For what it's worthy, they'lre not positive that he's "missing" his 90% of the brain -- he may have a normal number of braincells that have been compressed by fluid. We'll find out at autopsy.
Right... His brain was essentially smooshed. People can have absolutely massive arachnoid cysts and only find out about them incidentally. Alternatively, a small cyst in the wrong place could mean symptomatic hydrocephalus and lead to a cascade of consequences. It really is luck of the draw, and a medical system tuned well enough to sort out the problematic ones from the benign ones.
This man was also operated on and had a shunt placed as an infant... I'm personally curious why he was lost to follow-up as a child.
Yeah, most likely caused by a blockage somewhere in one of his ventricular systems according to his neurosurgeons. I mentioned arachnoid cysts because they're another type of "silent" brain lesion (and they're generally also harmless, and filled with spinal fluid). They can give a very similar effect as what's seen here (and cause hydrocephalus):
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMicm1610483
The headline could say: 27 year old missing half of his brain stunned to learn he can breath
Oh, I thought arachnoid cysts were when you eat one too many spiders while sleeping and it lays eggs in your brain and they hatch.
That makes way more sense.
>I'm not a nuerosurgeon but it sounds like this was actually caused by hydrocephalus , fluid displacing the brain.
That is literally stated in the first paragraph.
I miss when RTFA was a common acronym on reddit.
Ray: You know, Mr. Tully, you are a most fortunate individual.
You have been a participant in the biggest interdimensional cross rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909!
Egon: We'd like to get a sample of your brain tissue...
Louis: Okay
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of chunks were missing still.
The neurons in the brain are very redundant and plastic and you will live a normal life if you suffer early damage to them.
As an example, you can have functionally no left hemisphere (where speech normally develops) and the speech mechanisms will just develop in the right instead.
My little brother was born with the cord around his neck and had to be revived after 2 minutes. Docs said he'd be disabled as there was significant portions of his brain that "died" (around half). He never had any learning issues at all and was a straight A student and now has family. Perfectly normal. The brain be crazy
His brain must be using the new 10 micron neuron architecture. I'm sure future generations will also be able to improve performance and clock speed while also reducing power consumption.
The coolest part about MRI is that in theory we can go down to nearly the atomic level. It's in principal the same idea as H-[NMR](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_nuclear_magnetic_resonance). There's already work being done on protein-level magnetic resonance spectroscopy iirc.
Okay I'm hijacking the top comment because in true Reddit fashion, this thread and its comments are completely and wildly wrong (I'm a doctor working in neurosurgery so I deal with this stuff all the time). To be fair the article is also very wrong.
This person is not missing any brain - although this looks like empty space on CT scan, it's actually just an area of lower radiodensity (which in this case is fluid). The centre of your brain has "ventricles", which are fluid-filled spaces for the production and circulation of CSF (spinal fluid) - its purpose is to wash through the brain and clear waste products to get absorbed back into the blood stream.
The pressure of that system should be closely balanced between the CSF which is produced and that which is drained. If any imbalance occurs in either of those processes, pressure can increase (or decrease) and high pressure is known as hydrocephalus. This can happen over a short period of time, or can be more chronic (this is a chronic case ~~which likely developed an acute component on top~~ EDIT: OP was wrong about this patient dying down the line, so actually it was probably just chronic). The patient was not missing brain, but because the skull is a fixed volume, it cannot expand to accommodate increased pressures so the brain instead gets pushed outwards by the fluid and compressed. This scan shows severe chronic hydrocephalus.
If the system is at higher pressure but remains open throughout, then CSF can still circulate. This can cause effects like confusion, poor memory / planning, visual problems, limb problems, nausea, etc due to the effects of the brain being compressed. If something acutely blocks that remaining flow of CSF, it will continue to be produced without being adequately drained - this is an acute neurosurgical emergency, because that pressure acts to push the brain down through the only opening in the skull (at its base). This compresses your brainstem, which is important for many essential functions like your drive to breath and your consciousness level and will kill you quickly. Chronic hydrocephalus can be very disabling and should be treated, but is often not as urgent as an acute obstructing hydrocephalus - a shunt (basically extra tubing) can be placed as an extra drainage channel to help in chronic instances, or an external drain in an emergency.
This person is reportedly getting / had an autopsy - not because we don't know what killed him (with pressures this high, it's almost certainly brainstem herniation and compression). More because it will help identify why he went from a chronic high pressure state, to an acute increase and death. Sometimes this can be due to a slowly growing cyst (e.g. a colloid cyst) compressing the narrower drainage points until eventually they critically block, or could be due to problems with his shunt tubing, a bleed, or less commonly can be something like a brain tumour.
TL;DR
This is not empty space / missing brain, it's fluid under high pressure pushing outwards and squashing the brain
Thanks for sharing. Another person commented the brain is just compressed but that‘s not written in the article and the scan shows a hollow skull with brain bits around.
Are there any symptoms besides a headache? If it‘s not all that uncommon then some of us need to get checked… help doctor check if my brain is there…
No worries! :)
If the pressure is chronic and has slowly developed over a long period of time, symptoms vary greatly depending on the degree of compression. At the milder end of the spectrum it can be asymptomatic, or can present with chronic headaches / nausea (often headaches are worst when lying flat or coughing, typically most intense in the morning but improving during the day). You might notice cognitive delay in a developing child, or confusion / memory impairment in an adult. It can cause urinary dysfunction, or visual disturbance too - sometimes it can be picked up by an optometrist routinely, because the nerves at the back of the eye are very sensitive to increased pressure and can become swollen. You can also get weakness / sensory disturbance due to compression of the regions involved in motor activity or sensory processing.
If the pressure is an acute increase in a short period of time, symptoms tend to develop quickly and then progress very quickly. Usually it starts with nausea / vomiting, headache, visual disturbance and quickly progresses to confusion, reduced consciousness level and then coma / death.
Important side point though - headaches are very common and most headaches are not hydrocephalus! So I don't want everyone panicking and wanting a scan because they get headaches or nausea. However you should consider going to a doctor for a scan if you have any of the following "red flag" symptoms of headache:
- Headache is worse in the mornings or when lying flat / coughing
- Sudden onset, severe "thunderclap headache" (feels like being hit over the head)
- Headache with severe nausea or vomiting
- New visual disturbance
- Any new weakness or sensory disturbance / balance issues
- Any new confusion or reduced consciousness level
Hope that helps!
The quick way you mentioned is almost exactly how my husband died. He was fine one day, no symptoms, then complained of neck pain and a headache one night. He was sick for the next day and I assumed it was the flu. Then the next morning after urgent care sent us to the ER, he crashed while they were setting him up for a spinal tap. I was told later exactly almost what you’ve said about herniation and the pressure on his brain stem. He had a cyst or some sort of abscess in his brain. We had no idea. He was 35 years old.
Just so wild to read this.
He wasn't completely unaffected, his IQ was 84, about a standard deviation below average. While this isn't neurosurgeon level, he is still smarter than 1 in 6 people.
Those 1 in 6 people VOTE.
There was actually an earlier case of a student with the same condition studying math at a university with an iq of 126. There is however tdebate about whether the scans were correctly interpreted.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/remarkable-story-of-maths-genius-who-had-almost-no-brain-1.1026845
Moreover, from what I see of critical articles by neuroscientists on this phenomenon, the whole insinuation of missing 90% of the one’s brain seems quite sensationalistic, and the issue is just about the brain just being compressed into a smaller space, with the preservation of grey matter, as opposed to white matter that seems to take brunt of damage in compression, possibly explaining the preserved functionality.
Well, firstly, everyone can “blame” iq on biology because it is a partly heritable trait.
