I usually hate to cut and paste some excerpts from other web pages, but I don't think I could express this better. It is from
Ebon Musing's Ghost in the Machine. It is very similar to this article:
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Behavioral Alterations Caused by Tumors
The future seemed bright for Mary Jackson. Though she had grown up in a poor inner-city neighborhood, she had overcome this disadvantage to become the valedictorian of her high school graduating class, and had won a scholarship to an Ivy League university where she made the dean's list all four semesters of her first two years. She was well on her way to realizing her goal of becoming a pediatrician and working with children in the same inner-city areas where she had spent her own childhood.
However, in the summer after her sophomore year, those close to her began to notice strange changes in her behavior. She had been raised a devout Baptist and only rarely drank alcohol in the past, but now she began to drink regularly, in alarmingly large amounts. She began going to bars, first on weekends, then on weekdays, and often ended up sleeping with the men she met there, even though she already had a boyfriend. Eventually, she began using cocaine.
The summer ended and she returned to school. Her grades the first semester of her junior year were dismal - three F's and two D's. Her advisor warned her that she would lose her scholarship if this continued, but she flatly refused his recommendation of counseling and became angry and verbally abusive when he suggested it. Her academic performance, as well as her health, continued to worsen during her next semester. She finally saw a doctor after catching a case of pneumonia that would not go away, and his examination revealed a dread diagnosis: Mary Jackson had become infected with HIV and now was suffering from AIDS. Her fall from grace, it seemed, was complete.
Mary admitted sleeping around, but insisted it was not for money. Crying, she said that she could not understand why she had become promiscuous; this had never happened when she was younger, but for some reason, she no longer seemed able to turn down men she met in the bars. Her physician suspected a personality disorder, but she had one other symptom that made him suspicious: she had not had a menstrual period for months. Suspecting a disorder of her pituitary gland, he referred her to the neurologist Dr. Kenneth Heilman.
Dr. Heilman found that Mary had lost her drive to achieve long-term goals, could not avoid seductive situations, and had become short-tempered and easily frustrated. When asked to repeat a simple memory test, she snapped, "Once is enough," and admitted, "Up to about a year ago, it was extremely rare that I got angry. Now it seems I am always flying off the handle" (Heilman 2002, p. 83).
As well, she had a cluster of other strange symptoms. One of them was a disorder called
environmental dependency syndrome, in which the patient's behavior seems controlled by external cues and stimuli rather than internal decisions. Given a pen and paper, but no instructions on what to do with them, she immediately picked up the pen and began writing her name. When a comb was placed on the table in front of her, she took the comb, as if unconsciously, and began to comb her hair (p. 84).
The frontal lobes regulate and inhibit our behavior, and environmental dependency syndrome is a classic sign of frontal lobe dysfunction. Her other symptoms fit this diagnosis perfectly as well. But why had this change in behavior come on her so suddenly?
Dr. Heilman found the answer when he ordered a magnetic resonance scan of Mary's brain. The MRI revealed that a large tumor was growing in her brain, emerging from the pituitary gland and pressing on her orbitofrontal cortices, areas of the frontal lobe so named because they are directly over the orbits of the eyes. It was this tumor that had caused the sudden and dramatic change in her personality.
Mary underwent surgery to remove the tumor and began antiviral combination therapy to control the HIV infection, and the resulting change in her personality was every bit as sudden and dramatic as the last one had been. Her drive and motivation returned, and she returned to college, got her bachelor's degree, and enrolled in a program to get her master's degree in social work. "Her mother thinks that she still loses her temper more rapidly than she did before the tumor developed, but in general says her daughter is 'her old self'" (p. 85).
A case possibly even more shocking than Mary Jackson's was presented by neurologists Russell Swerdlow and Jeffrey Burns at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Neurological Association: a man whose brain tumor turned him into a pedophile (Choi 2002).
The patient, a 40-year-old schoolteacher, had had a normal history with no previous record as a sex offender. But then, without warning and for no apparent reason, his behavior changed; he began soliciting prostitutes, secretly visiting child pornography web sites, and finally made sexual advances toward minors, behavior for which he was arrested and convicted of child molestation. The man himself knew that this behavior was not acceptable, but in his own words, the "pleasure principle" overrode his self-restraint (ibid.), and he failed to pass a court-mandated Sexaholics Anonymous course. The evening before he was to be sentenced, he checked himself into a hospital, saying he feared that he would rape his landlady and complaining of headaches. An MRI revealed that he had an egg-sized brain tumor - and just like Mary Jackson's, it was pressing on his orbitofrontal cortex.
Brain surgeons removed the tumor, and after recovering from the operation, the man was able to successfully complete the Sexaholics Anonymous course and returned home. For some time, his behavior was completely normal. Then, around October 2001, he began complaining of headaches again, and once again began collecting pornography. A second MRI scan revealed that the tumor had begun to grow back; again it was surgically removed, and again the behavior disappeared.
In both cases, as the tumor grew, these patients' personalities changed radically, along with corresponding alterations in their behavior. When it was removed, their personalities promptly returned to type, and normal, societally acceptable behavior resumed. This correlated variance provides strong evidence that personality and behavior are unified with the brain. The values that guide our behavior, the motivation to embark on and complete goals, the basic character traits that determine who we are and how we act - the evidence shows clearly that all of these things arise from the frontal lobes of our brains.
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These types of case studies are not saying that all lies or behavior is from a brain tumor, but it shows that some of it is. It leads to some very tough questions for Christians:
1. What if someone stopped believing in God because of a tumor? Would they go to hell?
2. How can you tell if your soul is good or bad when the physical world can so easily shape your personality?
3. Why doesn't God help those people that lose free will due to a tumor if free will is so important to Him?
Quath
