Physically, gangrene refers to the death of body tissue due to either a lack of blood flow or a serious bacterial infection. Gangrene commonly affects the extremities, including your toes, fingers and limbs, but it can also occur in your muscles and internal organs.
Your chances of developing gangrene are higher if you have an underlying condition that can damage your blood vessels and affect blood flow, such as diabetes or hardened arteries (Mayo Clinic, 2020).
Intellectually, similar processes take place, when at first, certain areas of one's mind and or one's intellectual capacity starts to die out due to [lack of] correct information-flow (similar to lack of blood flow); OR, one may be willfully developing inherently destructive human traits. If this does not get intercepted early on by the individual, then, initially other healthy individuals start noticing the negative effects of this person's intellectual gangrene. It is sort of peripheral at first and others could either bear with it or maybe even ignore it. But if the infected individual doesn't do anything about it, this intellectual gangrene starts to grow and encompass other areas of that person's intellect, just like a physical gangrene caused by lack of blood supply, infection, or trauma. Eventually others can smell the foul odor of this disease.
The situation may eventually reach a stage that the doctors would have to amputate the infected limb, or else the tissue damage of the limb can go deeper and it can get far worse, affecting other areas of the body and eventually kill the person.
I believe the intellectual gangrene is far worse than the physical one, because it's not just the person suffering from it, but the whole organization and society in general that gets affected by this foul infection. So, early treatment or amputation may be two obvious solutions.
To prevent intellectual gangrene, one needs to provide the mind with two components: 1) Every day healthy, balance dose of information from reputable scientific and or unbiased sources, and 2) you must still run that information through several molecular sives so to speak and make sure they pass the common sense-test, as well as the test of reason, logic, and [collective] experience. Your own experience is important, but most likely, reality may have been completely skewed by your own biases, ego, and personal inclinations; therefore, individual experiences are not a sufficient litmus test by themselves, it must be checked against [collective experience] as well in order to make sure you have not infected the reality. One can convince oneself in anything, but unless it is juxtapositioned by collective information and experience, you may not have any correct knowledge or wisdom in a particular topic, no matter how convinced you are of your own experiences.
SHAHRAM MOOSAVI