Cases Of Little Or No Brain; Unusually Small Or Partial Brains

[sunsplash1]

Yes indeed, second brain not third brain. At the time I was thinking of something else said another thread, the alleged trilateral symetry of Alien grey brains.

 

[almond13]

Is your brain you really necessary?
The reason for my apparently absurd question is the remarkable research conducted at the University of Sheffield by neurology professor the late Dr. John Lorber.
When Sheffield’s campus doctor was treating one of the mathematics students for a minor ailment, he noticed that the student’s head was a little larger than normal. The doctor referred the student to professor Lorber for further examination.
The student in question was academically bright, had a reported IQ of 126 and was expected to graduate. When he was examined by CAT-scan, however, Lorber discovered that he had virtually no brain at all.
http://www.alternativescience.com/no_brainer.htm

 

[Anonymous]

A brain is necessary. There are conditions where the brain can be, for sake of argument, spread out (as it were) inside the cranium, however, the major areas that one would expect, are there. Mind is generated from brain.

 

[AFCSC]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A man with an unusually tiny brain managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, caused by a fluid buildup in his skull, French researchers reported on Thursday.

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.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnou ... 0020070720

 

[ramonmercado]

Heres some more on the story.
The man with a hole in his brain

Published online: 20 July 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070716-15
The man with a hole in his brain

Scans reveal a fluid-filled cavity in the brain of a normal man.

Louis Buckley

A serious case of water on the brain: scans revealed only a narrow rim of brain material.

Three years ago, a 44-year-old man was admitted to hospital in Marseille, France, complaining of weakness in his left leg. He had no idea what doctors would find to be the source of the problem: a huge pocket of fluid where most of his brain ought to be.

Normally, fluid continuously circulates throughout the brain and is drained away into the circulatory system. But in this case, the man's drainage tubes had narrowed, resulting in an accumulation of fluid in the ventricles and an enlargement of the skull due to the great volume of fluid pressing against it. This had squeezed his brain into a narrow layer around the outside of the fluid, doctors report in the Lancet1 today.

"We were very surprised when we looked for the first time the CT scan," says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University, Marseille. "The brain was very, very much smaller than normal." Nevertheless, subsequent tests showed the man to have an IQ of 75 — at the lower end of the 'normal range'.

The patient was a married father with two children and a job as a civil servant. His problems with his left leg were a neurological symptom of the condition, says Feuillet.

Water on the brain

The general condition caused by a build-up of fluid in the brain's ventricles — called hydrocephalus or 'water on the brain' — is relatively common, affecting about one in 1,000 people. It is most common in children but can affect adults too.

To release the trapped fluid doctors insert a tube called a 'shunt', allowing it to drain into the bloodstream and central nervous system. With this treatment most patients lead a fairly normal life. But neurological problems and other complications, such as brain infection and problems related to the shunt, are not uncommon. Left untreated, the condition is often fatal.

It's likely that the man in this case had hydrocephalus from birth, says Feuillet. His medical records show that he was treated with a shunt at the age of 6 months, and again at 14 years old. But without further neurological problems the extent of his condition went un-noticed for decades.

The fact that his medical record shows normal neurological development is remarkable, says Feuillet. "This case is unique to our knowledge. We have never encountered such severe hydrocephalus before."

Many other medical conditions lead to brain shrinkage, including brain atrophy from Alzheimer's disease, explains Feuillet. "But in these cases, mental abilities are usually affected." For example, people with microcephaly — a condition in which the size of the head and brain is reduced (but the structure of the brain is normal) — can suffer from cerebral palsy, epilepsy, impaired vision and hearing, and autism.

Happily, this patient has made a complete recovery following his treatment, reports Feuillet, although a subsequent scan showed no change in his brain size. So the man with the tiny brain lives on.

Visit our newsblog to read and post comments about this story.

References
Feuillet, L., Dufour, H. & Pelletier, J., et al. Lancet 370, 262 (2007).

Story from [email protected]:
http://news.nature.com//news/2007/070716/070716-15.html

http://news.nature.com//news/2007/070716/070716-15.html

 

[Yithian]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A man with an unusually tiny brain managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, caused by a fluid buildup in his skull, French researchers reported on Thursday.

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.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnou ... 0020070720

From further down that article:

Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled, either.​

​

Putting aside the usefulness of linking IQ-test scores to actual functional intelligence, an IQ of 70 is considered mentally impaired (as an IQ of 130 is often referred to as 'gifted') and these tests typically have a range of accuracy of +/-3. So although it isn't the most likely circumstance, it is perfectly plausible that his 'true IQ' is 72. These things are not like grade categories in school (nobody knows if you scraped a 'C' or missed a 'B' by 0.4%); the problems don't just kick in at 70 and 70.1 all is fine. I'd also speculate that as this reduction of the brain happened very gradually over a long period of time it would be possible for the ability to carry out repeated and habitual tasks (of which much of 'everyday life' is concerned) to be preserved, while new challenges would prove remarkably difficult. The article closes with a similar opinion:

“If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side,” added Muenke, who was not involved in the case.​

There are images of the brain scans at page linked, by the way.

 

[EnolaGaia]

The reference to the childhood hydrocephalus and associated shunt is the key here. The drainage shunt intervention permitted normal brain growth and development until the shunt was removed at age 14. The Frenchman probably made it to the last phase of brain development (circa age 18 - 22 usually ... ) before the ongoing effects of the hydrocephalus began to diminish his brain mass.

The bit that strikes me as odd is that someone with a known history of hydrocephalus wasn't being periodically monitored, possibly leading to a subsequent shunt being re-installed. I have an old friend who had such a shunt installed for the first time in her 60's, when previously diagnosed hydrocephalus elevated to problematic levels.

Anyway ... The 'mind' is a matter of the connections, not the brain per se. This man seems to have reached adulthood with a reasonable inventory of brain matter and connections. From that point onward the network architecture of his brain probably adjusted connectivity to accommodate the shrinkage, at least to the point where such adaptation couldn't forestall obvious problems.

 

[EnolaGaia]

"Is Your Brain Really Necessary?"

This famous article discussed the work of John Lorber, but over the following decades its implications have become the subject of debate.

In 1980, Roger Lewin published an article in Science, "Is Your Brain Really Necessary?",about Lorber studies on cerebral cortex losses. He included a report by Lorber, never published in any scientific journal, about the case of a Sheffield University student who had a measured IQ of 126 and passed a Mathematics Degree but who had hardly any discernible brain matter at all since his cortex was extremely reduced by hydrocephalus. The article led to the broadcast of a Yorkshire Television documentary of the same title, though it was about a different patient who had normal brain mass distributed strangely in a very large skull. Explanations have been proposed for the first student's situation, with reviewers noting that Lorber's scans evidenced that the subject's brain mass was not absent, but compacted into the small space available, possibly compressed to a greater density than regular brain tissue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lorber

 

[EnolaGaia]

This 2015 item from Discover Magazine describes the counterargument that radically diminished brain mass in hydrocephalus patients may represent compression of a (more or less) fully functional brain rather than what remains after a portion of such a brain is missing.

"Is Your Brain Really Necessary?", Revisited
By Neuroskeptic
July 26, 2015

According to British biochemist Donald R. Forsdyke in a new paper in Biological Theory, the existence of people who seem to be missing most of their brain tissue calls into question some of the “cherished assumptions” of neuroscience.

I’m not so sure. ...

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/is-your-brain-really-necessary-revisited