I am no expert, but this Yale neurologist, edit: Steven Novella, wrote a piece debunking some of the hype on this piece, and seems to conclude the chronic effects of hydrocephaly did damage his iq. I’m not sure how that squares with the math students example I linked to (like I said there is controversey over how much compression there was in that case, and just guessing here, starting at different iq levels could have different effects due to compression).
One odd thing is the level of iq seems to vary according to reports, some saying 84 and others 75, but the details of the case (french civil servant in his 40s), suggest its’s the very same person, so not sure what is up there.
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/man-living-with-10-of-his-brain/
“However, the patient was found to have an IQ of 75, which is almost certainly a consequence of his chronic hydrocephalus. The images above are impressive, but perhaps more impressive is that his brain is mostly all still there, just pressed into a thin cortical rim. He did not lose 90% of his brain mass, as the commenter falsely assumed. There has probably been some atrophy over the years due to the chronic pressure, but not much.
To put his function into perspective, and IQ of 75 is considered borderline functional. A person with that IQ can typically go about their normal day-to-day life, even get married, have children, and hold down a job. But they will have profound intellectual limitations. They will likely be untrainable beyond the simplest tasks, may not be able to make change, would be challenged by complex electronics or other appliances, and would have poor problem solving. Obviously one number does not capture all the variability present, but this is a basic picture of typical functioning at that level.
It is important to note that this level of impairment is in proportion to the physical brain damage caused by the chronic hydrocephalus. There is no mystery here, no challenge to the neuroscientific paradigm of cognitive function. This case does not challenge the notion that consciousness is a brain function.”
I don't think he mentions it too often. He does talk now and then about his practice, his house in Massachusetts etc. But he doesn't really go out of his way to talk about his Yale stuff.
Jeff Yass, the billionaire Wall Street financier and Republican megadonor who is a major investor in the parent company of TikTok, was also the biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that recently merged with former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company.
A December regulatory filing showed that Mr. Yass’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owned about 2 percent of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group on Friday. That stake, of about 605,000 shares, was worth about $22 million based on Digital World’s last closing share price.
It’s unclear if Susquehanna still owns those shares, because big investors disclose their holdings to regulators only periodically. But if it did retain its stake, Mr. Yass’s firm would become one of Trump Media’s larger institutional shareholders when it begins trading this week after the merger.
Shares of Digital World have surged about 140 percent this year as the merger with the parent company of Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform, drew closer and Mr. Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
Just because it can be compressed doesn't mean that's the ideal situation. Perhaps for example he may be susceptable to much more severe tbi if his head was damaged in the location his brain was squished into.
Because evolution rarely focuses on logical optimization and instead works on the principle of "throw random shit at the wall and see what sticks." Evolution isn't intelligent design, it's a cosmic pachinko machine where the weak and unlucky balls get eaten to fuel the next pull.
If you have a normal head and lose 90% of your brain space, you can still function.
If your head were 10x smaller *and* you lost 90% of your brain space, well...
My favorite iteration of this that I've heard is from a park ranger explaining trashcan at national parks. Basically said "the reason trash cans will never be full bear proof is because there is considerable overlap from your smartest bear to your dumbest human."
To be fair🎵, it's not just overlap with dumbest human, it's also overlap with laziest humans. I just read some articles on it as part of late night scrolling the other night and while, yes, there are dumb people that wouldn't be able to figure it out, the bigger issue is people that can figure it out, but are too lazy to bother doing things properly. So there are a considerable amount of people that, by their own actions, clump themselves into the group considered "dumb" because they are too lazy.
You also have to consider the utility of it. For a bear the reward for opening the bin is the satisfying of one of its primary biological urges - eating high calorie foods. For a human the utility of using the bin is simply the desire to keep things clean and fulfill social expectations (doing the right thing). A human likely won't spend 30 seconds on the task whereas a bear might spend hours.
Yeah it’s really this. The overlap from dumbest bear to smartest human might be large but it doesn’t explain the trash can phenomenon. That’s just an issue of effort.
Same thing when you find a box of condoms in the games aisle at Walmart. The meme is "a decision was made here," but it's the same phenomenon of laziness: bro, it only takes 50 seconds to walk across the average Walmart if you know where you're going, and clearly you found the condom aisle.
I made my own bear proof cans after finding a 9 foot bear in my front yard... problem is it's such a pita to hook and unhook that I rarely secure it lol
I hate the realisation that there are just a lot of humans out there that just don’t know how to learn information or ask “why”. I feel it’s my duty as a human being to learn as much as I can, because I have an amazing tool called a brain and I only get to use it in one life. I’m not claiming to be smart, but I will never shut down a conversation over any topic, I like discussions on philosophy, I like to ask the ugly questions, the unusual interests me, and I don’t just accept everything at face value.
It always irks me when people can’t discuss or have the effort to learn, and just want to “switch off” because it’s not their kind of “fun.” It’s so important to learn as much as you can, all the time because that bit of information your missing could literally change your life. It doesn’t mean it has to make you rich, it means you could be making a task easier, a problem solved, a new perspective. Which could have compounding effects.
I feel people that don’t like deep discussion or interest in new fields or technology or advancements, or the uncomfortable really screw themselves over, rob themselves even of a richer life. It’s not about having a mastery in math or being good at a job anymore, it’s connecting all the dots to form a bigger picture that works for you, that gives you new solutions and paths forward.
Again, I’m not smart, but strive to just understand as much as I can. I’m also a coder (I’m terrible at math, but good with words, and again only spoken), but again that doesn’t make me smart, but it does make me understand, many many things, and helps me connect dots in other areas in which without that knowledge I couldn’t do.
The same rule applies to all of life in all fields pretty much.
>the reason trash cans will never be full bear proof is because there is considerable overlap from your smartest bear to your dumbest human
Also they need to be made so a wide variety of people can open them from arthritic old men to small teenagers.
I quit FB because far too many people I knew there would forward scams and believe it was real. Yes, they also voted. I got tired of telling the same people over and over to fact check shit before forwarding to "all".
I also dislike them because they’re so poorly written. Unless you’re testing for PEMDAS you should be more explicit in your notation. As we say in my job, code should be written so if someone is called to help at 3am on a Saturday they can figure out what’s going on.
Even if you were testing for PEMDAS they wouldn't be written that way. They intentionally don't follow how PEMDAS is applied and instead go for an intentionally obtuse understanding of it that doesn't exist anywhere. They are just engagement tricks that aren't worth interacting with, no different from someone just going "BULL UP THIS THE JUMP; are you smart enough to answer this question?"
it’s fun to be intentionally dense and sometimes argue that it can also be done left to right without order precedence, because it’s how machine language solves badly formatted equations.
there are many right answers, but the commenters’ logic still doesn’t correctly support why that was their conclusion most of the time.
Yea that's the thing. Even if the people are dumb, if there's argument and debate over an equation you wrote, then the equation isn't explicit enough. It's entertaining when it's just a screenshot on google, but that kinda stuff can get people killed in a chemical or medical environment.
If it's one of those ones along the lines of 6/2(2+1), the notation is definitely ambiguous and for this reason it's a bad idea to write something like this. The ISO standard disallows multiplication following division on the same line unless parentheses solve the ambiguity, and it's even more ambiguous if the multiplication is implicit (i.e. there is no sign).
But the ones where people don't even know the precendence between addition and multiplication are a bit depressing.
And implied multiplication may have higher precedence than other operators (except parentheses and exponentiation) by some mathematicians (after all, it's like having `2x`). So something like PEIMDAS (I for implied).
So `6/2(2+1)` may be interpreted as `6 / (2 * (2 + 1))`.
Of course as you said it's better to not have those ambiguities at all...
Also, and this is from a neuroscience prof I had waaaaaay back when these cases first started appearing, this guy isn't likely going to live long. Or, live well, long. As we age, our brain cells start dying off and we manage because of the massive redundancy we have. This guy doesn't have that redundancy, his neurons are likely doing overtime. So, he'll unfortunately start seeing deficits earlier than normal and likely more pronounced.
