BEN CARSON, MD & DEBORAH SHAW LEWIS - WITH GREGG LEWIS
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Ben Carson, MD
with Gregg Lewis
& deborah shaw lewis
9780310745990_youhaveabrain_hc_int.indd 3 11/17/14 4:10 PMZONDERVAN
You Have a Brain
Copyright © 2015 by American Business Collaborative, LLC
This title is also available as a Zondervan ebook.
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ISBN 978 – 0 – 310 – 74599 – 0
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copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of
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9780310745990_youhaveabrain_hc_int.indd 4 11/17/14 4:10 PMTable of Contents
Chapter 1: The Amazing Brain 7
Chapter 2: Think Beyond the Can 13
Chapter 3: Gone 21
Chapter 4: How We Got Smart 29
Chapter 5: Bookworm 39
Chapter 6: Taming My Temper 49
Chapter 7: Expanding My Options 59
Chapter 8: The Smartest Choice 69
Chapter 9: Off to College 79
Chapter 10: The Challenge — Medical School 89
Chapter 11: Becoming a Neurosurgeon 97
Chapter 12: More Twins 107
Chapter 13: Mother’s Influence 119
Chapter 14: Talent 133
Chapter 15: Honesty 145
Chapter 16: Insight 157
Chapter 17: Nice 167
9780310745990_youhaveabrain_hc_int.indd 5 11/17/14 4:10 PMChapter 18: Knowledge 179
Chapter 19: Books 189
Chapter 20: In-Depth Learning 199
Chapter 21: God 211
Chapter 22: Think Big 219
Appendix: Personal Talent Assessment 227
9780310745990_youhaveabrain_hc_int.indd 6 11/17/14 4:10 PMChapter 1
The Amazing Brain
W hen you saw the title of this book, You Have a Brain, you
probably thought: Well, duh, of course, everybody has one!
Most people haven’t given their brains much thought. I have.
In more than thirty years as a brain surgeon, I have performed
in the neighborhood of 15,000 surgical operations. Counting
the scans I’ve studied, I’ve examined more than that. I had to
know a great deal about the brain before I began my career as
a neurosurgeon and I’ve learned much more since. My patients
have been a most significant part of my education on the brain.
Christina was the oldest hemispherectomy patient I ever
operated on. We’d had excellent results for years with young
children, but I’d never considered the operation — the removal of
half a brain — for a twenty-one-year-old. The younger the child,
the more elastic and adaptable their brain and the easier it is for
the remaining hemisphere to assume the responsibilities of the
one that’s been removed.
No one was sure how a twenty-one-year-old brain would
respond.
But Christina had more than fifty violent seizures a day cen-
tered in one side of her brain — and that was under anti-seizure
medication. Without the medication, she experienced even more
seizures that wreaked havoc on her physically, mentally, and
emotionally.
Her quality of life was poor, and the damage caused by the
seizures was slowly, but surely, killing her.
So I told her and her family we’d give it a try. She did so well
that within just a few months she went back to college. Where
7
9780310745990_youhaveabrain_hc_int.indd 7 11/17/14 4:10 PM8 You Have a Brain
she’d struggled to do C- and D-quality work before, after the
hemispherectomy, she made As and Bs. Her academic achieve-
ment had improved significantly. She finished college, became
independent, and started working and making a living. Last I
heard, she’d gotten married.
One of the joys of my life right now as I travel around the
country is that so many of my former patients seek me out. Most
of them are long past childhood now, in their twenties or even
their thirties. “I have a family now,” they say to me. “This is my
wife; here is my son. I wanted them to meet you, and I want to
say thank you.”
Some of these encounters make me feel old, but aside from
that I feel grateful that I get to see some of the fruits of my labor.
To be reminded again and again of the brain’s resiliency and the
amazing potential in even once-damaged and diseased brains.
A gift so remarkable, you can have a normal life with only half
of one.
Just how amazing and remarkable is this human brain you
have?
• Inside each human brain are approximately 86 billion neu-
rons interconnected by more than 100 trillion synapses (esti-
mated since no one has counted them all yet), which science
has only barely begun to understand.
• Your brain started developing almost immediately after
conception. During the first months of your mother’s preg-
nancy, your body was creating neurons at the rate of about
400 million per day.
• Your brain generates electricity constantly, enough every
waking minute to keep a low-wattage light bulb fully lit. So
9780310745990_youhaveabrain_hc_int.indd 8 11/17/14 4:10 PMThe Amazing Brain 9
when you say, “That’s a bright idea,” your statement could
be literally as well as figuratively true.
• Sensory signals move along an alpha motor neuron in your
spinal cord at 268 miles per hour (mph). This is the fastest
transmission of this type in the body. Skin sensory receptors,
which travel at about 1 mph, are among the slowest in the
body because they do not have a myelin sheath, which would
insulate them and boost their speed.
• The brain of a normal twenty-year-old human possesses
100,000 miles of myelin-covered nerve fibers.
• Your brain can feel no pain because it has no pain receptors.
The organ that controls the whole nervous system, and it
can’t feel pain! This is why we can operate on the brain with-
out worrying about the pain level of the patient. It’s also the
reason we can perform surgery on people who are awake, as
they feel absolutely nothing.
• Harvard University neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman, who is
attempting to map the brain, has calculated that several mil-
lion petabytes of data storage would be needed to index the
entire human brain.1
When scientists try to quantify the capacity of the human
brain, the numbers get so high that we can’t get our minds around
them. The potential of your mind is literally mindboggling.
My respect for the human brain has deepened over the years
to an attitude I can only describe as awe. Every time I’ve opened
a child’s head and seen a brain, I marvel at the mystery. This
is what makes every one of us who we are. This is what holds
1. David Russell Schilling. “Knowledge Doubling Every 12 Months, Soon
to Be Every 12 Hours.” Industry Tap. Apr. 13, 2013. http://www.industrytap.
com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-months-soon-to-be-every-12-hours/3950.
9780310745990_youhaveabrain_hc_int.indd 9 11/17/14 4:10 PM10 You Have a Brain
all our memories, all our thoughts, and all our dreams. This is
what makes us different from each other in millions of ways.
Do you realize that no super computer on earth can come
close to the capacity of the average human brain? The most com-
plex organ system in the entire universe is a tremendous gift
from God. There are hundreds more neural connections in our
brains than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
I tell audiences of several thousand people that if I could bring
one person up on stage, have her look out at the crowd for one
second, then lead her away, then fifty years later I could perform
an operation to take off the cranial bone and put in some depth
electrodes, stimulate the appropriate area of her brain, and she
could not only remember where everyone was sitting but also
what they were wearing.
The brain sorts, organizes, and warehouses that deluge of
sensory data flooding in at millions of bytes per second. It’s the
control and command center for all of our senses, all our other
organs, our body temperature, and the operation of every system
in the human body — respiratory, circulatory, and more. Much
more. Most of this work the brain does automatically without a
thought (literally) from us.
On top of all that, the brain enables us to imagine, to create,
and to solve problems. A human brain comes programmed with
the ability to extract information from the past, gather informa-
tion from the present, integrate that data, and project it into the
future — which means we’re the only creatures on earth with the
capacity to analyze, strategize, and prioritize so we can alter or
improve the world around us. This is unlike other animals who
only react to what’s going on around them.
Yet, when I was a child, I did not think that my brain was
capable of doing much of anything. My classmates considered me
the class dummy, and I saw no reason to debate their conclusion.
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My mother, however, always believed in me. She knew I had
a brain, and she was convinced that brain could be my ticket to
a bigger, better world beyond our tiny home and life on the big
city streets of Detroit.
And she was right.
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