When this writer attended medical school in Houston, TX, 50 years ago, Neuroscience was highly esteemed and Joe Wood – the department head – had huge expectations for brain and nerve studies. Psychiatry by then was and still is largely an offshoot of neurology. The three disicplines were revered and imagined to be the “hope of the future” for understanding mental illness and producing cures for a wide swath of human disorders – since stress is implicated in many, many diagnoses.

Ah but, the future has arrived and practically all the predictions of Joe Wood and all thousands of psychiatrists and neuroscientists have come to nought. The simple fact is that brain-based psychology and psychiatry are limited for a host of reasons. Neuroscience continues to rule the two professions, even though generations of studies have failed to show that the mind is a product of the brain. Some day, we will be able to grasp the wonders of the Universal Mind, the Collective Conscious, and then the Personal Conscious which exist beyond the realm of the physical brain and the material world. Minds work through brains, but are not limited to them by any means.

How far off that understanding may be, we dare not guess. Still, science and medicine are beginning to move slowly in that direction. They are already helping to show mind as having much greater import than body and brain. Heading in this direction, let us consider some of the current information which indicates the true relationship of mind to brain:

• In his book Space, Time and Medicine, Larry Dossey discussed the research of a British neurologist, John Lorber, whose work questioned the premise that “an intact cerebral cortex is even required for normal mentation.”

Dr. Lorber utilized computerized brain Xrays to study hundreds of patients with hydrocephalus, a condition in which fluid gradually replaces brain tissue. “He discovered that many of his patients had normal or above-normal intellectual function even though most of the skull was filled with fluid. Normally, humans have a cerebral cortex measuring four and one-half CENTIMETERS in thickness, containing 15 to 20 billion neurons. In one patient, however, a college mathematics student who was referred to him because his physician suspected that his head was slightly enlarged, the brain scan revealed a cerebral cortex of only one MILLIMETER in thickness. Functioning, with only a tiny rim of cortical brain tissue of 1/45 normal thickness, this student proved to be gifted on standard IQ testing (he had an IQ of 126) and was normal not only intellectually but socially.”

Dr. Dossey also cited exceptional cases of individuals who had entire hemispheres removed from their cerebral cortex as treatment for intractable epileptic seizures. These procedures are commonly followed by permanent paralysis, speech disturbances, and memory or reasoning deficits. Yet, there are numbers of patients who do not react in typical ways. They recover fully and sometimes become truly gifted people.


• To bring Dossey’s observations nearer in time and place, we can recall the tragic shooting in Tucson, AZ, in January 2011. Six were killed, and 15 injured including US Representative Gabrielle Giffords who was maimed with a blast at close range to her head while she was meeting with constituents outside a supermarket. The bullet entered near her left eye and passed through the left side of her brain before exiting at the back of her skull.

Both she and her husband, now US Senator Mark Kelly, had been hard-charging,  service-oriented Americans then – and still are. But, their lives were already changing prior to that incident – and traumatically changed thereafter. Even fourteen years ago, Gabby had noted a sense of the nastiness which seethed around her political world, sensing it was “almost like people are going to get violent.” And, they did. And, one killer acted so on that fateful day.

Gabby Giffords’s recovery and rehabilitation were considered extraordinary. Kelly told that 95 percent of people experiencing such wounds die immediately. He recognized that “the brain is still a mystery,” while Gabrielle slowly regained most of her usual abilities. 

Initially, she suffered paralysis as well as aphasia, like many stroke victims. Always fun-loving, quick-witted, and smart, Gabby understands everything going on around her. But after a dozen years, words still don't come readily to her. It takes a lot of work.

Beyond routine physical and speech therapy, Giffords has returned to playing the French horn which she first started at age 13. In recent years, she has been taking lessons again – five days a week. Music and singing have been definite helps for Gabby on her long path to recovery. She has used music to help with words – understanding and speaking them.
 
Music is still inside her. Where might that be? But reading sheet music is hard. Relearning to hold her French horn and getting the fingerings right were challenging. Music therapy is thought to work by inducing “brain plasticity.” But unsurprisingly, “Just how it works remains unclear.” Still, Gabby Giffords keeps playing. Gabby, by Mark Kelly


• In recent days, the story of Mora Leeb has circulated around the internet telling that when Mora was four months old, she began experiencing seizures. To early outward appearances, all had been well for mother and child until … For the first three months Mora made her milestones: She nursed; she rolled over; she smiled — and then a standstill. Seizures began when she was 4 months old, barely noticeable at first — but by February 2008 they were clustering 20 per minute, hundreds in a day. 

Brain scans were interpreted to suggest major damage to Mora’s left hemisphere resulting in the epileptic seizures. No explanation was given as to how the infant developed normally for her first months with the brain damage believed to be due to “a massive stroke she had experienced in utero.”