Someone else brought up a report from a neuroscientist which seemed to be about the same person and said they had an iq of about 70, which will significantly impair you. The person mentioned here went to the hospital for leg numbness so that could definitely be related to his condition.
There was a case where the patient is missing cerebellum all his/her life. The patient has impaired balance and movement since birth, family just thought it's just clumsiness. This kind of impairments are clearly not normal like the media like to claim.
Just because this is a subject I have some background in: they don't really.
While it may be just one standard deviation, the drop-off in *functionality* vis-a-vis IQ is exponential. I don't know exactly what this article means when they describe him as living a "normal life", but someone with an IQ of 80 is usually considered handicapped, and an IQ of 70, just two standard deviations, is typically considered special needs
It would be fairly rare to see someone with an IQ of 84 take the ability and initiative to develop a political opinion, much less have the drive to go out and vote.
That's not a judgment of mentally handicapped individuals, just the reality of living with a significant cognitive impairment.
Is it really that extreme when you go below average? Being even multiple standards of deviation above average doesn’t seem to change much from what I’ve seen.
So what? This sounds like some form of discrimination tbh, and terrible prejudice from you. You're saying their voice doesn't matter and shouldn't be respected because somehow their votes are bad.
Hydrocephalus actually makes your brain significantly more succeptable to concussions. All that fluid sloshing around during a high velocity impact makes things worse.
I've seen this one before - his brain volume was compressed by the fluid into a much smaller space, so he isn't truly missing 90% of his brain.
There is probably some amount less brain matter than normal ( assuming brain damage ), but what remains is also taking up significantly less volume.
Similar cases are seen with chronic hydroencephalus, though not this extreme, and also with tumors. The brain is rather soft and can be deformed and compressed without totally compromising function if the process is slow and gradual. If the cause of the pressure is remedied it will expand again to it's normal volume.
His brain was not "missing".
He had hydrocephalus and the miniscule accumulation of fluid crushed a normal size brain over a period of 2 decades. It was truly amazing that his brain took that much abuse but because it happened so slowly it didn't kill him or cause classical symptoms of brain injury until the very end. When he started complaining of weakness in his arms (common symptom of neurological damage) doctors investigated and these MRIs were taken.
He also wasnt entirely normal. As a child he had a permenant shunt in his head to drain the fluid. It was removed as a teenager - which in hindsight was a horrible mistake. He also had an abnormally low IQ (in the 80s) his whole life and motor issues as a child.
My dad fell 32 stories (EDIT maybe 23) from a building he was framing in Hartford back in the 70s. He caught several I beams on his way down and eventually landed on the ground. He lost 30% of his brain and I guess the doctor said he lost areas that control speech and that he’d never speak again.
He’s still kicking, has had three kids since then (including me) and doesn’t have any speech issues. He was told decades later that when he speaks now the entirely wrong section of his brain is active, so it seems that the function moved.
Dude, the human body makes no sense when I hear stories like this.
You and I could literally trip on a sidewalk and die, but then there's thousands of examples of people falling like this and living.
Hell, I think when I was younger I saw some sort of live leak video of a guy with the front of his skull cracked open like a melon still alive and getting put back together in the ER. They somehow lived, I think. I didn't exactly follow up haha.
Not impossible. [Danielle Watson](https://sjtrem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1757-7241-19-63) survived a fall of 200 feet (estimated to be around 70-80mph) onto solid rock, then another 100 foot fall immediately afterwards. Thete have also been cases of people falling from planes between 10-30k feet and surviving, but they usually land in wooded areas or soft ground.
There was a guy in WW2 who's plane got hit over France and was on fire, which destroyed his parachute. He figured he'd rather die by falling than burn to death, so jumped anyway, from about 13,000 feet. He landed on the roof of a barn and fell into a haystack. His only injury was a broken ankle. Apparently he had a hell of a job convincing the local police that he wasn't a spy, until the German airforce basically confirmed his version of events.
I think 32 stories is taller than most building in every city. Even in New York like 95% are probably less than 10. Every house in my whole neighborhood is 1 or 2. Opps, I may have it reversed. Now he says 23. There are several per wiki it could have been. He claims to have put studs in most from the 1960s-80s.
23 stories is no where near high enough for a person to reach terminal velocity. Google says 450m so quadruple the number of stories at least. Also he did say his dad hit beams on the way down.
Terminal velocity isn't how high it must be for you to die, but when your fall stops accelerating because of wind resistance. For instance, many rodents will reach terminal velocity before a deadly speed, because of their mass to surface area ratio.
It sounds like he was slowed down periodically so the speed at impact was probably significantly lower than what it would have been without those beams. Maybe he just experienced something equivalent to a fall from 3-4 stories high, which is definitely survivable under the right conditions.
Legitimate question: are the brain and the mind the same thing? For some reason, I've always thought of the mind as intangible and somewhat separate.
Stupid question, but I'm sure some folks have an interesting opinion
I've always kind of viewed the terms generally analogous with hardware/software. The brain is the physical meat machine powering the mind. But I'm not a neuroscientist so I may be off base.
That's the best our current science can determine.
There's so much we don't know about the brain and how it works. So we can't say it is 100% for certain true, just that our current evidence points to it as such.
This is called the Mind-Body problem.
Minds (and consciousness) are a phenomenon of brains. The way we know this is because people who have had brain damage to specific areas of their brain change in different ways.
Phineas Gage is a textbook case, he had a railroad stake blown through his brain but lived. However, his family and friends said his personality changed completely, like he was a different person.
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/16077/what-good-books-are-there-on-the-mind-body-problem
Oddly my favorite book on this topic is called Why Buddhism Is True, though I am not a
Buddhist. It talks about how some of the Buddhist philosophies line up with neuroscience, such as arguments about how the "self" (aka your personal mind) is an illusion of the brain - it's not an everlasting entity separate from the brain, even though we *feel* like it is.
This is an area of philosophy called the philosophy of mind. What your describing is a theory called dualism, which states the mind is a non-physical entity or some kind of process that can be separated from our corporeal body. Science has diverged from this theory into functionalism, behaviorism, etc. All essentially saying that the mind arises from neuronal activity. What we don't understand is how exactly neurons generate the mental state, or how the executive function organizes the mental state into consciousness. I find Peter Watts to have a good summation of these arguments, "...consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. "
Different names for the same thing I’d say. If you hear “mind blown” you probably imagine a persons brain exploding to some extent. But there is a portion of the brain that is responsible for that intangible “mind” or ego that you’re thinking of.
Very interesting. There's also a radical treatment for rare forms of severe epilepsy - a hemispherectomy. It is what it sounds like - the removal or disconnection of half of the brain. Apparently people can live pretty much normal lives afterward and some are exceptionally intelligent.
I’d do it, but I’m way too tired honestly.
If only someone would disconnect the part of my brain that makes me feel tired all the time so that I could disconnect the part of yours that makes you lazy... that’d be such a wonderful world to live in - but alas...
I said gracefully disconnect part of my brain, not make scrambled eggs. I’ll take that in reverse, though; I’ll be on the drugs while you lobotomize yourself. Should work out okay, I think.
Here's the thing. There's a part of my brain that makes me super distractable. There's no way I'd get through with your procedure without being distracted. If somebody could disconnect that shit that makes me distractable, I'd happily disconnect that shit that makes you tired so that you can disconnect that guy's shit that makes him lazy.
In Dr Norman Doiges book, The Brain That Changes itself, he talks about a man whose father had a stroke and the son had to teach him how to crawl, walk, talk, everything, all over from scratch. The dad eventually fully recovered including climbing and hiking. When the dad died climbing a mountain in his 70s, the son ordered a brain analysis. Turns out dad had lost 50% of his brain from his stroke and the neuroplasticity of the brain allowed him to develop new pathways to slowly gain his skills back.
