Non-materialist neuroscientist's criticisms of current medicine called "well-founded"

Here, Jack Cole, The Country Shrink defends Stonybrook's non-materialist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor:

I thought Egnor’s criticism of medicine was well founded. In my practice, I frequently have to fill in the gaps for my patients with chronic medical problems that “contemporary medicine” fails to fill. I’m sorry, but a 5-15 minute appointment hardly fills the bill.

Egnor, trying to set the record straight, happened to stumble on a world of self-satisfied ignorance among materialists that is currently being blown out of the water, both physically and spiritually.

Podcasts with non-materialist neuroscientists

Materialism and human dignity

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Michael Egnor, professor of neurosurgery at SUNY, Stony Brook, on the relationship between the mind and the brain.

Listen in as Dr. Egnor explains how a materialist understanding of the mind undermines human dignity, affecting bioethics, criminal law, and ultimately how we treat one another as human beings.

Listen here.

I personally think this is a serious problem. A materialist understanding of life justifies manipulating people because neither they nor we are ultimately responsible for what we do.

Now here's the fun one!:

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and UCLA psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz on the interaction between the mind and the brain in science fiction. Could the mind really be an illusion from a computer program, like in The Matrix? Listen in as Drs. Egnor and Schwartz explain how materialist fictions ultimately beg the question.

Hey, if life is all just this big fiction:

Step this way, please ma'am ...

Oops, where'd she go? Down there?

Oh, that's right. Too bad nobody remembered to replace that staircase.

Oh, well, life is all just this big fiction anyway .... uh, not!

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor to lecture on Why We Got Eugenics

A friend writes to say that neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, who has said kind things about The Spiritual Brain, is speaking at the University of Alabama at Birmingham late next month:

Michael Egnor will be coming on Thursday, November 20 to the University of Alabama at Birmingham to speak on "Why We Got Eugenics: The Old and New Science of Evolutionary Medicine." The lecture will be held on the third floor of Lister Hill Library, 1700 University Blvd., Birmingham, AL from noon to one and is being presented as part of the Reynolds Historical Lecture series. The lecture is free and open to the public.

I'm told Egnor is a good speaker; here's a podcast. He's certainly entertaining: In "P.Z. Myers’ Neurons Give Talk to Minnesota Atheists on Non-Existence of the Soul," he offers advice on giving a talk on the non-existence of the soul.

Re "evolutionary medicine": It strikes me as just another project based on the idea of looking for something for "evolution" to do in the present day, to demonstrate that enquiries into evolution are useful. But it doesn't sound as though a lot of people agree that evolution is much use in clinical medicine.

As I put it recently, evolution doesn't have to be useful to be worth studying:

... consider the example of heart attacks: What if the lemur-like creature from which humans are said to descend never had heart attacks? What if it usually did, under stress? How does such information help the medical interne whose patient presents with cardiac arrest? Whatever the interne decides to do must work in half a minute, not half a billion years.

Yes, evolution is very interesting - like any other type of ancient history - but no, it is not essential. I think it should definitely be studied, along with the cave paintings, ancient Egypt and theories about the origin of life and the universe and all that. But the burden of pretending that evolution is useful in a concrete way is tiresome and surely avoidable.

Neuroscience: Neurosurgeon uses design inference in brain hypothesis

Neurosurgeon Mike Egnor, who was said some kind words about The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, has an interesting hypothesis about how the brain protects itself from the hammering it might take from the blood flow from the heart.

On this episode of ID the Future, Logan Gage interviews professor of neurosurgery at SUNY, Stony Brook Michael Egnor. Dr. Egnor discusses his current research into cerebral blood flow and the buffering of the brain from the force of blood pumped by the heart. Dr. Egnor's approach to this problem is that of an engineer, using the design inference to understand how the brain protects itself from the pulsatility of the arterial blood flow of the heart.

That's his specialty, apparently.

Also, this is Dr. Egnor on the abuse he endured when he started questioning materialist theories of human origins.

Once again: How much brain do you need?

Regular readers of this space will know that I've been running comments from Dr. Mike Egnor, who - like Dr. Jeff Schwartz - has said kind things about The Spiritual Brain, on the subject of how people who have very little brain often manage to cope quite well:

I have many patients with surprisingly little brain tissue who are quite normal or even bright people. Conversely, I have many patients who are quite disabled who have brains that look pretty normal on MRI scans.
One of the best examples of excellent neurological function with diminished brain volume is a little girl who I've been caring for since birth. She is one of identical twins, and she was born with a huge fluid cavity that has replaced at least a third of her brain. I had the option to drain the fluid surgically, which might have helped her brain function. Yet since birth, she has been normal neurologically, and we have an excellent control- her twin sister (with a structurally normal brain). I've never drained the fluid because I couldn't find any evidence that she was impaired.
The little girl with the 2/3 brain is 6 years old now, and she is exceptionally bright, excelling in school, and cognitively doing better than her sister. She isn't quite as coordinated as her sister, but her motor function is well within the range of normal for her age.
I've cared for hundreds of patients with significantly diminished brain mass who are normal. In fact, it is well established that brain weight has no correlation with intelligence over quite a broad range- from about 1200 grams to about 1700 hundred grams (normal is about 1500 grams for an adult).

That's really encouraging for small people like me and people with impaired brain function. Don't let life get you down.

Just how much brain do you need? Could you use that space for something else?

Recently, I blogged on a guy who was apparently leading a normal life whose head turned out to be full of water. The neurosurgeon who said such kind things about The Spiritual Brain, also writes to say:

The redundancy of much of the brain (most of the cerebellum and cerebral hemispheres) is remarkable. The brain stem and the deeper structures (thalamus, basal ganglia) are less tolerant and more 'hardwired', and it's essential in this business to know what's hard wired and what's not. Most of the brain isn't hardwired. For example, it's well known (in my experience and in the experience of other neurosurgeons) that removal of most of both cerebellar hemispheres (because of strokes or tumors) causes no discernable long-term disability. I have many patients with large portions of their cerebellums missing who are completely normal. The invariable assumption- 'some other part of the brain took over'- is merely an inference. We generally have no actual evidence what, if anything in the brain, 'took over'. Perhaps the inference is because we start with a materialist bias, and we can't imagine neurological function without an identifiable region of the brain to cause it. We really don't understand a lot of whatever correlation exists between neuroanatomy and neurological function.

Many years ago I removed a tumor from the left frontal lobe of a patient. Adequate resection of the tumor required removal of most of the lobe, but I had to take care to avoid injury to the speech areas and the motor areas of the frontal lobe, located posteriorly. I did the surgery under local anesthesia (for the scalp- the brain has no sensation of pain) so I could electrically 'map' the speech and motor areas during the surgery and avoid injury. As I was removing nearly the entire left frontal lobe, the patient (under the surgical drapes) and I had a conversation, discussing life in general, philosophy, family stuff, etc. She never turned an hair as I was removing large portions of her brain.

I was cured of my 'materialist' neuroscience dogma. The brain's important, needless to say, but there's much more to the mind than the brain. To paraphrase Eddington, not only is the mind-brain interface stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.

Dr. Egnor draws my attention to Dr. Wilder Penfield, who - like Mario - worked in Montreal. He writes,

Brain surgery under local anesthesia is fairly common, usually to treat intractable epilepsy but also at times to remove tumors while permitting stimulation of the brain to test for functional areas that cannot be removed safely. The press pays a fair amount of attention, but science reporters rarely discuss the philosophical implications of this kind of surgery. When they do discuss the implications, its usually to vaguely support a materialist neuroscience perspective.

Wilder Penfield was a Canadian neurosurgeon in the mid-20th century who was the pioneer in epilepsy surgery. He is one of the finest scientists the field of neurosurgery has produced. He started out as a materialist, but his experience with brain surgery on thousands of conscious patients made him a mind-body dualist.

His insights are fascinating. He found that he could elicit all kinds of things from electrically stimulating the brain- memories, emotions, movements of the body, etc. The mental processes elicited were remarkably vivid.Yet in all instances, patients knew that the evoked response was not caused by their own will. Penfield called it 'double consciousness'. Patients always saw the response from a third person perspective, as well as experiencing the response in the first person. Patients always knew that the response was done to them, not by them. Penfield noted that patients always experienced their own responses as observers, as well as participants, and they could always distinguish their own coincident experience from the simultaneous induced response. There always remained a first-person subjectivity that was untouched by electrical stimulation of the brain.

Penfield recognized that there was an irreducible component of human experience that was itself independent of neurophysiology. He noted "Something else finds its dwelling place between the sensory complex and the motor mechanism. . . . There is a switchboard operator as well as a switchboard." (reference in link above).

Science clearly points to mind-body duality. The materialist monist model of the mind is an ideological construct, and is indefensible philosophically and empirically.

Further, he adds, "Penfield's experiments and observations are still considered superb neuroscience. He firmly believed in the distinction between the mind (soul) and the brain. He wrote a book on his observations on the soul-brain duality. The default position of materialism in neuroscience is a recent aberration."

But what about lobotomies? Remember how that guy in Planet of the Apes was turned onto a total zombie by a lobotomy? Dr. Egnor comments:

Lobotomies were rather imprecise procedures that had a variety of effects on people. Some people were quite functional afterwards.

This is particularly interesting to me because thirty-five years ago I met and talked with a woman who had had a lobotomy (to cure some mental ailment that had resulted in frequent hospitalizations). She wasn't the brightest light on the string, but she seemed quite normal - and I actually don't know what she was like before the lobotomy. Lobotomy sounds like an awful idea and I can't imagine anyone in their right mind thinking of it today, but that woman certainly wasn't a zombie.

If you want to pursue the question of (mostly) brain absent people who appear to function normally in more detail, here's an article from the early 1980s, and a link to additional resources.

My sense is that we are only just beginning to discover the relationship between the mind and the brain, and the last thing we need is a bunch of materialists telling us that the mind doesn't really exist. Still, I would not advise you to try renting out that space upstairs. It all undoubtedly does something really important for you - but it clearly isn't the sum total of who and what you are.