People have been trumpting Terri's brain
size as "proof" of her hopeless condition.
But I think the work of Lorber may bring
that into question.
Lorber wrote a provacative
article entitle "Do we really need a brain?"
I don't think he meant it literaly. But I think
he is question certain assumptions about the brain.
As I understand it the myth that larger brain meant
more intelligence was discredited when Einstein died
and it was discovered his brain was normal sized.
As I understand it Lorber found that one of his bright students
had a small brain or just a brain stem. This started him on
his research. Apparently there are a number of people who live
normal lives with a small brain. In talking to someone about Lorber's work, one of the questions raised was does this show that man (or woman) is more than a material being?
While some dismiss these ideas
as urban legends, I think the subject is worth researching. After
all Mainline science is not always right. Remember Scientific American
denounced the Wright Brothers' invention as a fraud. Tests were not
made on the flying machine till 1908, five years after Kitty Hawk.
To find articles on this matter do a google search: lorber brain.
Guy
Addendum:
In response to what I wrote a pastor related the time,
as a seminarian, he would go to a hospital to visit an elderly lady who
was there. This lady could talk about the weather and
what was going on at the hosptial. When he asked why
the lady was there, the response was the doctors were
studying her since she had no brain waves and was
technically brain dead. The doctors had no idea why this
lady was so responsive.
Editor's note: Without specifically weighing in on the Schiavo matter,
it is worth emphasizing that as far as our experts are concerned
we don't use the majority of our brain. There are one of two
possibilities here: 1) we don't or 2) they don't know how or for what.
In the first case, this would mean that if certain parts of Schiavo's
brain were gone or shrunken it didn't matter (they weren't used),
did matter (they were absolutely necessary to thought) or might
matter (the stuff of thought lingered on, the means to conveying
thought however being gone). In the second case, there's no telling
how much life might be taking place in ways we don't understand. We
know what lights up when you determine who you're looking at or
wave your left hand. We don't know what happens to make us look
or actually decide to move that hand. If the "unused" portion of our
brain is merely responsible for stuff beyond human perception,
we can never know what it does and still be left with the possibility
that what it does is all-important for things we don't understand but
still need. This possibility also lingers in the matter of what happens
if, say, the speech centers are gone but the keys to ecstatic thought
remain. Could we have broken a for fifteen years uninterrupted
prayer with the starvation of Schiavo? Just a thought.
# posted by GuyTak @ 4:02 PM
