In 1848 Phineas
Gage a foreman at a construction site suffered a head injury when some
workers used dynamite. A metal rod penetrated his skull and disconnected
his frontal lobes from the rest of his brain. He did not lose
consciousness. He was a conscientious worker but over months he became
unreliable as a worker. His acquaintances noticed a certain deterioration
in his personality, work ethic and social interactions. Since then similar
results were noticed in psychiatric patients subjected to a bi-frontal
leucotomy, a surgical procedure misused by many American institutions.
In the nineteen fifties a neurosurgeon named Scoville performed a
bilateral temporal lobectomy including the hippocampus, as a treatment for
intractable seizures. The patient lost ability to acquire new memories but
retained old memories. A surgical procedure was carried out by Kluver and
Bucy on monkeys where the temporal lobes were destroyed. The monkeys
tended to grasp and put everything they grasped into their mouths, a
behavior reminiscent of one year old human children prior to myelination
of their temporal lobe connections.
The work by Roger Sperry and Gazzaniga on patients whose epilepsy was
treated by disconnecting the left and right brains by a corpus
callosectomy, revealed that the left brain controlled language and was a
confabulator, while the right brain was more concerned with graphics and
orientation. One patient tried to snatch a cigarette from his right hand
with his left hand. Another who was given a selective command to the right
hemisphere to get up and walk around when asked verbally why he got up
confabulated that he was stretching his legs and going to get a soda.
Ladoux and other researchers experimentally destroyed a part of monkey
brain called amygdala and found that the monkey lost all fear of its usual
predators. Stimulation of the area in human brains during surgery brought
on episodes of terrifying fear. Wilder Penfield, a Canadian neurosurgical
pioneer stimulated a portion of the brain adjacent to the third ventricle
in the brain and elicited bursts of laughter. Certain seizures of the
temporal lobe and stimulation of parts of it produced divine epiphanies
and patients with such disorders of intense religiosity. Certain
streptoccal throat infections are known to produce involuntary movements
called chorea, first described by a British physician named Sydenham. More
recently there is some evidence that they may cause obsessive compulsive
behaviors. The pathology seems to be in a part of the brain called basal
ganglia.
Other earlier studies by Broca and Wernicke, French and German
neurologists highlighted specific varieties of speech disturbances
characterized by loss of spontaneous speech or its comprehension
respectively due to lesions in specific brain areas. Other lesions cause
loss of one half of the field of vision, inability to read, recognize
faces, neglect or denial of the left half of one’s entire body and bizarre
behaviors.
All these clearly show that judgment, character and behavior are all a
function of brain parts and their interconnections that have been
perfected by trial and error over eons by evolution. What then is the need
for a superfluous god?
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