Do no-brainers exist?

[steenkh]

On a Danish website, this article was quoted. Some of the key sentences are these:

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.

The article claims that several people have been found to live well with little brain tissue, and these people have even acquired university degrees.

It sounds like rubbish to me, and the name Rupert Sheldrake also pops up, but I would like to know if these claims are comletely made up or if there is some core of distorted truth in them.

 

[Jeff Corey]

Nope.
The brain includes many structures that are vital to life, not just the cerebral cortex.
It sounds like a variant of the "Only use 10%" legend.

 

[JamesM]

To Milton's credit, he does at least give us a name to go and look for: John Lorber of Sheffield.

I've had a look on the Web Of Knowledge, and there is a meeting abstract by him called "Is your brain really necessary" from a 1978 issue of Archives of Disease in Childhood. It appears we have that journal somewhere in our medical library, but I have no idea where the medical library is - and it is at most a page long.

He also wrote an article called "The Disposable Cortex" for Psychology Today in 1981, which seems like it might be relevant. I don't have access to that, though. It has been cited a grand total of twice. I don't have access to those papers, either, though.

And there the trail turns cold. Unless someone else with access to a better library want to take up the baton.

There were a couple of documentaries about a little while ago about a woman called Sharon Parker, who was told she would only have 10-15% of her brain capacity after a childhood operation, but MRI scans reveaed that she had in fact a slightly larger than average brain volume, albeit located much further towards the foramen magnum (the hole for the spinal column) than most of us.

 

[steenkh]

I tried to ggogle around John Lorber, and it seems he is a well-respected British neurologist. I found several references to his his research about hydrocephalus, and also a fair amount about the student with an IQ of 126 who only had 10% of the brain that others have.

While I found no criticism of his work, I also found nothing about supporting studies.

It seems that the religious people are picking up on this, because they believe that if you can have intelligence with very little brain, you could probably do the brain away entirely, except as a means to keep the body functioning, and so we can say that the intelligence is residing in the soul instead.

 

[steenkh]

I found an article in Science and Consciousness Review where it states that Lorber's research was never publicly refuted, but it also says

Talking to colleagues and contemporaries of Lorber, it was revealed he was probably greatly exaggerating the extent of brain loss in his cases. Said one source: "If the cortical mantle actually had been compressed to a couple of millimetres, it wouldn't even have shown up on his X-rays." Another agreed, adding that brain scans with modern techniques such as MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) show stretching, but not much real loss of brain weight with slow-onset hydrocephalus. He says the brain structure adapts to the space it is allowed: "The cortex and its connections are still there, even if grossly distorted."

So it seems that his research has never been taken seriuosly.

 

[CFLarsen]

Do no-brainers exist?

Sure. One is even President of the United States.

It seems that the religious people are picking up on this, because they believe that if you can have intelligence with very little brain

They personally would have to, wouldn't they?

 

[Soapy Sam]

I also looked up Lorber's work a year or so ago. I even emailed Sheffield University asking if they had further details. No response.
I believe Lorber himself has been dead for some years.

I got the impression the research was perfectly legitimate, but that there was much uncertainty about the actual amount of brain tissue present.

With improved non invasive scanning, I expect many more cases will surface.
What I find intriguing is less the amount of brain tissue than the localisation of function. Do well documented local functions map isomorphously onto a (somewhat 2-D) brain?

I aslo caught the documentary about the English nurse. It seemed she actually had a lot more brain tissue than had previously been thought.

 

[Psi Baba]

Somewhere, I have tapes of the PBS series The Brain (not to be confused with The Secret Life of the Brain--the one I'm referring to was made in the late 80s), one installment of which is about a girl whose brain was compressed against the inside of her skull, perhaps due to hydroencephaly, but I'm not certain. It's been a while since I watched that series. Brain scans on her showed her skull to appear mostly empty, but it's not that she lacked brain matter, it was all there, just compressed. When she was younger, people around her thought she would be mentally retarded (the brain deformity affected her speech, which added to this perception), but she eventually went on to acquire a college degree. I don't know recall the girl's name, so can't think of what to Google at the moment, but if anyone is interested, I'll pull the tape and take down some notes of the pertinent details. Before declaring someone to "have no brain" it's important to determine whether they are actually missing brain tissue or if it has been squashed into a smaller space.

Possible new source for the 10% myth: perhaps our brain matter fills only 10% of the skull's potential capacity! Obviously we use all of what we have, but think of what we could do with 10x more brain matter crammed into our skulls!

 

[JAK]

Somewhere, I have tapes of the PBS series The Brain (not to be confused with The Secret Life of the Brain--the one I'm referring to was made in the late 80s), one installment of which is about a girl whose brain was compressed against the inside of her skull, perhaps due to hydroencephaly, ...

I, too, saw this show. It was hydroencephaly, and her occipital lobes had taken over for much of the lost brain matter. However, the diencephalon (especially the hypothalamus) and some brainstem facets appear critical to life. Damage or loss in function of these areas could be either fatal or leave the person in a coma.

For the closest thing to a "no-brainer," go to the website for "Mike, the Headless Chicken" (http://www.miketheheadlesschicken.org/). He, supposedly, survived for 18 months after decapitation, but only because the midbrain and a few other parts of his brain were left intact: "Although most of his head was in a jar, most of his brain stem and one ear was left on his body. Since most of a chicken's reflex actions are controlled by the brain stem Mike was able to remain quite healthy."

 

[Psi Baba]

I, too, saw this show. It was hydroencephaly, and her occipital lobes had taken over for much of the lost brain matter. However, the diencephalon (especially the hypothalamus) and some brainstem facets appear critical to life. Damage or loss in function of these areas could be either fatal or leave the person in a coma.

I haven't looked at the tape yet. When you say "lost brain matter," do you mean mass or volume? The just-released autopsy on Terry Schiavo revealed that her "brain weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain." This is completely different than someone whose brain has been compacted into a smaller volume. I would think that mass, not volume, is the key to determining if someone has a complete brain or not, though obviously such compression could certainly cause damage to brain functions. The article linked to in the OP only refers to the sizes of the brains but does not say anything about their mass.

 

[JAK]

When you say "lost brain matter," do you mean mass or volume?
...

Hydrocephalus is not my area of expertise, but from what I have read, there can be compression and tissue destruction. The latter appeared to be the case in the PBS program. It would seem that having the occipital lobes take over various functions would not be necessary unless some tissue destruction occurred. The point about the occipital lobes - made in the PBS program - was to show that the brain was "plastic" in its ability to recover from various injuries. (Of course, many injuries cause permanent and irreversible damage, so "plasticity" is relative, at best.)