Is your brain really necessary?

Maybe not, lookee.

The student in question was academically bright, had a reported IQ of 126 and was expected to graduate. When he was examined by CAT-scan, however, Lorber discovered that he had virtually no
brain at all. Instead of two hemispheres filling the cranial cavity, some 4.5
centimetres deep, the student had less than 1 millimetre of
cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column. The student was suffering from hydrocephalus

Actually this is not so much of a surprise in the light of the kind of thing that Antonio Damasio says in 'The Feeling of What Happens'. What it may do is undermine a kind of 'physical basis' for anthropoligical dualism where 'mind' is secreted by brain. It may be that mind is better thought of as an emergent quality of humanity (including the social aspects); a view more in consonance with alleged Hebraic modes of thought on related matters and certainly likely to be grist for the mill of cultural uptake of holistic thinking.

Now, I'm must admit that I'm not sure I can go as far as Rupert Sheldrake, but it certainly makes you think. And on the basis that an extreme idea is good for shaking our thinking up ...

what on earth is the brain for? And where is the seat of human intelligence? Where is the mind?
The only biologist to propose a radically novel approach to these questions is Dr Rupert Sheldrake. In his book A New Science of Life Sheldrake rejected the idea that the brain is a warehouse for memories and suggested it is more like a radio receiver for tuning into the past. Memory is not a recording process in which a medium is altered to store records, but a journey that the mind makes into the past via the process of morphic resonance.

Intriguing, though, at present, very 'out there'. For a less esoteric approach, Mindful Hack draws our attention to some musing of AJ Meyer:

A static hologram basically can be thought of as a global associative read only memory.[1] That is, the data are not stored at specific addresses as in the digital computer, instead they are stored globally. Much of human memory also appears to have a similar global character. Studies done by Adey with rabbits seemed to indicate that there appeared to be some sort of globalized phase modulation in the rodent's brain waves as they learned mazes. In my talk I made a presumptuous jump and suggested that human memory might have a dynamic holographic structure, that is, a global associative read and write memory.

And, in fact, if Damasio is right, we have to take in not just the brain but the whole nervous system and endocrine system, in crude; the whole body.

Is your brain really necessary?
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