Clearly, the brain is not at all like a machine:
A study of six adults who each had half of their brain removed or partially removed as children is helping us understand how they retain language and thinking skills. This radical surgery (hemispherectomy) is done when epileptic seizures have severely damaged one lobe of the brain. Sensory, motor, or language deficits sometimes follow but many patients retain normal functions with only half a brain…
In fact, as the open-access paper reports, the six people with up to half their brain removed (see Figure 1 from the paper, right) had stronger connections than the six with whole brains.
“Some people think and speak with only half a brain” at Mind Matters News
Of course, when a person suffers from serious epilepsy, the usable half of the brain may have been doing most of the work for years anyway, one researcher suggests. If so, it was inured to functioning largely alone and the removal of the epileptic half was not a huge loss for the functioning half.
This level of neuroplasticity is a relatively new discovery; people used to think the brain was much more static than it seems to be.
Lots of further info on epilepsy and theories of mind.
Further reading:
Does brain stimulation research challenge free will? If we can be forced to want something, is the will still free?
and
A short argument against the materialist account of the mind (Jay Richards)
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