, in other words. ‘Conditioned response to stimulus’ was all. They could not explain innate Instinct (eating one’s own placenta) or Intuition (suddenly connecting w-a-t-e-r with water), so they ignored them. Picking holes in the ‘logic’ of Behaviorism is like shooting turkeys in a barrel, so let’s leave it at that. Richard Dawkins’ attempt to replace the Idealist word ‘idea’ with the more mechanical and dementalised word ‘meme’ is a hangover from Behaviorism. It is currently very popular with some Materialists: ‘Memes colonise us; they parasitize us and get us to pass them on. Our sense of self is thus an illusion.’ Dr Susan Blackmore, Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. One can only assume that the Professor is herself parasitized by the meme of Materialism which has tricked her into thinking she has no self. But I wonder who she thinks writes her books?
But the Behaviorist tyranny is weakening. It is rare these days to see a nature programme which does not acknowledge animal creativity and intelligence, as eg more evidence of tool-making emerges. Anyone who has kept a pet knows that animals are intelligent; and if you have ever seen a cow’s love for her new calf, or a bitch for her puppies, you will know that animals feel and show affection, often of a higher order than their owner’s or breeder’s.
§ Mechanist-Behaviorist ideas linger on though:
‘We accept that our minds are produced by our brains.’ Dr K Jansen, Psychiatrist.
‘The brain creates who we are.’ Dr Alice Roberts, on Don’t Die Young, BBC tv.
But where is the evidence? Or a logical explanation of the principle whereby chemicals teach themselves to think? The Dogma……
§ For some puzzling and even bizarre examples of what vision (especially if damaged) can produce, see Chapter 5 of VS Ramachandran’s book Phantoms In The Brain.
***
So what does the brain do? Perhaps the Yogic/Esoteric doctrine of the purpose of our life in this world might explain it. After all, this is the physical world, and to experience it, we need a physical body. The most appropriate body would seem to be one that has evolved great flexibility of limb and digit, via the primate branch of the naturally selected evolutionary tree, which is suitable for intelligent reincarnating incomers who will want to manipulate their environment for good or ill, as per their individual free will. Perhaps a dense physical-mechanical body simply needs a heavy-duty electro-mechanical nervous system to take the currents needed to keep the monkey-suit mobile? That would make sense. But it still doesn’t explain how Mind relates to brain, even allowing for the astral/mental bodies which, they say, actually ‘contain’ or handle our emotions and thoughts (as in the organ transplant mystery, for example).
One clue might come from the fact that Mind can affect health. Every doctor knows this to be true. ‘Think ill, and you will become ill’. Hypochondriacs really can bring illness upon themselves. (Yogis would say that they do this by focussing on negative vibes and thoughtforms and thus attract them into their mental and astral auras, from where they eventually show up in the physical.)
§ ‘All that we are is a result of what we have thought.’ Buddha
What is less well accepted by doctors is the opposite: that positive thinking can restore health. ‘A positive attitude’ is known to be helpful, but the logical extension, of thinking yourself cured, is not.
And why not extend this to other minds as well as the patient’s own? We know from hypnosis that an outside mind can affect a person’s inner being and behaviour. And ‘spiritual healing’ (a misnomer, but it will do for here) does sometimes work. There is a mass of evidence for it. Then there is the ‘mind-input’ of people like Dr Carl Wickland who have cured many seriously ill people, as have other more conventional ‘talking-cure’ psychiatrists and psychologists.
Studies have been done which show that people who have been prayed for get better quicker than those in a control (non-prayed-for) group.
§ So God gets personally involved? Hang on… if we are following the so-far-rational Yogic/Esoteric approach, then we are not necessarily talking about ‘God’, but of Higher Mind and entities who know how to use aspects of it for creative purposes. Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife by JG Fuller, might be helpful at this point. Or Hands of Light by Dr Barbara Brennan (an ex-NASA physicist).
And then there is the placebo effect. Every doctor knows that someone given a sugar pill, if told it is a wonder drug, will quite often be cured of his ill. What does the curing? The doctor’s and patient’s minds combined somehow. What else could it be?
Mind affects body. There is no doubt of this. The problem is that our current medicine struggles to accept this because to a Materialist it is Body that creates Mind. Also, because the placebo effect doesn’t fit with The Dogma, medics tend to ignore it, or discourage it as being unethical. It’s easy for a Yogi of course. For him, Mind is power, quite literally. The sad result of this dogmatic Materialist domination is that caring doctors make only rare use of placebos, which is a shame as they are immensely cheaper than the drugs which are, perhaps, ‘inappropriately?’ administered in placebo-treatable cases.