Doctors tried to control the seizures with medication, but the drugs had little effect. In June 2008, when Mora was 9 months old, neurosurgeons operated and removed her damaged brain tissue – the left half of her brain.

It was suggested that it would be like a reset. But, progress didn’t come easily or quickly for Mora. She began walking at 23 months, didn’t speak in sentences until she was 6, and she was 8 when she learned to tie her own shoes. With much therapy and time, Mora progressed well without half her brain until …

Today, for this 18-year-old from South Orange, N.J., each ordinary action Mora takes — walking, talking, reading a recipe, dealing cards, joking — has involved a painstaking learning process. She grew up with only half a brain.

Still seven years ago, Mora had a medical setback. Her seizures returned which suggested toe medics the need for more surgery. In August 2018, neurosurgeons went back and removed the remaining tissue in hopes that the seizures would stop. Mora managed to recover quickly and was even dancing at a family member’s wedding by December.

Mora has continued to cope with medical complications — she still takes anti-epileptic medication, she receives Botox injections in her right hand, arm and leg twice a year to keep her muscles loose and she lives with Crohn’s disease as well.
 
Nearly three years after her second surgery, in 2021, Mora stood in front of her synagogue congregation, and hundreds of others tuning in via Zoom, to give her Bat Mizvah speech. “Personally, I can be described as a ‘glass half full’ girl,” she told the crowd. “There are challenges in my life. Things can be difficult. As a family we know that well, but we try to keep moving forward and hope for good times ahead.” PEOPLE, October 2023.

• Noted neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield wrote in The Mystery of the Mind, “As Aristotle expressed it, the mind is ‘attached to the body.’ The mind vanishes when the highest brain-mechanisms cease to function due to injury or to epileptic interference or anesthetic drug. More than that, the mind vanishes during deep sleep. On this basis, one must assume that although the mind is silent when it no longer has its special connection to the brain, it exists in the silent intervals and takes over control when the higher brain-mechanism does go into action.”
 
Penfield went on to say, “Because it seems to me certain that it will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain, and because it seems to me that the mind develops and matures independently throughout an individual's life as though it were a continuing element, and because a computer (which the brain is) must be programmed and operated by an agency capable of independent understanding, I am forced to choose the proposition that our being is to be explained on the basis of two fundamental elements. This, to my mind, offers the greatest likelihood of leading us to the final understanding toward which so many stalwart scientists strive.”
 
• Nobel Prize winning surgeon and researcher, Alexis Carrel, concluded in his Man the Unknown that, “Personality is rightly believed to extend outside the physical continuum. Its limits seem to be situated beyond the surface of the skin. The definiteness of the anatomical contours is partly an illusion. Each one of us is certainly far larger and more diffuse than his body.”


• Plant physiologist Rupert Sheldrake in A New Science of Life postulated “morphogenetic fields” as invisible organizing fields which act across time and space and are responsible for forms and evolution, behavior and learning. Sheldrake concluded that those fields “can be regarded as analogous to the known fields of physics in that they are capable of ordering physical changes, even though they themselves cannot be observed directly.”

• Candace Pert, who performed groundbreaking research on neuro-peptides at the National Institutes for Mental Health, reported in Noetic Sciences Review that “... it is possible now to conceive of mind and consciousness as an emanation of emotional information processing, and as such, mind and consciousness would appear to be independent of brain and body.”

She went on to say, “A mind is composed of information, and it has physical substrate that has to do with information flowing around. Perhaps, then, mind is the information among all these bodily parts. Maybe mind is what holds the network together.”

Both Pert’s fields of information and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields help to explain mind and consciousness, whether of an individual or of a group. Minds of individuals overlap and intertwine to become group, family, national and racial fields of mind.

• It seems appropriate to end by considering the idea of cellular and tissue life in connection with body-mind issues.

Our simple proposition is to look at the memories that we all carry in our own beings. It seems quite impossible – in similar thinking to that as given by Wilder Penfield offered above – to imagine that cells or tissues even of the brain can in and of themselves remember anything.

For the simple reason that our body cells, even brain cells, are dying off constantly to be replaced by new ones. It is commonly held that the whole human body is renewed evey five to seven years. Cells are dying off and being replaced constantly – a million every second. Neurons or brain cells have longer life spans. But, they too are replaced during the life of a human.

The obvious implication is that constant change and renewal within the body and the brain requires some greater force for direction. Memory must therefore be dependent upon more than body or brain tissues.

The brain is controlled by the mind which holds the mystery and wonder of memory.


We could detail further studies and reckonings regarding the mind-brain relationship. Near Death Experiences, Out-of-Body Experiences, Past Life Remembrances, and other other phenomena can shed light on the subject. But, sufficient has been shared to “prove” that the mind works through the brain rather than that the brain produces consciousness. There is no doubt.