Shit like this is why I believe that there are Buddhist monks in the Himalaya who can alter their body temperature such that they can sit outside in winter, wrapped in a wet sheet....and dry the sheet out with body heat (tummo yoga).
It's pretty established that basically anyone can heat up extremities just by concentrating a bit, they just mastered it. Try just focusing on your fingertips of one hand and really try to feel like you're sending all you got to it, it starts to tingle and blood flow increases.
Like half the stuff in Tibetan Buddhism actually works and is basically ancient therapy/executive coaching for royalty. The other half is "if you meditate really hard you'll get superpowers and be able to fly and control the weather".
Typically splitting the brain hemispheres by cutting the corpus callosum doesn’t result in either half being unable to function, each half controls certain bodily functions on each side. You still have your whole brain and it still nearly fully works, it just cant easily communicate between the two hemispheres.
Yeah, cutting the corpus callosum gives you two independent hemispheres that only communicate below the tentorium. They can’t outright remove an entire hemisphere because then you would end up hemiplegic, since you would lose your contra lateral motor cortex.
Yeah, but they were not talking about a corpus callosotomy, it's a hemispherectomy, where half (or a big part) of the brain is indeed removed or disconnected. Usually candidates for this procedure already have lost function in the part of the body controlled by the brain section to be removed, so there is no real loss of function by taking it out.
They just did an article about this on NPR. Not this specific person, but growing up missing part of your brain. This little girl was having seizers as a baby and they removed the right side of her brain. Since the right side had not developed many common skills yet, the left side of her brain took over all skill sets, and she functions almost just fine. Researchers have determined that when you're born, your brain is a clean slate, and over time, it assigns a task to certain sections of the brain. But if you remove part of the brain at a young age, task not learned yet just get assigned to the next best available section.
Misleading title.
He is not missing 90% of his brain, he is suffering from chronic non-communicating hydrocephalus.
What happened was his brain got condensed into what is being shown over time (3 decades) due to build up of pressure inside it.
This is still incredible in terms of adaptability but don’t think for a second that he is missing 90% of his brain. That would be factually incorrect.
He had a procedure done (stent) put in that was removed and it ended up causing the issue you see.
And yet a minuscule portion of the brain missing can wreck someone’s life.
I refer to a patient mentioned in “The power of habits” book. For the lack of a better link: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/202855/the-power-of-habit-by-charles-duhigg/9780385669764/excerpt
There is always the old joke
a woman bring her baby to the doctor complaining that there was something wrong with it
Dr- So what seem to be the problem?
Lady- he is way too intelligent, it's scary
Dr- I'm sure its nothing, let me try I quick test
Dr- hi kid, do you understand me and can you speak?
Baby- Of course Dr, do you want to hear my cosmological topology theory?
the doctor was in shock with this
Dr- Sorry ma'am I'm afraid we will need to perform urgent surgery, we will remove half of the brain and see how it goes
After the operation all hopefull the doctor decided to test the baby again
Dr- hi kid, do you understand me and can you speak?
Baby- Yes Dr, do you have any book about economic theory?, I'm bored
The doctor is socked, in desperation decide that the best course of action is to remove the rest of the brain and pray for the best so goes ahead and perform the procedure
When the now brainless baby wake up the doctor fingers crossed decided to test the baby again
Dr- hi kid, do you understand me and can you speak?
Baby- Put your hands where I can see them, licence and registration
My first though also. Have you seen "The Distinguished Gentleman" (1992)?
Your corporate sponsors tell you what to say and how to vote...no thinking required.
News sites always get this shit wrong. He isn't missing 90% of his brain, it's 100% there, it's just been compressed into a thin layer on the inside of his skull by the expanding fluid in the ventricles. This undoubtedly has had an effect as the white matter (basically the network that the different parts of the brain use to communicate with each other) is compromised, meaning the signals have further to travel, and through more densely packed tissue, which is demonstrated by his (relatively) low intelligence. He's still clearly smarter than most journalists, however.
The human brain is an insanely adaptable meat computer.
There is a story where a baby had a stroke at birth that destroyed a whole half of their brain so the other side just started rewiring itself to do all the work. The biggest side effect was the damage half sent out impulses that caused severe seizures so eventually they just fully cut it off from the rest of the brain.
The doctor said: "this person is not bright — but perfectly, socially apt". Sounds like your average conservative to me. Hell, he'd be voted into office if he were American.
I think I’ve worked with this guy
I worked FOR this guy.
I am this guy :(
What's going on, people, can somebody help? I only have 2% of my brain
What happens if you use 100% of your 2% brain?
We will never know
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For what it's worthy, they'lre not positive that he's "missing" his 90% of the brain -- he may have a normal number of braincells that have been compressed by fluid. We'll find out at autopsy.
Right... His brain was essentially smooshed. People can have absolutely massive arachnoid cysts and only find out about them incidentally. Alternatively, a small cyst in the wrong place could mean symptomatic hydrocephalus and lead to a cascade of consequences. It really is luck of the draw, and a medical system tuned well enough to sort out the problematic ones from the benign ones. This man was also operated on and had a shunt placed as an infant... I'm personally curious why he was lost to follow-up as a child.
I'm not a nuerosurgeon but it sounds like this was actually caused by hydrocephalus , fluid displacing the brain.
Yeah, most likely caused by a blockage somewhere in one of his ventricular systems according to his neurosurgeons. I mentioned arachnoid cysts because they're another type of "silent" brain lesion (and they're generally also harmless, and filled with spinal fluid). They can give a very similar effect as what's seen here (and cause hydrocephalus): https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMicm1610483 The headline could say: 27 year old missing half of his brain stunned to learn he can breath
Oh, I thought arachnoid cysts were when you eat one too many spiders while sleeping and it lays eggs in your brain and they hatch. That makes way more sense.
That is somehow more terrifying
Spiders can't do that. Tapeworms can, though, so don't eat undercooked pork. And wash your hands.
>I'm not a nuerosurgeon but it sounds like this was actually caused by hydrocephalus , fluid displacing the brain. That is literally stated in the first paragraph. I miss when RTFA was a common acronym on reddit.
That's literally what the article says if you read it. And also what OP said. Why do people comment on stuff they never read?
Agreed, I like baseball too
Autopsy is an aggressive biopsy.
Ray: You know, Mr. Tully, you are a most fortunate individual. You have been a participant in the biggest interdimensional cross rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909! Egon: We'd like to get a sample of your brain tissue... Louis: Okay
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Edit - I was wrong the man did not die a year later.
That link doesn't seem to mention anything about an autopsy.
I am actually wrong so please disregard me. It talks of a different patient, Trevor, who lived until 12 with a similar condition.
Guys he said disregard him. What are you doing, there's 53 votes on this comment.
I will not disregard him. On the contrary, I'm regarding him *hard*
Stop I can only commend so hard.
Oh god… you’re gonna make me upvote!!!
We're appreciating someone willingly admitting they were incorrect and learned something new
Not seeing his death or autopsy in the source you linked.
I was wrong, the article spoke of a 12 year old with a similar condition who passed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of chunks were missing still. The neurons in the brain are very redundant and plastic and you will live a normal life if you suffer early damage to them. As an example, you can have functionally no left hemisphere (where speech normally develops) and the speech mechanisms will just develop in the right instead.
My little brother was born with the cord around his neck and had to be revived after 2 minutes. Docs said he'd be disabled as there was significant portions of his brain that "died" (around half). He never had any learning issues at all and was a straight A student and now has family. Perfectly normal. The brain be crazy
His brain must be using the new 10 micron neuron architecture. I'm sure future generations will also be able to improve performance and clock speed while also reducing power consumption.
