“Real consciousness remains intact.”

“The Day a Latter-day Saint Saw Heaven—and Decided to Stay on Earth”

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Continuing with the line of thought mentioned in my entry titled “‘Anatomically and functionally impossible’?”, drawn from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010)”

On the basis of these findings, we are forced to conclude that the brain has insufficient capacity for storing all memories with associated thoughts and feelings or retrieving capacity for stored information.  Neurosurgeon Karl Pribram was equally certain that memories cannot be stored in brain cells, but only in the coherent patterns of the electromagnetic fields of neural networks.  In his view the brain functions like a hologram.  This hologram is capable of storing the vast quantity of information in the human memory.  According to Pribram’s holographic hypothesis, memories are stored not in the brain itself but in the electromagnetic fields of the brain.  Pribram’s hypothesis was inspired by the extraordinary experiments of psychologist Karl Lashley, who proved as early as 1920 that memories are stored not in any single part of the brain but throughout the brain as a whole.  His experiments on rats showed that it did not matter which parts or indeed how much of the rats’ brains were removed.  The animals were still capable of carrying out the complex tasks that they had learned to do before the brain operations.

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned that the composition and coherence of all brain structures, from molecules to neurons, is in constant flux, which raised a question about long-term memory.  The debate about information storage and memory is further complicated by an article in Science with the provocative title “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?”  This article was written in response to English neurologist John Lorber’s description of a healthy young man with a university degree in mathematics and an IQ of 126.  A brain scan revealed a severe case of hydrocephalus: 95% of his skull was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, and his cerebral cortex measured only about 2 millimeters thick, leaving barely any brain tissue.  The weight of his remaining brain was estimated at 100 grams (compared to a normal weight of 1,500 grams), and yet his brain function was unimpaired.  It seems scarcely possible to reconcile this exceptional case with our current belief that memories and consciousness are produced and stored in the brain.  (196-197)

The obvious and correct conclusion must be that the brain has a major impact on the way people show their everyday or waking consciousness to the outside world.  The instrument, the brain, has been damaged, whereas “real” consciousness remains intact.  Consciousness and the brain are interdependent, which is not to say that mental and emotional processes are identical with or reducible to cerebral processes.  How else can we explain the fact that people with a severe form of dementia, or patients with chronic schizophrenia, sometimes can experience brief lucid moments (“terminal lucidity”) shortly before they die?  (197)

A number of years ago, we had such a case of “terminal lucidity” in my wife’s own near family.  It was remarkable.