§ ‘Inappropriate’ might amount to ‘unhelpful’ or even ‘harmful’, sometimes. If a placebo would do the trick, then taking a drug you don’t need is not a good thing, surely? Every drug has side-effects; some very unpleasant. I wonder what Hippocrates would say? According to a 2009 report in Science, a medical team in Hamburg found that ‘pain-related activity in the spinal cord’ definitely reduced after the application of a placebo ointment to the arm. The indication here is that Mind can control pain, as hypnotists have always known. In other words, pain is a mental event.
Only a Materialist system, obeying the anti-scientific dogma of Can’t Work Therefore Doesn’t Work, would undervalue such a helpful, healthy (and cheap!) potential aid.
***
Sometime in the 1970s Professor John Lorber was quoted in a paper called Is Your Brain Really Necessary? by Roger Lewin:
‘There’s a young student at this university’ says Lorber, ‘who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honours degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain.’ The student’s physician at the university (Sheffield, UK) noticed that the youth had a slightly larger than normal head and so referred him to Lorber, simply out of interest. ‘When we did a brain scan on him,’ Lorber recalls, ‘we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles (gaps in the brain mass) and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimetre or so. His brain is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid.’
In other words, his head was like an orange made up of only 2mm of rind, and containing no fruit. His brain volume was estimated at 100gm and not the normal 1,500gm. Not for him the galactic tapestry of a neural network, but he managed a first-class honours degree without one.
Lorber said that he knew of numerous cases of hydrocephalic people who coped well with large areas of their brain missing. If one needed proof that the brain/Mind isn’t just a very complicated mechanical device, like a diesel engine or a computer, surely this single case does the job? It is a White Crow par excellence, which throws into question just about every bit of brain research there has ever been.
§ ‘The brain is the onboard computer.’ Richard Dawkins.
Is it? Even when most of it is missing? And anyway, ‘a computer’ needs Mind to design it, if the metaphor is to make any sense.
Not surprisingly, the medical world tried to ignore it. Lorber was even taken to task for ‘over-dramatising’ the case. His response was ‘You have to be dramatic in order to make people listen’. But still they wouldn’t listen. The Materialist Dogma was stuck to just as tenaciously, despite the coach and horses Lorber had driven through them.
§ Among other things, Lorber had showed beyond any doubt that there is no relationship between volume of brain tissue and IQ. To be fair, nobody (apart from a few Nazis) seriously thought there was a perfect correlation. Neanderthalers had bigger brains than Hom Sap but nobody has suggested they were brighter. (Why not? I wonder!)
Some children with severe epilepsy have had a complete hemisphere of their brain removed. This has led to an improvement in the patient’s condition (ie, they are better off with half their brain missing). And just for fun: a cockroach can live for weeks without its head, and some insects can live headlessly for a whole year; and your own gut contains about 100 million brain neurons (about as many as in the brain of a cat.)
Clearly the brain and memory have a close relationship. But what is it? The Dogma that claims that brain makes mind just doesn’t work, even after decades of trying very hard to show that it does. There is no real sign that I’ve come across that anyone is seriously questioning it, however. This is fully in line with ignoring Oparin’s plea concerning the Primordial Soup experiments (see Chapter 7), and the similar notion that chemical-DNA creates Life.
Autism is yet another challenge for how brain and Mind relate. Stephen Wiltshire is seriously autistic, but can draw accurately very complicated buildings after one sight of the real thing, and I have seen on television a pianist who can play just about any music in any style after just the one hearing. But this young man, genius that he would seem to be, can’t tie his own shoelaces.
Another astonishing prodigy is Jay ‘Bluejay’ Greenberg, who entered the Julliard School (of Music in New York; acceptance rate ~6.5%) at age eleven. He had written five symphonies by the age of twelve. He tends not to correct his works, and claims that he hears them ‘playing like an orchestra’ in his head. ‘I just hear it as if it were a smooth performance of a work that is already written, when it isn’t.’ He has been compared to the 14year-old Mozart.
The Paranormal
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence
Nikola Tesla
The actual, the real, the true… is not visible
Max Planck (The Father of the Quantum)
The stuff of the world is mind stuff
Sir Arthur Eddington
When I started this book, I expected that a chapter on The Paranormal would need to be long and thorough, but now I’m not so sure. If Dogmatised Science didn’t even blink when presented with the brainless Lorber student, then any evidence for the paranormal would have no effect whatsoever.