Man found missing 90% of his brain defies scientific understanding - most of his skull is filled with water:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61127-1/fulltext
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I ran a lot of MRIs for my PhD. I saw somewhere around 100-200 different brains. About 10% of them had abnormalities. Of all the technicians, scientists, and (non-clinical) doctors I spoke with, we all agreed this was a very high rate of discovery. All my friends graduated without seeing anything weird. My advisor liked to joke that I was cursed. Eventually I stopped inviting my friends to do my experiments because I didn’t want to deal with the risk of them having an abnormality - thanks to some combination of HIPAA and medical liability laws, I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it, even if asked point blank. I didn’t like that very much.
I made one exception, as a friend of mine came in for a study and I saw a golf ball sized cyst in his sinus. He had it surgically removed and he told me he stopped snoring the next day. It felt good to make a difference for him.
But, I saw one brain similar to the one documented here. It belongs to one of my close friends. It was harrowing. Entire left hemisphere was malformed, the ventricles were way too big and the cortex was way too thin. But the right side of his brain was underdeveloped, maybe the size of a tennis ball.
The weirdest part, he is 100% normal. In fact, he competed at a high level of college athletics. Normal Cognition, normal motor function, great sense of humor, and a very caring person. Now he has a great job, wife and kid, and we hang out often. But I can’t bring myself to say anything, and every time I see his son I wonder about his brain.
I’m a Neuroradiologist and occasionally people ask me “Have you ever scanned your own brain?” when they find out my profession.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. I’ve seen how many people have random abnormalities that are unknown until discovered incidentally when having an unrelated problem evaluated. Finding something abnormal in my brain would no doubt keep me up at night even if it was something medically considered unimportant. No way I’m going to scan myself just for fun.
I think I read that brains like these are basically normal in terms of structure and number of neurons, just compressed by the extra fluid pressure.
He’s not 100% normal, you just haven’t experienced the things he cannot process properly or at all, which is likely a lot of higher reasoning… They just don’t affect his day to day, which gives us clues that day to day functioning is very low level and likely mostly autonomous.
Eh, college is hard and so was his sport. Sure, it’s not an exhaustive battery of testing but I’m confident to say he’s a normal dude.
My advisor liked to joke that I was cursed.
It didn’t have quite the same level of personal impact, but I used to associate with a geologist who said something similar about me and geodes.
Kept finding geodes filled with fresh human blood huh?
“Fresh” might be a stretch.
Average middle manager
If we could just let go of the Yakubian myth that more brains = smarter, this wouldn’t be so surprising.
Yaaay, new nightmare unlocked!
Weird, you can just make out letters in one angle, i see a M and G… Was the subject wearing a hat during the scan?
