"If I only had a brain" - Scarecrow / Oz

[C C]

http://mindhacks.com/2014/12/29/why-you-...f-a-brain/

EXCERPT: [...] A number of stories have appeared in the news in recent months about people with chunks of their brains missing or damaged. These cases tell a story about the mind that goes deeper than their initial shock factor. It isn’t just that we don’t understand how the brain works, but that we may be thinking about it in the entirely wrong way.

Earlier this year, a case was reported of a woman who is missing her cerebellum, a distinct structure found at the back of the brain. By some estimates the human cerebellum contains half the brain cells you have. This isn’t just brain damage – the whole structure is absent. Yet this woman lives a normal life; she graduated from school, got married and had a kid following an uneventful pregnancy and birth. A pretty standard biography for a 24-year-old.

The woman wasn’t completely unaffected [...] But the surprise is how she moves at all, missing a part of the brain that is so fundamental it evolved with the first vertebrates.

[...] This case points to a sad fact about brain science. We don’t often shout about it, but there are large gaps in even our basic understanding of the brain. We can’t agree on the function of even some of the most important brain regions, such as the cerebellum. Rare cases such as this show up that ignorance. Every so often someone walks into a hospital and their brain scan reveals the startling differences we can have inside our heads. Startling differences which may have only small observable effects on our behaviour.

Part of the problem may be our way of thinking. It is natural to see the brain as a piece of naturally selected technology, and in human technology there is often a one-to-one mapping between structure and function. [...] The case of the missing cerebellum reveals there is no such simple scheme for the brain. Although we love to talk about the brain region for vision, for hunger or for love, there are no such brain regions, because the brain isn’t technology where any function is governed by just one part.

Take another recent case, that of a man who was found to have a tapeworm in his brain. Over four years it burrowed “from one side to the other“, causing a variety of problems such as seizures, memory problems and weird smell sensations. Sounds to me like he got off lightly for having a living thing move through his brain. If the brain worked like most designed technology this wouldn’t be possible. If a worm burrowed from one side of your phone to the other, the gadget would die. Indeed, when an early electromechanical computer malfunctioned in the 1940s, an investigation revealed the problem: a moth trapped in a relay – the first actual case of a computer bug being found....

[Magical Realist]

Oh it's more than just that the brain isn't a machine. It's like if someone took out the insides of a radio and then told you to turn it on, and you did and it still played music loud and clear. That's how totally weird this gets.


"GPS tracking experts at Tracking System Direct were shocked when they came across some credible stories about people actually being able to survive while missing a substantial part of the brain, or while having almost no brain at all! One of the first reported and documented cases about a man without a brain living a normal life came to surface when John Lorber, a professor of pediatrics and Nobel Prize committee member, baffled the medical community with his findings of a boy who essentially had no brain! Under the scope of a X-ray (CAT scan), Lorber discovered that the region that normally housed a working brain was actually carrying little more than cerebrospinal fluid. However, what was most shocking about the case was that the young man grew up to have an IQ over 125, graduated with honors in mathematics and he lived a completely normal social life! Neurophysiologists were left with a loss of words as some began asking whether the brain was as necessary as many had thought it was to the life of humans?"====http://www.tracking-system.com/news/3-tr...mazes.html

"A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.

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 (see image below).

"It is hard for me [to say] exactly the percentage of reduction of the brain, since we did not use software to measure its volume. But visually, it is more than a 50% to 75% reduction," says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France.

Feuillet and his colleagues describe the case of this patient in The Lancet. He is a married father of two children, and works as a civil servant.

Not retarded

The man went to a hospital after he had mild weakness in his left leg. When Feuillet's staff took his medical history, they learned that, as an infant, he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away hydrocephalus - water on the brain.

The shunt was removed when he was 14. But the researchers decided to check the condition of his brain using computed tomography (CT) scanning technology and another type of scan called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They were astonished to see "massive enlargement" of the lateral ventricles - usually tiny chambers that hold the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the brain.

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

"The whole brain was reduced - frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes - on both left and right sides. These regions control motion, sensibility, language, vision, audition, and emotional and cognitive functions," Feuillet told New Scientist.the case."===http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12...KzNTCvF-So

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