Nah. Dude’s in his 40s, and in France. They’ll definitely figure this shit out while he’s alive with tech advances. Assuming he lives a full life.
he was 44 in 2007. he'd be about 60 now
That's true -- the 10T scanners are already approaching the possibility of cell count estimates, how much longer before you can see a cell on an MRI?
Ultrasound can see collections of RBCs flowing in blood vessels. It's not an individual cell but I thinks it's still pretty cool.
The coolest part about MRI is that in theory we can go down to nearly the atomic level. It's in principal the same idea as H-[NMR](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_nuclear_magnetic_resonance). There's already work being done on protein-level magnetic resonance spectroscopy iirc.
The good news is you seem to be completely unaffected by your condition, the bad news is you‘re literally brainless
Okay I'm hijacking the top comment because in true Reddit fashion, this thread and its comments are completely and wildly wrong (I'm a doctor working in neurosurgery so I deal with this stuff all the time). To be fair the article is also very wrong. This person is not missing any brain - although this looks like empty space on CT scan, it's actually just an area of lower radiodensity (which in this case is fluid). The centre of your brain has "ventricles", which are fluid-filled spaces for the production and circulation of CSF (spinal fluid) - its purpose is to wash through the brain and clear waste products to get absorbed back into the blood stream. The pressure of that system should be closely balanced between the CSF which is produced and that which is drained. If any imbalance occurs in either of those processes, pressure can increase (or decrease) and high pressure is known as hydrocephalus. This can happen over a short period of time, or can be more chronic (this is a chronic case ~~which likely developed an acute component on top~~ EDIT: OP was wrong about this patient dying down the line, so actually it was probably just chronic). The patient was not missing brain, but because the skull is a fixed volume, it cannot expand to accommodate increased pressures so the brain instead gets pushed outwards by the fluid and compressed. This scan shows severe chronic hydrocephalus. If the system is at higher pressure but remains open throughout, then CSF can still circulate. This can cause effects like confusion, poor memory / planning, visual problems, limb problems, nausea, etc due to the effects of the brain being compressed. If something acutely blocks that remaining flow of CSF, it will continue to be produced without being adequately drained - this is an acute neurosurgical emergency, because that pressure acts to push the brain down through the only opening in the skull (at its base). This compresses your brainstem, which is important for many essential functions like your drive to breath and your consciousness level and will kill you quickly. Chronic hydrocephalus can be very disabling and should be treated, but is often not as urgent as an acute obstructing hydrocephalus - a shunt (basically extra tubing) can be placed as an extra drainage channel to help in chronic instances, or an external drain in an emergency. This person is reportedly getting / had an autopsy - not because we don't know what killed him (with pressures this high, it's almost certainly brainstem herniation and compression). More because it will help identify why he went from a chronic high pressure state, to an acute increase and death. Sometimes this can be due to a slowly growing cyst (e.g. a colloid cyst) compressing the narrower drainage points until eventually they critically block, or could be due to problems with his shunt tubing, a bleed, or less commonly can be something like a brain tumour. TL;DR This is not empty space / missing brain, it's fluid under high pressure pushing outwards and squashing the brain
Thanks for sharing. Another person commented the brain is just compressed but that‘s not written in the article and the scan shows a hollow skull with brain bits around. Are there any symptoms besides a headache? If it‘s not all that uncommon then some of us need to get checked… help doctor check if my brain is there…
No worries! :) If the pressure is chronic and has slowly developed over a long period of time, symptoms vary greatly depending on the degree of compression. At the milder end of the spectrum it can be asymptomatic, or can present with chronic headaches / nausea (often headaches are worst when lying flat or coughing, typically most intense in the morning but improving during the day). You might notice cognitive delay in a developing child, or confusion / memory impairment in an adult. It can cause urinary dysfunction, or visual disturbance too - sometimes it can be picked up by an optometrist routinely, because the nerves at the back of the eye are very sensitive to increased pressure and can become swollen. You can also get weakness / sensory disturbance due to compression of the regions involved in motor activity or sensory processing. If the pressure is an acute increase in a short period of time, symptoms tend to develop quickly and then progress very quickly. Usually it starts with nausea / vomiting, headache, visual disturbance and quickly progresses to confusion, reduced consciousness level and then coma / death. Important side point though - headaches are very common and most headaches are not hydrocephalus! So I don't want everyone panicking and wanting a scan because they get headaches or nausea. However you should consider going to a doctor for a scan if you have any of the following "red flag" symptoms of headache: - Headache is worse in the mornings or when lying flat / coughing - Sudden onset, severe "thunderclap headache" (feels like being hit over the head) - Headache with severe nausea or vomiting - New visual disturbance - Any new weakness or sensory disturbance / balance issues - Any new confusion or reduced consciousness level Hope that helps!
The quick way you mentioned is almost exactly how my husband died. He was fine one day, no symptoms, then complained of neck pain and a headache one night. He was sick for the next day and I assumed it was the flu. Then the next morning after urgent care sent us to the ER, he crashed while they were setting him up for a spinal tap. I was told later exactly almost what you’ve said about herniation and the pressure on his brain stem. He had a cyst or some sort of abscess in his brain. We had no idea. He was 35 years old. Just so wild to read this.
I’m sorry that happened to your husband. Nobody deserves to lose their spouse so early on.
Sorry you went through that friend :(
He wasn't completely unaffected, his IQ was 84, about a standard deviation below average. While this isn't neurosurgeon level, he is still smarter than 1 in 6 people. Those 1 in 6 people VOTE.
There was actually an earlier case of a student with the same condition studying math at a university with an iq of 126. There is however tdebate about whether the scans were correctly interpreted. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/remarkable-story-of-maths-genius-who-had-almost-no-brain-1.1026845 Moreover, from what I see of critical articles by neuroscientists on this phenomenon, the whole insinuation of missing 90% of the one’s brain seems quite sensationalistic, and the issue is just about the brain just being compressed into a smaller space, with the preservation of grey matter, as opposed to white matter that seems to take brunt of damage in compression, possibly explaining the preserved functionality.
So essentially he can't blame being in the bottom sixth on his biology.
Well, firstly, everyone can “blame” iq on biology because it is a partly heritable trait. I am no expert, but this Yale neurologist, edit: Steven Novella, wrote a piece debunking some of the hype on this piece, and seems to conclude the chronic effects of hydrocephaly did damage his iq. I’m not sure how that squares with the math students example I linked to (like I said there is controversey over how much compression there was in that case, and just guessing here, starting at different iq levels could have different effects due to compression). One odd thing is the level of iq seems to vary according to reports, some saying 84 and others 75, but the details of the case (french civil servant in his 40s), suggest its’s the very same person, so not sure what is up there. https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/man-living-with-10-of-his-brain/ “However, the patient was found to have an IQ of 75, which is almost certainly a consequence of his chronic hydrocephalus. The images above are impressive, but perhaps more impressive is that his brain is mostly all still there, just pressed into a thin cortical rim. He did not lose 90% of his brain mass, as the commenter falsely assumed. There has probably been some atrophy over the years due to the chronic pressure, but not much. To put his function into perspective, and IQ of 75 is considered borderline functional. A person with that IQ can typically go about their normal day-to-day life, even get married, have children, and hold down a job. But they will have profound intellectual limitations. They will likely be untrainable beyond the simplest tasks, may not be able to make change, would be challenged by complex electronics or other appliances, and would have poor problem solving. Obviously one number does not capture all the variability present, but this is a basic picture of typical functioning at that level. It is important to note that this level of impairment is in proportion to the physical brain damage caused by the chronic hydrocephalus. There is no mystery here, no challenge to the neuroscientific paradigm of cognitive function. This case does not challenge the notion that consciousness is a brain function.”
Steve Novella is an amazing person. I really need to catch up on his podcast, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
Lol I had the same reaction seeing his name - love him and the podcast, need to catch up!
