langreiter.com plain, simple: 2003-09-24-brainlessness

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2003-09-24-brainlessness

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 7713 days AGO

Nova Spivack: "In any case, the interesting point here is not that you don't need a brain to graduate from Harvard, but rather that it appears that in some documented cases people with little to no brain tissue are able to demonstrate full cognitive abil[i]ties. If that is the case, then (a) what is the brain for?, and (b) what is enabling them to think without a brain?"

"No brain tissue" is a slight exaggeration.

[create Barry Beyerstein]: "Anything this impervious to evidence must speak to widely-felt longings. That is to say, it would be nice if it were true, for, like so many congenial falsehoods, the ten-percent myth lays open a variety of attractive possibilities. [...] What Lorber's remarkable cases demonstrate is not, as the show coyly suggests, the irrelevance of higher brain centres to our mental lives, but rather the ability of this amazing organ to adjust to massive disruptions, providing they occur slowly enough and early enough in life."