The Mysteries of Consciousness

Traditional views are that the brain creates consciousness. But more information is emerging that challenge this view.

 In July 2007, a 44-year-old French man went to a hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. When doctors learned that the man had a spinal shunt removed when he was 14, they performed numerous scans of his head. What they discovered was a huge fluid-filled chamber occupying most of the space in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue. It was a case of hydrocephalus, literally—water on the brain. Dr. Lionel Feuillet of Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille was quoted as saying, “The images were most unusual ... the brain was virtually absent.” The patient was a married father of two children and worked as a civil servant apparently leading a normal life, despite having a cranium filled with spinal fluid and very little brain tissue.

 This was reported in Reuters Science News entitled, “Tiny brain no obstacle to French civil servant.” An analysis of more than 600 cases of children with hydrocephalus by John Lorber, a British neurologist, found that of the 60 cases where fluid took up 95 percent of the skull, around 30 had above average IQs. One college student with a 1 mm thick brain who had a 126 IQ, placing him in the top 5 percent of the higher end of the population. While initially disbelieved, Lorber’s observations have since been independently confirmed by clinicians in France and Brazil.

 These cases of people without brains challenge the conventional teachings that brain structure is the basis for generating consciousness. Another area of transplants is doing the same.

“When he hugged me I could feel my son,” recounted Jerry’s mother. “He was there.”

When Jerry was 16 months old, he tragically drowned. His heart was transplanted into Carter, a 7-month-old boy with congenital heart disease. Years later, when Jerry’s mother, a physician and self-proclaimed “natural born sceptic,” met Carter, she was struck by similarities to her son. “Carter is 6 years old,” she observed, “but he was talking Jerry’s baby talk and playing with my nose just like Jerry did.”

Carter’s mother also witnessed extraordinary behaviours in her son after the heart transplant. “I saw Carter go to her,” she reported, referring to Jerry’s mother. “He never does that. He is very, very shy, but he went to her just like he used to run to me when he was a baby. When he whispered ‘It’s okay, Mama,’ I broke down. He called her mother.”

Even more astonishing was Carter’s reaction to Jerry’s father. “When we went to church together, Carter had never met Jerry’s father,” she explained. “We came late, and Jerry’s dad was sitting with a group of people in the middle of the congregation. Carter let go of my hand and ran right to that man. He climbed on his lap, hugged him, and said ‘Daddy.’ We were flabbergasted. How could he have known him? Why did he call him dad?”

Paul Pearsall, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Hawaii, and Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek, from the departments of psychology and medicine at the University of Arizona, Tucson, first documented Jerry and Carter’s cases. Research in their study was based on more than 74 organ transplantation cases, including 23 heart transplants, brought to Pearsall’s attention over a 10 year span. He found that organ recipients sometimes adopt traits of the donors, including preferences, emotions, personality characteristics, memories, and even aspects of identity. Pearsall’s study design was thorough, incorporating interviews with the transplant recipients, their social circles, and close contacts of the donor

Other areas of research examining the mystery of consciousness are examined in our new book Between Lives. It also full of self-help exercise to help readers on their spiritual journey.