Is the brain necessary?

[cassiopeiae]

I was listening to a lecture and there was a mention of Neurologist John Lorber and his discovery of humans functioning in society, many of which have high IQs, but virtually no brain...

Article:

Is the Brain Really Necessary?

(Or What and Where Is Consciousness)

This was the question asked by British neurologist John Lorber when he addressed a conference of pediatricians in 1980. Such a frivolous sounding question was sparked by case studies Lorber had been involved in since the mid sixties.

The case studies involve victims of an ailment known as hydrocephalus, more commonly known as water on the brain. The condition results from an abnormal build up of cerebrospinal fluid and can cause severe retardation and death if not treated.

Two young children with hydrocephalus referred to Lorber presented with normal mental development for their age. In both children, there was no evidence of a cerebral cortex. One of the children died at age three months, the second at twelve months was still following a normal development profile with the exception of the apparent lack of cerebral tissue shown by repeated medical testing. An account of the children was published in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology.

Later, a colleague at Sheffield University became aware of a young man with a larger than normal head. He was referred to Lorber even though it had not caused him any difficulty. Although the boy had an IQ of 126 and had a first class honors degree in mathematics, he had "virtually no brain".

A noninvasive measurement of radio density known as CAT scan showed the boy's skull was lined with a thin layer of brain cells to a millimeter in thickness. The rest of his skull was filled with cerebrospinal fluid. The young man continues a normal life with the exception of his knowledge that he has no brain.

Although anecdotal accounts may be found in medical literature, Lorber is the first to provide a systematic study of such cases. He has documented over 600 scans of people with hydrocephalus and has broken them into four groups:
those with nearly normal brains.
those with 50-70% of the cranium filled with CSF
those with 70-90% of the cranium filled with CSF
and the most severe group with 95% of the cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid.

Of the last group, which comprised less than ten percent of the study, half were profoundly retarded. The remaining half had IQs greater than 100.

Skeptics have claimed that it was an error of interpretation of the scans themselves. Lorber himself admits that reading a CAT scan can be tricky. He also has said that one would not make such a claim without evidence.

In answer to attacks that he has not precisely quantified the amount of brain tissue missing, he adds, "I can't say whether the mathematics student has a brain weighing 50 grams or 150 grams, but it is clear that it is nowhere near the normal 1.5 kilograms."

Many neurologists feel that this is a tribute to the brains redundancy and it's ability to reassign functions. Others, however, are not so sure. Patrick Wall, professor of anatomy at University College, London states "To talk of redundancy is a copout to get around something you don't understand."

Norman Geschwind, a neurologist at Bostons Beth Israel Hospital agrees: "Certainly the brain has a remarkable capacity for reassigning functions following trauma, but you can usually pick up some kind of deficit with the right tests, even after apparently full recovery."

Anthony Smith "The Mind" New York Viking Press, 1984, p.230

Roger Lewin "Is Your Brain Really Necessary?" Science 210 December 1980, p. 1232 --------------------------------------------------------------------


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October 30, 1993

[WolfsonJakk]

Perhaps there is another explanation? If I had no brain, I probably wouldn't bother spending too much time thinking about it.

[jimhaz]

It is rubbish.

They are not really talking about no brain or even almost no brain, but severely restricted brains.

It doesn't take much brain size to do most of the things we do. The mathematics kid has an honours degree, only because the part of his brain least affected is the processing areas, lets say the frontal lobes, and he also has sufficient segments of the brain left to store memories. I’d say the lack of a storage area may have helped him, as the processing area would become more developed and would waste far less resources ‘searching’ memory for memories relevant to what he was doing at any one time. I’ll bet you his life wasn’t really normal.

Note also that he had a larger than normal head, which if as the layer was inside that sphere would be more volume of brain matter, as compared to a normal size head.

Plus scientists make things up to produce the results they want, by making stats lie and inadequate testing. Notice that in the other 600 cases the range was up to 95%, which in the worst case scenario someone had 5% of the brain left and was probably one of the severely retarded ones. I bet you also that what they are referring to as the brain is only the grey lumpy bit not the whole brain, it was done in the 60’s-80.

[cassiopeiae]

If I can find the article, there were additional studies carried out by other scientists suggesting the same results, only the apparent portion of the brain that was actually in existence was the brainstem.