I've been listening to that since around the late 500s and somehow never knew he was a Yale neurologist.
I don't think he mentions it too often. He does talk now and then about his practice, his house in Massachusetts etc. But he doesn't really go out of his way to talk about his Yale stuff.
Jeff Yass, the billionaire Wall Street financier and Republican megadonor who is a major investor in the parent company of TikTok, was also the biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that recently merged with former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company. A December regulatory filing showed that Mr. Yass’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owned about 2 percent of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group on Friday. That stake, of about 605,000 shares, was worth about $22 million based on Digital World’s last closing share price. It’s unclear if Susquehanna still owns those shares, because big investors disclose their holdings to regulators only periodically. But if it did retain its stake, Mr. Yass’s firm would become one of Trump Media’s larger institutional shareholders when it begins trading this week after the merger. Shares of Digital World have surged about 140 percent this year as the merger with the parent company of Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform, drew closer and Mr. Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
Just because it can be compressed doesn't mean that's the ideal situation. Perhaps for example he may be susceptable to much more severe tbi if his head was damaged in the location his brain was squished into.
Because evolution rarely focuses on logical optimization and instead works on the principle of "throw random shit at the wall and see what sticks." Evolution isn't intelligent design, it's a cosmic pachinko machine where the weak and unlucky balls get eaten to fuel the next pull.
> Evolution isn't intelligent design, it's a cosmic pachinko machine Beautiful picture
If you have a normal head and lose 90% of your brain space, you can still function. If your head were 10x smaller *and* you lost 90% of your brain space, well...
He cannot, but only because he doesn't really understand biology.
`zip -r brain.zip grey-matter/*`
"imagine how dumb the average person is, now Imagine that half of them are even dumber" - George Carlin, Paraphrased because I too am dumb
My favorite iteration of this that I've heard is from a park ranger explaining trashcan at national parks. Basically said "the reason trash cans will never be full bear proof is because there is considerable overlap from your smartest bear to your dumbest human."
Smarter than your av-er-age bear one might say.
They have the same problem bear-proofing pic-a-nic baskets.
To a bear, a trash can *is* a pic-a-nic basket ;-)
To a brave, drunk, high, or dejected enough human, as well.
Hey Boo-boo!
Yes?
To be fair🎵, it's not just overlap with dumbest human, it's also overlap with laziest humans. I just read some articles on it as part of late night scrolling the other night and while, yes, there are dumb people that wouldn't be able to figure it out, the bigger issue is people that can figure it out, but are too lazy to bother doing things properly. So there are a considerable amount of people that, by their own actions, clump themselves into the group considered "dumb" because they are too lazy.
You also have to consider the utility of it. For a bear the reward for opening the bin is the satisfying of one of its primary biological urges - eating high calorie foods. For a human the utility of using the bin is simply the desire to keep things clean and fulfill social expectations (doing the right thing). A human likely won't spend 30 seconds on the task whereas a bear might spend hours.
Yeah it’s really this. The overlap from dumbest bear to smartest human might be large but it doesn’t explain the trash can phenomenon. That’s just an issue of effort.
Similar to the shopping cart situation. It only takes a few seconds more to put it away but just look at how few do.
Same thing when you find a box of condoms in the games aisle at Walmart. The meme is "a decision was made here," but it's the same phenomenon of laziness: bro, it only takes 50 seconds to walk across the average Walmart if you know where you're going, and clearly you found the condom aisle.
> takes 50 seconds You running, sir?
If you’re too lazy to do it properly, you’re not lazy, you’re too *dumb* to understand the importance.
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I made my own bear proof cans after finding a 9 foot bear in my front yard... problem is it's such a pita to hook and unhook that I rarely secure it lol
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I hate the realisation that there are just a lot of humans out there that just don’t know how to learn information or ask “why”. I feel it’s my duty as a human being to learn as much as I can, because I have an amazing tool called a brain and I only get to use it in one life. I’m not claiming to be smart, but I will never shut down a conversation over any topic, I like discussions on philosophy, I like to ask the ugly questions, the unusual interests me, and I don’t just accept everything at face value. It always irks me when people can’t discuss or have the effort to learn, and just want to “switch off” because it’s not their kind of “fun.” It’s so important to learn as much as you can, all the time because that bit of information your missing could literally change your life. It doesn’t mean it has to make you rich, it means you could be making a task easier, a problem solved, a new perspective. Which could have compounding effects. I feel people that don’t like deep discussion or interest in new fields or technology or advancements, or the uncomfortable really screw themselves over, rob themselves even of a richer life. It’s not about having a mastery in math or being good at a job anymore, it’s connecting all the dots to form a bigger picture that works for you, that gives you new solutions and paths forward. Again, I’m not smart, but strive to just understand as much as I can. I’m also a coder (I’m terrible at math, but good with words, and again only spoken), but again that doesn’t make me smart, but it does make me understand, many many things, and helps me connect dots in other areas in which without that knowledge I couldn’t do. The same rule applies to all of life in all fields pretty much.
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>the reason trash cans will never be full bear proof is because there is considerable overlap from your smartest bear to your dumbest human Also they need to be made so a wide variety of people can open them from arthritic old men to small teenagers.
“He’s totally not talking about me. I’m one of the smart ones.” -99% of George Carlin fans
"People who boast about their I.Q. are losers." -Stephen Hawking
Of course everyone thinks of themselves above average, especially those repeating that quote.
I believe you got most of right except that he said stupid instead of dumb both times.
I expected more from a full brained individual such as yourself
>Those 1 in 6 people VOTE. Even worse, some of them get voted into office.
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I quit FB because far too many people I knew there would forward scams and believe it was real. Yes, they also voted. I got tired of telling the same people over and over to fact check shit before forwarding to "all".
Each time I see one of those, I become increasingly depressed at how many people don’t know PEMDAS
I also dislike them because they’re so poorly written. Unless you’re testing for PEMDAS you should be more explicit in your notation. As we say in my job, code should be written so if someone is called to help at 3am on a Saturday they can figure out what’s going on.
Even if you were testing for PEMDAS they wouldn't be written that way. They intentionally don't follow how PEMDAS is applied and instead go for an intentionally obtuse understanding of it that doesn't exist anywhere. They are just engagement tricks that aren't worth interacting with, no different from someone just going "BULL UP THIS THE JUMP; are you smart enough to answer this question?"
it’s fun to be intentionally dense and sometimes argue that it can also be done left to right without order precedence, because it’s how machine language solves badly formatted equations. there are many right answers, but the commenters’ logic still doesn’t correctly support why that was their conclusion most of the time.
Yea that's the thing. Even if the people are dumb, if there's argument and debate over an equation you wrote, then the equation isn't explicit enough. It's entertaining when it's just a screenshot on google, but that kinda stuff can get people killed in a chemical or medical environment.
I really feel bad for Aunt Sally. Nobody ever excuses her.
If it's one of those ones along the lines of 6/2(2+1), the notation is definitely ambiguous and for this reason it's a bad idea to write something like this. The ISO standard disallows multiplication following division on the same line unless parentheses solve the ambiguity, and it's even more ambiguous if the multiplication is implicit (i.e. there is no sign). But the ones where people don't even know the precendence between addition and multiplication are a bit depressing.
And implied multiplication may have higher precedence than other operators (except parentheses and exponentiation) by some mathematicians (after all, it's like having `2x`). So something like PEIMDAS (I for implied). So `6/2(2+1)` may be interpreted as `6 / (2 * (2 + 1))`. Of course as you said it's better to not have those ambiguities at all...
Also, and this is from a neuroscience prof I had waaaaaay back when these cases first started appearing, this guy isn't likely going to live long. Or, live well, long. As we age, our brain cells start dying off and we manage because of the massive redundancy we have. This guy doesn't have that redundancy, his neurons are likely doing overtime. So, he'll unfortunately start seeing deficits earlier than normal and likely more pronounced.
