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. 

Why nobody Truly Knows Anybody Else

We work under presumptions of knowing other persons in our contacts, but individuality of each of us is too complex to be understood by anybody else. If mutual knowing of two persons were possible, there would remain no possibility of misunderstanding between them. Since we often notice misunderstandings and disputes among persons familiar to each other, we may safely infer that the two persons were not knowing each other. Not only that, even most of the persons fail in knowing themselves that is why they take wrong decisions about matters fully under their own control. Most of the sicknesses among humanity are results of this misunderstanding of the self.

Dimensions of an Individual

A person's existence gets expressive in three dimensions - physical, mental and intellectual through the three organs body, mind and brain, respectively. A living body is a passive organic system having many subsystems interwoven and supportive of each other functionally. It functions under partial control of the mind, and the body and the mind combination functions under overall control of the brain. Thus, the brain is the supreme commander of an individual.

From practical experiences, we know that even supreme commanders fail in exercising full control over their domains with the result that elements of domains become undisciplined and even revolt occasionally against their supreme commanders. Similar is the situation with the command line of the body, mind and brain.

Reason for Indiscipline

Like the practical life incidences, the command line fails for control of the supreme commander being indirect with a hierarchy of mediators in between the ultimate domain and the supreme commander. In case of an individual, the mind is the mediator between the body and the brain which plays its own tricks in between to gain more authority over the body. Tricks of the mind are termed as wisdom of the individual, which gets played often in conflict with the intellect of the person.

Wisdom and Intellect Conflict

Wisdom of an individual is applied with sole purpose of getting things done for the body in accordance of her wishes which may not be appropriate always for the negative human traits raising their heads through the body. All crimes by humans are committed for these negative traits with full support of the individual's mind and justified by the wisdom of the self. For this reason, each criminal tries to justify his/her committed crime. Wisdom doesn't have analytical power but is merely empowered to get the desired results by hook or crook.

On the contrary, the intellect, function of the brain, with its faculties of memorizing studied and experiential information, logical reasoning, and imaginative extrapolation of information through application of logic is capable of judging right from wrong, if properly applied to a problem. But for the complexity of body and mind functions, it is impossible for the intellect to keep watch on everything under its overall command. It relies on the wisdom standing in between with the instruction of referring any matter to it whenever needed. Another reason for the limitation of the intellect is its being mono-tasking, while a multitude of processes keep ongoing every moment in the body of an individual. So, relying on wisdom is a compulsion of the intellect.

The Societal Scenario

For the reason explained above, an individual can truly know another individual through application of one's intellect only. Since, the intellect remains burdened with a huge workload all the time, the wisdom is empowered to know the person which plays its tricks for own vested interests. In the process, the other person is not understood well but presumed to be understood. Since the matter is not referred to the brain by the mind under the presumption, the brain doesn't get involved in the matter leaving it to the mind.

Having Progressive Psyche with Pleasure of Contentment

There are two philosophies of leading one's life. One says that a person must work for progress and on this path there is no need for him/her to stop. Currency coins of this philosophy are words like 'competition', 'dynamism', 'advancement', etc. Henceforth, we would be calling this way 'progressive philosophy'. Another lifestyle philosophy advocates developing a feeling of satisfaction with what has been achieved to enjoy life. Although, this seems to be the objective life is meant for, it is opposed by progressive philosophers on grounds of developing complacency, hence is counter-productive. We term this 'contentment philosophy'.

The contentment philosophy has been the hallmark of religious and spiritual preachers throughout human history, but for others only. They themselves have been found involved in amassing unlimited wealth, authority, luxuries, etc for themselves through doing business of virtual commodity of God. Although, these exhibitionist preachers seem to have massive following in common innocent people but none of the followers follows what is preached to him/her in his/her practices of real life. Hence, for the followers being faked like the preachers themselves, we keep them out of our preview through this discussion. Even then, the contentment philosophy doesn't lose its luster of bringing happiness to human faces.

In practice, we enjoy water when thirsty, rush to grab a meal when hungry, we stop taking these after our needs of these are satisfied, and feel contented. This doesn't mean that we would never again enjoy taking water, or rush for a meal. This is where and how the contentment philosophy is pursued by everyone even without any preacher or even being aware that we follow a philosophy day-in and day-out. We need no exhibitionism for it, it is purely instinctive in all forms of life. Even with this universal pursuance of contentment philosophy, we are not rejecting the progressive philosophy for its immense contribution to progress and development of human civilization.

Two above-said philosophies may be graphically depicted as shown below.

 

Two Philosophies of Life

From the above discussion, it appears that the two philosophies have their exclusive fields of application in human life, and these can't be mixed up. These two exclusive fields of life may be named as 'home' and 'work' using contentment philosophy and progressive philosophy, respectively. This is what I propose to counter here. Two philosophies may be made complementary to each other with accrued benefits of both for every individual.

Pause in between to Enjoy

The third philosophy as hybrid of the two outlined above is to have pauses in between progress efforts to enjoy gains of the progress already made. I would like to name this philosophy of life as 'Propause Philosophy', depicted in the diagram below.

Propause Philosophy of Life

Specific steps of pursuing this philosophy are -

Plan for making progress efforts with a fixed short-term and conveniently achievable target for reaching in the step,

Pause on reaching the target, review the progress made and enjoy until you feel rejuvenated for the next bout of efforts,

Plan for the next step of efforts with another specific target for achieving,

Continue the process of efforts and pauses mutually sandwiched, … …

With pursuance of this philosophy, it appears that time of pause goes waste during which some more progress would have been made, which is not the case in reality for three solid reasons. Firstly, the wholesome purpose of life, efforts, progress and achievements is to find happiness. Unless you have it through pauses, whole process of living remains a waste. Secondly, each pause rejuvenates the person to make efforts with higher efficiency for getting better results with lesser efforts, the the rate of progress at each step is enhanced, adequately compensating for the loss of time during the pause. Thirdly, every pause provides an opportunity for reviewing the past efforts and results thereof suggesting what might have gone wrong as a lesson for the future steps. This further improves performance. 

Process of Ageing

Time stamps a lasting impression of everyone's body and mind. In the first quarter of century, both grow and get enriched. Second quarter of century witnesses slower rate of growth of body coupled with higher rate of growth of mind. Third body growth is stagnated but growth of mind continues with enhanced rate. Fourth quarter of century finds the body maintaining status quo and the mind continuing to grow.

Ageing Process

Ideally speaking, the process continues and may cover a few centuries until the body begins to decay reaching the terminal stage some day as depicted above. It all depends on how an individual maintains his body and mind in healthy and active state with key being discipline in all aspects of life with rejuvenation in between through pauses as stated above. Human experience of Vaidic Era informs us human lifespan may go up to about 500 years.  

Considerations for Age Factor

With age of a person going above 50, steps of efforts and target need be designed with consideration of ageing on the body and mind. Firstly, the person must engage him/herself in more of intellectual activities coupled with reduction in physical exertions. Secondly, the steps of efforts and targets must be gradually reduced with aim at enjoying life, rather than destroying it with hard work.