How Well Do We Understand The Brain?
Few images have changed my view of reality like this one.
It is a picture an MRI scan; An MRI scan of a man missing 90% of his brain. Believe it or not, this man is alive and well. He’s married, employed, and has two children. He also had no idea that his skull was mostly filled with fluid until the age of 44, when he went in for a brain scan to diagnose the cause of mild weakness in his left leg. If you’d like to read more about him, click here.
These days, most scientists and academics believe that we are our brains. That there is nothing more to us. If you read online articles about the brain, you’ll often see statements like: “This is the hippocampus, the part of your brain responsible for memory” or “This is your amygdala, the part of your brain that makes you afraid when it activates.”
We are told that large animals need large brains to support the functioning of their bodies. We are told that our personalities and preferences arise due to the firing of brain cells called neurons, and nothing more.
How is it then, that this man is able to live a normal life, despite the fact that most of his brain is simply not there?
When scientists talk about this particular case, they usually say that it just goes to show how remarkably adaptable our brains are. They talk about neuroplasticity, and how the man’s remaining brain regions must just be picking up the slack. To me, this seems unlikely.
It’s akin to a 50 horsepower car keeping up with a 500 horsepower car in a drag race.
So what is going on here? Is this evidence that the brain might not be all that we are?
To answer these questions, I’m going to try to spell out why so many scientists believe that the brain is all that we are.
Scientists have come to their current understanding of the brain largely through reductionistic inquiry. They have looked at organisms with brain damage, and attempted to link damage to different brain regions with various functional impediments.
For example, there is a region of the brain called Broca’s area that seems to be strongly involved with the production of language. When people have strokes that damage their Broca’s areas, their ability to speak becomes impaired. Therefore, scientists came to the to the conclusion that Broca’s area is responsible for language production. In reality however, all they can honestly say is that Broca’s area seems to be involved with language production. The language might actually be originating from somewhere else.
To help drive home this point, I’m going to continue with the car analogy.
Is the depression of a gas pedal the thing that makes a car accelerate? In a way, but the driver is what makes the gas pedal move in the first place. And the driver could easily make the car accelerate using a different input, if the car was designed differently. Could it be that activity in Broca’s area (or any brain region) is a more like the movement of a gas pedal than the foot pressing down upon it? To me, this doesn’t seem out of the question.
Another reason why scientists feel that we are just our brains is that they can’t seem to detect any alternative explanation for who we are. They haven’t been able to catch a glimpse of a spirit or a soul in a microscope or particle accelerator. However, the fact that we can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Take radio waves for example. Back in the 1400s, we simply didn’t have the technology to prove their existence. Nonetheless, quite a few of them were zipping around all the time, and having an influence on the matter with which they interacted.
But these days, we seem to have largely forgotten about the times when we didn’t believe in radio waves.
Since we can see brains, we can’t see anything else that seems to be responsible for who we are, and we can see that damaging the brain leads to changes in our characteristics, we have come to the conclusion that the brain is all there is to the story of us. Of course, this might not be the case.
To further illustrate this point, I’m going to call on the car analogy once again.
Imagine that an alien is observing our world. For some reason, this alien can’t see humans. They can however, see cars (both their exteriors and interiors) and traffic lights.
This alien might easily come to the conclusion that turn signals are the causal agents that make cars turn. After all, cars usually turn after their turn signals are activated. They might also start to think that car acceleration is directly caused by traffic lights turning green (it obviously is true to some extent, but the driver can always choose not to put their foot down on the gas pedal regardless of what color the light is).
In other words, these aliens would be mistaking correlation for causation.
It could very well be that neuroscientists are doing the same. Activity in a brain region associated with movement could be somewhat akin to a driver’s activation of a turn signal. Not the cause of the turn itself, or necessary in any way for its execution. Just something that drivers usually do before turning.
Of course, a car could turn just fine if you ripped out its turn signal. Humans don’t seem to be able to speak that well after the regions of their brains responsible for speeh have been damaged. I’ll repeat though, that language regions, and other brain structures, might be a bit like gas pedals. They are usually the method by which the driver makes the car accelerate, but not strictly necessary for acceleration itself. If our bodies are actually controlled by something other than our material brains, it could be that these spirits or souls, or whatever they might be, can influence our limbs, tongues, and vocal cords without having to go through the brain to do so.
This idea may seem like a stretch, but it’s also a possibility. And it’s a potential explanation for why a man missing 90% of his brain is able to function normally.
Conclusion
Are there alternative explanations to this “the brain is all that you are” theory? Plenty. Substance Dualism, Idealism, and the Simulation Hypothesis, to name a few. (I wrote about the latter of the three in this post). It could even be that Christians are right and we all have spirits and souls. I don’t think there is enough evidence to rule that theory out either.
The idea that we have souls or spirits has fallen out of favor among mainstream scientists. Many of them view the belief in such things as evidence of dellusion. To me, however, the existence of either would actually explain quite a lot. Is their existence a sure thing? Absolutely not. But again, the fact that we can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Could the “brain is all that you are” theory be correct? Definitely (though again, I seriously doubt it).
I didn’t write this article to argue for any specific theory. Instead, its primary objective was to poke holes in commonly held convictions, and provide a few potential alternate ways of thinking about the matter in our skulls. In all honesty, I don’t really know what the brain is, or the degree to which it accounts for who and what we are. Unfortunately, many people pretend as though they do.
I’m of the opinion that shouldn’t, because to be frank, I don’t think anyone knows for sure.
