Do You Really Need Your Brain?

Many doctors and biomedical students may have been taught the same about consciousness. However, scientists are still debating whether that theory holds true.

Imagine a child observing an elephant for the first time. Light reflects off the animal and enters the child’s eyes. Retinal photoreceptors in the back of the eyes convert this light into electrical signals, which travel through the optic nerve to the brain’s cortex. This forms vision or visual consciousness.

How do these electrical signals miraculously transform into a vivid mental image? How do they turn into the child’s thoughts, followed by an emotional reaction—“Wow, the elephant is so big!”

Despite his condition, he grew up healthy, became a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant.

When he was 44 years old, he went to the doctor due to a mild weakness in his left leg. The doctors scanned his head thoroughly and discovered that his brain tissue was almost entirely gone. Most of the space in his skull was filled with fluid, with only a thin sheet of brain tissue.

The man had been living a normal life and had no problem seeing, feeling, or perceiving things.

The normal brain cortex is responsible for sense and movement, and the hippocampus is responsible for memory. Hydrocephalus patients lose or have significantly less volume of these brain regions, yet they can still perform related functions.

Even without substantial brains, these people can have above-average cognitive function.

Among them, one university student had excellent grades, a first-class honors degree in mathematics, an IQ of 126, and was socially normal. This math genius’s brain was only 1 millimeter thick, while an average person’s is usually 4.5 centimeters thick—44 times larger.

The cases of people without brains challenge the conventional teachings that brain structure is the basis for generating consciousness. Is our brain—weighing about three pounds, with roughly two billion neurons connected by around 500 trillion synapses—the real source of consciousness?

Some scientists have proposed that deep and invisible structures in the brain explain normal cognitive function—even with severe hydrocephalus. These structures may not be easily visible on conventional brain scans or to the naked eye. However, the fact that they are not readily apparent doesn’t mean they don’t exist or aren’t important for brain function.

“For hundreds of years neurologists have assumed that all that is dear to them is performed by the cortex, but it may well be that the deep structures in the brain carry out many of the functions assumed to be the sole province of the cortex,” Wall commented in the 1981 article.

These unknown deep structures “are undoubtedly important for many functions,” said neurologist Norman Geschwind (1926–1984) from Beth Israel Hospital, affiliated with Harvard University, in the 1981 article.

Furthermore, the deep structures “are almost certainly more important than is currently thought,” said David Bowsher, a professor of neurophysiology at the University of Liverpool in the UK, in the same article.

The source of consciousness may exist in realms we’ve yet to explore. When medical theories can’t solve a mystery, physics might step in with a plot twist—in particular—quantum physics.

Beyond Neurons

“To understand consciousness, we can’t just look at the neurons,” Dr. Stuart Hameroff, director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, told The Epoch Times.

The proteins that make up microtubules (tubulin) are “the most prevalent or abundant protein in the whole brain,” Hameroff told The Epoch Times. He hypothesizes that microtubules are key players in human consciousness.

“Because [when] you look inside neurons, you see all these microtubules, and they’re in a periodic lattice, which is perfect for information processing and vibrations,” Hameroff stated.

Quantum refers to tiny units of energy or matter at a microscopic level. Its unique features can help us understand many things that current science cannot explain.

In simple terms, microtubules act as a bridge between the quantum world and our consciousness. They take quantum signals, amplify them, organize them, and somehow, through processes we don’t fully understand, turn them into the feelings, perceptions, and thoughts that make up our conscious awareness.

Microtubules can explain bewildering facts about the brain. Hameroff posits that the brains of individuals born with hydrocephalus can adapt as their microtubules control neuroplasticity and reorganize their brain tissue.

“So over time, the microtubules in that brain adapt and rearrange themselves to sustain consciousness and cognition,” he said.

Therefore, according to Hameroff, our brains serve like information processors, receiving signals from the universe and forming them into consciousness.