Body can be Alive without the Brain

A recent suicide attempt in my neighborhood and his progress through ongoing medical treatment have been educating me on functioning of human body and their control by the person's mind and brain. The suicide victim is in hospital with doctors assuring his family members of a full recovery. Condition of his body which was stout and healthy otherwise, except the head injury due to shooting point-blank through frontal portion of the brain, is improving.

On passage of 10 days in hospital, he is able to breathe without external aids of oxygen and ventilator, his heart beat is normal, he opens his eyes, and is sensitive to touches on his skin. Apart from nutrition injected into his body, he is being tube-fed milk which he seems to be digesting. But there is no action from any of his action organs. It is not known whether he is able to understand what his sensory organs sense from the external world. Doctors attending him say that he would take about two more weeks for speaking and affecting other actions. With this set of information, I am trying to separate mind and brain functions in monitor, control and regulation of a person's body condition, sensory inputs and output actions. Accordingly, provided here is a functional constitution of human body with incorporation of its mind and brain.

Physical Body

Apart from mind and brain, human body has three sets of parts -

Sensory organs - palms and soles for touches, eyes for visuals, nostrils for smells, ears for sounds and taste buds for tastes.

Action organs - tongue for speech, arms with hands for handling things, legs with feet for walking, sex organs for reproduction, two excretion organs, and the body in general for other movements and expressions.

Life support systems - breathing, digestion, blood formation and circulation, etc

The Mind

Routine sustenance of these systems of body is looked after by the mind without any support from the brain. Therefore, the body may sustain or remain clinically alive even if the brain is dead.  This seems to be the present condition of the patient mentioned above.

The mind of a person is composed of many sub-minds with one in each sub-system of the body. All the sub-minds are attached in form of glands to the network of neurons spread throughout the body. Apart from taking care of routine sustenance of the body sub-systems, the mind reads body's special and contingent needs and desires, and communicates them to the brain for further instructions. Thus, the brain has no direct communication with parts of the body.

The Brain

The brain resides safely inside skull and is connected to the body through an intricate and comprehensive network of neurons, termed the mind. It has three functional parts -

Body sensing and control centers for interpreting inputs from sensory organs, issuing instructions to action organs and taking care of special and contingent needs of body's sub-systems,

Memory to keep record of experiences of the body with the external world and providing the recorded information to thinking faculty whenever needed,

Thinking faculty to analyze experiential information and take decisions for actions through the body,

Thus, the body can be clinically alive without intervention of the brain, but can't sense the external environment or take any action.

My View differs from Medical Science View

Medical science practitioners are of the opinion that the body can't sustain without the brain. So in their opinion, if a person breathes, his/her heart beats, and he/she digests food, his body is not only clinically alive but he/she is fully alive and can be brought to normal health and working. With this opinion, they keep on treating even brain-dead persons based on condition of their physical bodies. In all such cases, a day arrives when a sub-system of the body develops a contingency needing intervention of the brain. For not getting any support from the dead brain, the body meets its end of life. A brain injury is termed as 'concussion' in medical terminology. Therefore, a person with seriously injured brain has very rare chances of survival. Persons with partially injured brains may survive but with physical impairments or mental disorders. 

Mental, Psychological and Intellectual Disorders

Some disorders such as spasms, defective speech, Parkinson's disease, etc are caused by defective or broken communication links in the neuron network spread in the body - the mind of the person, resulting into communication weakness between the body, mind and the brain. Most of the spastics fall in this category. These disorders require medical treatment to strengthen the neuron network in the body.

A second type of disorders of the same class, such as phobias, excessive anger and irritation, depression and anxiety, inferiority and superiority complexes, etc is purely psychological wherein brain fails in understanding the situation in right perspective. This is dysfunction of thinking faculty of the brain and may be cured through psychological counseling by a psychiatrist. The practice of treatment strengthens neuron links within the brain for developing the right perspective. No medication is necessary in such cases but some brain tonics may prove beneficial in the treatment.    

Insanity in a person is considered a disease and is medically treated though it is rare and its low percentage of detection makes it rarer. It is a disorder of the brain wherein some part of the brain doesn't function properly. So, I put it in a class intellectual disorders which I find rampant in human societies. 

Many intellectual disorders are considered as part of culture of the people, hence neither recognized as disorders nor treated. Faith in divine miracles and incarnations, religious fundamentalism, spirituality, worshiping of pebbles and stones placed in so-called temples, respect to a person based on his/her dress or make-up, etc are intellectual disorders in people remaining untreated for thousands of years, hence becoming cultures of many societies. Such disorders have been hampering scientific developments and progress in human civilization.

Since body can survive even with a dead brain, it can survive with weak or defective brain too with display of all signs of life. But all such cases make the persons less human-beings, may be called sub-humans, than those with their brains fully functional. Unfortunately, the modern world has more of sub-humans than those with fully functional intellectual faculties, but their disorders remain undetected under covers of cultures and democratic majority of theirs. Thus, many cultures and democracies in the world have been preserving and promoting intellectual disorders in their subjects. 

Vaidic life recorded in Vaidic scriptures ensures full intellectual development of people through healthy foods. This was the case with Theo culture and race about 2,500 years back. That culture was decimated by enemies of humanity for establishing their psychological, political and social domination over common people under covers of religions.