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epilepsy

At Mind Matters News: Epilepsy: If you follow the science, materialism is dead

Egnor: on the issue of intellectual seizures, the fact that there has not been a single seizure in recorded medical history out of 250 million seizures, a quarter of a billion seizures, that has evoked abstract intellectual content, Maybe the next one will, but I’m not going to bet on it… Read More ›

Why, as a neurosurgeon, Michael Egnor believes in free will

Egnor: "An intellectual seizure would be a seizure that caused abstract thought, such as logic, or reasoning, or mathematics. People never have, for example, mathematics seizures—seizures in which they involuntarily do calculus or arithmetic. This observation, which is as true today as it was in Penfield’s time nearly a century ago, begs for explanation." He offers an argument for the immaterial powers of the mind. Read More ›

Yes, Jerry. Split brains are weird, but not the way you think

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, who knows some details about the brain, responds: What is most remarkable about these patients is that after the surgery they are unaffected in everyday life, except for the diminished seizures. Read More ›

How can people think and speak with only half a brain?

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 Read More ›

Mutations Degrade Inherited Intelligence

The remarkable “powers” of evolution are now shown to degrade (aka “mutate”) the human genes essential to intelligence.

Remarkably, they found that some of the same genes that influence human intelligence in healthy people were also the same genes that cause impaired cognitive ability and epilepsy when mutated, networks which they called M1 and M3.

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