posted
"Latest in Brain Science: French neurologists writing recently in the journal The Lancet described their surprise in finding, via brain scans, that a normally functioning 44-year-old man had a brain "more than 50 percent to 75 percent" smaller than average, consisting of little more than a thin sheet of brain material surrounding a large fluid buildup. (The man is employed as a French government bureaucrat.) [New Scientist, 7-20-07"
I am also reminded of a patient mentioned by advocates of Terri Schiavo's who was very intelligent, but whose brain was similarly sized.
What is going on here? The Frenchman mentioned above has an IQ of only 75, but the Oxford student that was referenced during the Schiavo congressional hearings had a very high IQ. Can brain cells really do the kind of double, triple, or quadruple duty that is being postulated by the doctors in the wiki article I linked?
If not, what is going on?
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
***this theory is not founded on research***
Intelligence doesn't depend as much on the size of the brain, but much more on the ability of the brain to process information - or in other words - the rate at which your neurons are firing, making connections. To me it seems plausible that in the case of the French bureaucrat or Mrs. Schiavo the remaining braincells function(ed) at a higher rate than to make up for the difference.
***any corrections are welcome; always willing to learn***
Or it might just be that working as a bureaucrat turns your brains to mush. Posts: 993 | Registered: Jul 2006
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I think that there is a great deal of flexibility in *how* the brain accomplishes tasks and, because we've all got more brain than is necessary to accomplish the tasks that are put to it, most of us are running relatively inefficient "software". Perhaps some functions are redundant or are algorithmically more complex than necessary.
A smaller brain, given the same tasks, would be encouraged to find more efficient methods of performing these tasks, sort of like a programmer faced with making his application run on a computer with less memory than he had originally designed it for. He can use a number of techniques to get the same functionality out of the software on the lower-spec machine.
Posts: 3275 | Registered: May 2007
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For the record, I'm literally missing the entire right side of my brain, and I like to think I function pretty normally. Usually. I am a bit of a klutz sometimes.
Posts: 1945 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
I like how the article states that the brain is "more than 50 percent to 75 percent smaller than average." Which is it? If it's more than 75 percent, then why even mention the 50 percent part? Shouldn't it either be a "more than" or a "between" statement?
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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