• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Unusually "tiny" brain found in civil servant

Miss Anthrope

Illuminator
M
Joined
Oct 23, 2006
Messages
3,575
This is both interesting and worth a chuckle.

Scans of the 44-year-old man's brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue.


"He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr. Lionel Feuillet and colleagues at the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille wrote in a letter to the Lancet medical journal.
Click to expand...
 
Rumors that he was turned down for the job of Perm. Sec. at the DWP as he was "vastly overqualified" have been hotly denied by Ministers.
 
That's rather startling, when you come to look at the MRI scan. I wouldn't have thought you could even survive unaided with that much brain matter missing.
 
PixyMisa said:
That's rather startling, when you come to look at the MRI scan. I wouldn't have thought you could even survive unaided with that much brain matter missing.
Click to expand...


Wow. You are so right. I had no idea that his brain would be quite that "tiny".
 
i think children can adapt to brain parts missing (plasticity i think its called)? I dont know if that even works in theory though, im not the person to ask. it just came to mind when thinking about how he could be fully functional..
 
nails3jesus0 said:
i think children can adapt to brain parts missing (plasticity i think its called)? I dont know if that even works in theory though, im not the person to ask. it just came to mind when thinking about how he could be fully functional..
Click to expand...


Yep. Exactly.

I almost made a remark about how I am so often stunned at the developing nervous system's plasticity. You're right on.
 
Whoah!

Interesting but not amusing, to me at least. When looking at the scan I get the same mix of repulsion, fascination and sympathy as when I'm looking at, say, a mass crash in a bike race, repeated in slow motion. That's gotta hurt.

But yes, the human brain is amazing.
 
I've heard before that it's important that the enlarging of the ventricles occurs very slowly, which allows the brain time to adjust. There have been other cases of this....

He probably wasn't working on theoretical physics, either.
 
Long ago BBC did a special on people with brains like this. I think it may have been called " The missing brain ", I don't recall off hand since it was so long ago.

Several people were studied throughout the show. All showed sings of being exceptionally bright.

My guess is that since there was so little brain tissue to work with, this triggered a condition of forced efficiency. Unlike the rest of us who seem to have plenty to be waisted and thus can be poorly managed, these bunch of people seemed to be quite logically minded.

What was interesting though, was that somehow the basic functions required to create consciousness and smarts, still happened to survive. This also tends to give the impression that these functions are not as complex as once thought, since almost no brain at all is still suffice enough to support such functions.
 
Last edited:
maybe that's where the rumor about using only 10% of your brain comes from...

I wonder if that could be T'ai's problem...
 
The brain is certainly a strange organ. Small amounts of damage can be incredibly debilitating, yet removing half the brain can sometimes be an improvement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/hmn/W98/medupdate.html

Children suffer no intellectual impairment from the removal of so much brain tissue. Many, in fact, actually improved academically, the study found, when their seizures stopped and they were able to stop taking debilitating anticonvulsive drugs. And in preschool-age children, in particular, the remaining brain easily picks up responsibility for speech.
Click to expand...
 
The scanned brain didn't appear so "tiny" to me.

What was the percentage of brain volume, compared to normal adults, children of different ages, or apes?
 
I know two people who have holes in their brain, and neither of them are mentally impaired in any way. They both have issues with body temperature control, and one of them has a partial paralysis of her right hand, but intellectually and mentally they are as sharp as anyone.

They also both happen to be extremely hot women, but that's beside the point.
 
arthwollipot said:
I know two people who have holes in their brain, and neither of them are mentally impaired in any way. They both have issues with body temperature control, and one of them has a partial paralysis of her right hand, but intellectually and mentally they are as sharp as anyone.
Click to expand...
Yep, it depends very much on what's missing.

They also both happen to be extremely hot women, but that's beside the point.
Click to expand...
That's never beside the point. ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom