A person can quite easily survive without a limb or a kidney. Wouldn't it be wonderful to live a fulfilling life without the organ that gives you all those inappropriate thoughts and headaches, makes you anxious, depressed and keeps you wide awake at 3am before the most important work meeting of your life? Oh yes!
No brain, no pain
But first, we must figure out why brains are even important? Why have they evolved? Put simply, you need your brain (and nervous system more broadly) for successful adaptation to the surroundings. The environment around us changes to a greater degree as we move around, thus evolvement of the nervous system can be seen as secondary to the evolvement of the locomotion ability. Indeed, plants, although undeniably living organisms, had no need to evolve brains because they simply cannot move! Which is just as well, as you wouldn't want your favourite rose bush walking out of your garden one night!
Brain is served. Bon appetite!
If you are still not convinced, keep reading! Far away in a deep blue sea there lives a creature called the "see squirt". At the very beginning of its life, it resembles a tadpole with a primitive nervous system that swims around in an annoying fashion. After bumping into everybody and apologising continuously for a few days, the sea squirt decides to settle down. It finds a cosy-looking rock and attaches itself to it. With no need to move anywhere else, and possibly because of being hungry after all that wandering around, the see squirt (young children and pregnant women stop reading now) eats its own brain! No more movement - no need for having one!
Well, now you know that for you, a creature of action, chances of living without a brain are pretty slim (unless you decide to get married and settle down, like the sea squirt, of course). Let's just hope we are all reborn as beautiful rose bushes in the next life!
Thank for reading!
References for the curious:
Allman, J. M. (2000). Evolving brains. New York: Scientific American Library.
Glenberg, A. M., Jaworski, B., Rischal, M., & Levin, J. R. (2007). What brains are for: Action, meaning, and reading comprehension. Reading comprehension strategies: Theories, interventions, and technologies, 221-240.
