Break into song?

Yep!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPk32I8rmU4

And I’m not sure why, but I’ve seen info on Mr Phineas before and it’s almost spooky to me.

But it is well known that brain damage does hugely affect personality, for an interesting read try this wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

The brain is an extremely complicated biological machine, but it is a machine. If you take one persons brain and subject it to precisely the same stimuli under precisely the same conditions then you will get the same reaction. The slight issue being that due to the complexity of the brain and how it interacts with the entire body it’s impossible to have stable conditions while the brain is still located in a living animal.

I think there are many other factors that just brain damage to focus on here, they are surveying people with brain tumours removed for their spiritual thoughts. Now when given a fatal illness to overcome many people will find themselves praying, since there’s little else they can do, and they find the idea of there being an afterlife a lot more comfortable when they think there is a good chance of death.

However after the operation they are still alive (although being dead probably also leads to a reduced amount of spirituality from the brain) and quite aware they were saved not by a heavenly hand, but by a blue-gloved one with a scalpel. Suddenly they aren’t dying so an afterlife is less needed and they don’t need to pray because they have overcome their problems.

Is the reduced spirituality due to the brain damage or due to the situation change, well the tests to do that are quite apparent, but highly immoral (false positive test would be to take a patient, have a fake surgery (and yes placebo surgeries do happen sometimes) then patch them back up then see if their mood changed even though, unbeknownst to them, they are still dying of a brain tumour, similarly a false negative could be done by telling a patient who has no illness they have a tumour and doing a placebo operation then telling them they are cured and seeing how spirituality changes).

The interesting thing from this is that medically some people are more suited to belief, which suggests that people with extremely fervent belief might actually have brain damage, or that its possible to lose faith through a head injury.

Sorry bit of a rant there, maybe I should update my own blog eh?

In the article, the implication is that the ego is generated within the brain, so the bit that is damaged is part of whatever generates the ego and so a sense of selfless transcendence is the result of a malfunctioning ego-generator. This seems like a very mechanical interpretation, and what seems odd to me is that it’s a metaphor they don’t seem to understand that they are deploying. The brain is not a machine.

Anyway, I don’t know if any of this makes sense – my brain says it does but then my brain is kind of funky. And whenever I say anything about the brain I get all caught up in the recursiveness of it all. I don’t know how brain scientists deal with that all the time.