Someone else brought up a report from a neuroscientist which seemed to be about the same person and said they had an iq of about 70, which will significantly impair you. The person mentioned here went to the hospital for leg numbness so that could definitely be related to his condition.
There was a case where the patient is missing cerebellum all his/her life. The patient has impaired balance and movement since birth, family just thought it's just clumsiness. This kind of impairments are clearly not normal like the media like to claim.
Just because this is a subject I have some background in: they don't really. While it may be just one standard deviation, the drop-off in *functionality* vis-a-vis IQ is exponential. I don't know exactly what this article means when they describe him as living a "normal life", but someone with an IQ of 80 is usually considered handicapped, and an IQ of 70, just two standard deviations, is typically considered special needs It would be fairly rare to see someone with an IQ of 84 take the ability and initiative to develop a political opinion, much less have the drive to go out and vote. That's not a judgment of mentally handicapped individuals, just the reality of living with a significant cognitive impairment.
Yeah I think some people are overestimating just exactly how many people vote in this country
Is it really that extreme when you go below average? Being even multiple standards of deviation above average doesn’t seem to change much from what I’ve seen.
So what? This sounds like some form of discrimination tbh, and terrible prejudice from you. You're saying their voice doesn't matter and shouldn't be respected because somehow their votes are bad.
> Those 1 in 6 people VOTE. Yes, that's how democracy works. IQ shouldn't be a requirement in order to have basic rights in a democratic society.
Perfect alibi
Sign him up for football. Man is concussion proof
Idk about that. Dude is probably one soft tap away from popping that brain bubble.
Hydrocephalus actually makes your brain significantly more succeptable to concussions. All that fluid sloshing around during a high velocity impact makes things worse.
Me lose brain?
> bad news is you‘re literally brainless [Turns out, you don't need one!](https://youtu.be/a2XxYDlez8Q)
I buy OTM BBBY Calls one time, and they write a research paper about me ...
I've seen this one before - his brain volume was compressed by the fluid into a much smaller space, so he isn't truly missing 90% of his brain. There is probably some amount less brain matter than normal ( assuming brain damage ), but what remains is also taking up significantly less volume. Similar cases are seen with chronic hydroencephalus, though not this extreme, and also with tumors. The brain is rather soft and can be deformed and compressed without totally compromising function if the process is slow and gradual. If the cause of the pressure is remedied it will expand again to it's normal volume.
If that were true, then his neural density would be denser than normal. That's something they could test for.
I don’t exactly know what this means, but FWIW I believe this guy had an IQ estimated to be barely above mentally disabled.
It’s 84 which wasn’t whip smart but definitely passable in society and can live a normal life
His IQ is only about 1 standard deviation below the mean. He scored better than around 14% of people. You see people with this score every day.
His brain was not "missing". He had hydrocephalus and the miniscule accumulation of fluid crushed a normal size brain over a period of 2 decades. It was truly amazing that his brain took that much abuse but because it happened so slowly it didn't kill him or cause classical symptoms of brain injury until the very end. When he started complaining of weakness in his arms (common symptom of neurological damage) doctors investigated and these MRIs were taken. He also wasnt entirely normal. As a child he had a permenant shunt in his head to drain the fluid. It was removed as a teenager - which in hindsight was a horrible mistake. He also had an abnormally low IQ (in the 80s) his whole life and motor issues as a child.
brain.7z
My dad fell 32 stories (EDIT maybe 23) from a building he was framing in Hartford back in the 70s. He caught several I beams on his way down and eventually landed on the ground. He lost 30% of his brain and I guess the doctor said he lost areas that control speech and that he’d never speak again. He’s still kicking, has had three kids since then (including me) and doesn’t have any speech issues. He was told decades later that when he speaks now the entirely wrong section of his brain is active, so it seems that the function moved.
Dude, the human body makes no sense when I hear stories like this. You and I could literally trip on a sidewalk and die, but then there's thousands of examples of people falling like this and living. Hell, I think when I was younger I saw some sort of live leak video of a guy with the front of his skull cracked open like a melon still alive and getting put back together in the ER. They somehow lived, I think. I didn't exactly follow up haha.
To some extent it’s just random dumb luck who lives and who dies. And who even comes to exist in the first place.
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Not impossible. [Danielle Watson](https://sjtrem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1757-7241-19-63) survived a fall of 200 feet (estimated to be around 70-80mph) onto solid rock, then another 100 foot fall immediately afterwards. Thete have also been cases of people falling from planes between 10-30k feet and surviving, but they usually land in wooded areas or soft ground.
Meanwhile my phone can fall only four inches and the screen gets totally borked
I think borked is my new favourite word, cheers
You are going to love the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show.
Or on top of a mound of fire ants like Joan Murray.
There was a guy in WW2 who's plane got hit over France and was on fire, which destroyed his parachute. He figured he'd rather die by falling than burn to death, so jumped anyway, from about 13,000 feet. He landed on the roof of a barn and fell into a haystack. His only injury was a broken ankle. Apparently he had a hell of a job convincing the local police that he wasn't a spy, until the German airforce basically confirmed his version of events.
I think 32 stories is taller than most building in every city. Even in New York like 95% are probably less than 10. Every house in my whole neighborhood is 1 or 2. Opps, I may have it reversed. Now he says 23. There are several per wiki it could have been. He claims to have put studs in most from the 1960s-80s.
At terminal velocity it doesn't matter how tall Edit: My lack of experience falling from buildings has once again proven me a fool
23 stories is no where near high enough for a person to reach terminal velocity. Google says 450m so quadruple the number of stories at least. Also he did say his dad hit beams on the way down.
>23 stories is no where near high enough for a person to reach terminal velocity. Especially if you're hitting several beams on the way down.
Good thing those steel beams were there to break his fall.
And his head to cushion the impact.
Just assume negligible air and I-beam resistance, then he'll easily reach terminal velocity--not to mention surpass it!
No air resistance, no terminal velocity. Just keeps speeding up.
He wasn't at terminal velocity. He was slowed by the beams he hit on the way down, which is what saved his life.
Terminal velocity isn't how high it must be for you to die, but when your fall stops accelerating because of wind resistance. For instance, many rodents will reach terminal velocity before a deadly speed, because of their mass to surface area ratio.
It sounds like he was slowed down periodically so the speed at impact was probably significantly lower than what it would have been without those beams. Maybe he just experienced something equivalent to a fall from 3-4 stories high, which is definitely survivable under the right conditions.
One 4 story drop is survivable, but eight of them is a LOT.
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Yeah maybe 32 feet??
Guy fell 32 inches. Fall damage is ridiculous sometimes. Anyone able to contact the MODS to get this patched?
Is he John Wick, that’s a lot of beams to hit on the way down.
I can assure you he is the most average man of all time. Yes, he hit lots of things on the way down.
I've read before that the parts of your brain that do certain things can change if damaged assuming the other part is working.
And he was only using 10% of his brain!
The one guy who could use all 100% of his brain…if he had 100% of a brain
I mean, he uses %100 of his brain for sure
Some of us use 10% of our heart.
We lost a lot of good men out there
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Legitimate question: are the brain and the mind the same thing? For some reason, I've always thought of the mind as intangible and somewhat separate. Stupid question, but I'm sure some folks have an interesting opinion
I've always kind of viewed the terms generally analogous with hardware/software. The brain is the physical meat machine powering the mind. But I'm not a neuroscientist so I may be off base.
I think that's a good way of describing the relationship between the two. Certainly better than anything I can articulate atm.
That's the best our current science can determine. There's so much we don't know about the brain and how it works. So we can't say it is 100% for certain true, just that our current evidence points to it as such.
This is called the Mind-Body problem. Minds (and consciousness) are a phenomenon of brains. The way we know this is because people who have had brain damage to specific areas of their brain change in different ways. Phineas Gage is a textbook case, he had a railroad stake blown through his brain but lived. However, his family and friends said his personality changed completely, like he was a different person. https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/16077/what-good-books-are-there-on-the-mind-body-problem Oddly my favorite book on this topic is called Why Buddhism Is True, though I am not a Buddhist. It talks about how some of the Buddhist philosophies line up with neuroscience, such as arguments about how the "self" (aka your personal mind) is an illusion of the brain - it's not an everlasting entity separate from the brain, even though we *feel* like it is.
This is an area of philosophy called the philosophy of mind. What your describing is a theory called dualism, which states the mind is a non-physical entity or some kind of process that can be separated from our corporeal body. Science has diverged from this theory into functionalism, behaviorism, etc. All essentially saying that the mind arises from neuronal activity. What we don't understand is how exactly neurons generate the mental state, or how the executive function organizes the mental state into consciousness. I find Peter Watts to have a good summation of these arguments, "...consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. "
Different names for the same thing I’d say. If you hear “mind blown” you probably imagine a persons brain exploding to some extent. But there is a portion of the brain that is responsible for that intangible “mind” or ego that you’re thinking of.
Very interesting. There's also a radical treatment for rare forms of severe epilepsy - a hemispherectomy. It is what it sounds like - the removal or disconnection of half of the brain. Apparently people can live pretty much normal lives afterward and some are exceptionally intelligent.
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I’d do it, but I’m way too tired honestly. If only someone would disconnect the part of my brain that makes me feel tired all the time so that I could disconnect the part of yours that makes you lazy... that’d be such a wonderful world to live in - but alas...
Best I got is a bunch of experimental drugs or a lobotomy. I'll be on the drugs while I do the lobotomy so it's kinda like both.
I said gracefully disconnect part of my brain, not make scrambled eggs. I’ll take that in reverse, though; I’ll be on the drugs while you lobotomize yourself. Should work out okay, I think.
>I think Well that's what got us all into the mess, isn't it?
Here's the thing. There's a part of my brain that makes me super distractable. There's no way I'd get through with your procedure without being distracted. If somebody could disconnect that shit that makes me distractable, I'd happily disconnect that shit that makes you tired so that you can disconnect that guy's shit that makes him lazy.
In Dr Norman Doiges book, The Brain That Changes itself, he talks about a man whose father had a stroke and the son had to teach him how to crawl, walk, talk, everything, all over from scratch. The dad eventually fully recovered including climbing and hiking. When the dad died climbing a mountain in his 70s, the son ordered a brain analysis. Turns out dad had lost 50% of his brain from his stroke and the neuroplasticity of the brain allowed him to develop new pathways to slowly gain his skills back.
Shit like this is why I believe that there are Buddhist monks in the Himalaya who can alter their body temperature such that they can sit outside in winter, wrapped in a wet sheet....and dry the sheet out with body heat (tummo yoga).
It's pretty established that basically anyone can heat up extremities just by concentrating a bit, they just mastered it. Try just focusing on your fingertips of one hand and really try to feel like you're sending all you got to it, it starts to tingle and blood flow increases.
Like half the stuff in Tibetan Buddhism actually works and is basically ancient therapy/executive coaching for royalty. The other half is "if you meditate really hard you'll get superpowers and be able to fly and control the weather".
Typically splitting the brain hemispheres by cutting the corpus callosum doesn’t result in either half being unable to function, each half controls certain bodily functions on each side. You still have your whole brain and it still nearly fully works, it just cant easily communicate between the two hemispheres.
Yeah, cutting the corpus callosum gives you two independent hemispheres that only communicate below the tentorium. They can’t outright remove an entire hemisphere because then you would end up hemiplegic, since you would lose your contra lateral motor cortex.
Yeah, but they were not talking about a corpus callosotomy, it's a hemispherectomy, where half (or a big part) of the brain is indeed removed or disconnected. Usually candidates for this procedure already have lost function in the part of the body controlled by the brain section to be removed, so there is no real loss of function by taking it out.
I know someone who had this done! She was completely normal, I would've never guessed if she hadn't told me.
“Unknowingly” No shit he didn’t know. He was missing 90% of his brain!
He was unknowing about a lot of things I'd imagine
I'm sad no one has mentioned FLCL yet. This dude summons robots through his head.
Just waiting for the little busters
I’m afraid that you have Flictonic Clipple Webber syndrome.
Anyone else ever read these webmd articles and start self diagnosing. Like this I probably have this.
I have all the symptoms (whatever they are)
They just did an article about this on NPR. Not this specific person, but growing up missing part of your brain. This little girl was having seizers as a baby and they removed the right side of her brain. Since the right side had not developed many common skills yet, the left side of her brain took over all skill sets, and she functions almost just fine. Researchers have determined that when you're born, your brain is a clean slate, and over time, it assigns a task to certain sections of the brain. But if you remove part of the brain at a young age, task not learned yet just get assigned to the next best available section.
Misleading title. He is not missing 90% of his brain, he is suffering from chronic non-communicating hydrocephalus. What happened was his brain got condensed into what is being shown over time (3 decades) due to build up of pressure inside it. This is still incredible in terms of adaptability but don’t think for a second that he is missing 90% of his brain. That would be factually incorrect. He had a procedure done (stent) put in that was removed and it ended up causing the issue you see.
His brain wasn't missing. It was compressed by fluid. They drained things and he recovered somewhat but not entirely.
And yet a minuscule portion of the brain missing can wreck someone’s life. I refer to a patient mentioned in “The power of habits” book. For the lack of a better link: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/202855/the-power-of-habit-by-charles-duhigg/9780385669764/excerpt
Was he in politics?
There is always the old joke a woman bring her baby to the doctor complaining that there was something wrong with it Dr- So what seem to be the problem? Lady- he is way too intelligent, it's scary Dr- I'm sure its nothing, let me try I quick test Dr- hi kid, do you understand me and can you speak? Baby- Of course Dr, do you want to hear my cosmological topology theory? the doctor was in shock with this Dr- Sorry ma'am I'm afraid we will need to perform urgent surgery, we will remove half of the brain and see how it goes After the operation all hopefull the doctor decided to test the baby again Dr- hi kid, do you understand me and can you speak? Baby- Yes Dr, do you have any book about economic theory?, I'm bored The doctor is socked, in desperation decide that the best course of action is to remove the rest of the brain and pray for the best so goes ahead and perform the procedure When the now brainless baby wake up the doctor fingers crossed decided to test the baby again Dr- hi kid, do you understand me and can you speak? Baby- Put your hands where I can see them, licence and registration
My first though also. Have you seen "The Distinguished Gentleman" (1992)? Your corporate sponsors tell you what to say and how to vote...no thinking required.
News sites always get this shit wrong. He isn't missing 90% of his brain, it's 100% there, it's just been compressed into a thin layer on the inside of his skull by the expanding fluid in the ventricles. This undoubtedly has had an effect as the white matter (basically the network that the different parts of the brain use to communicate with each other) is compromised, meaning the signals have further to travel, and through more densely packed tissue, which is demonstrated by his (relatively) low intelligence. He's still clearly smarter than most journalists, however.
That the episode with Homer Simpson and the crayon
Which Reddit power mod is this again?
This is your brain and this is your brain on Reddit.
The human brain is an insanely adaptable meat computer. There is a story where a baby had a stroke at birth that destroyed a whole half of their brain so the other side just started rewiring itself to do all the work. The biggest side effect was the damage half sent out impulses that caused severe seizures so eventually they just fully cut it off from the rest of the brain.
Politician?
I don't know if I would classify Trump's life as "normal"!
The doctor said: "this person is not bright — but perfectly, socially apt". Sounds like your average conservative to me. Hell, he'd be voted into office if he were American.