Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
newscientist.com
Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
#2I’ve heard that most processing in the brain happens near the surface, while the central brain regions are more connective. Is that accurate and could it be a factor here? If he’s got otherwise mostly normal brain function, my gut reaction is that maybe those connections were just displaced or formed in other ways.
Re: Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
#3I’ve heard that most processing in the brain happens near the surface, while the central brain regions are more connective. Is that accurate and could it be a factor here? If he’s got otherwise mostly normal brain function, my gut reaction is that maybe those connections were just displaced or formed in other ways.
Article says his IQ is 75, which is quite low.
Re: Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
#4I’ve heard that most processing in the brain happens near the surface, while the central brain regions are more connective. Is that accurate and could it be a factor here? If he’s got otherwise mostly normal brain function, my gut reaction is that maybe those connections were just displaced or formed in other ways.
Article says his IQ is 75, which is quite low.
Well below average, but not disablingly low. From what I understand, he functions normally, despite missing most of his brain.
Re: Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
#5This reminds me of dropout regularization where you improve a neural network by removing random neurons from the neural network.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropout_(neural_networks) and https://youtu.be/u4alGiomYP4?t=33m53s
Re: Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
#6The linked article within that story about the other person missing the entire cerebellum is also interesting.
Re: Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
#7There are a few recorded examples of this. Peter Watts had quite a good blog post on them a while back:
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116
About 50% of the examples have above average IQ (he says).
Re: Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
#8I’ve heard that most processing in the brain happens near the surface, while the central brain regions are more connective. Is that accurate and could it be a factor here? If he’s got otherwise mostly normal brain function, my gut reaction is that maybe those connections were just displaced or formed in other ways.
Article says his IQ is 75, which is quite low.
There are quite a few examples with IQs over 100 too:
Re: Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
#9Hemispherectomy patients do not decrease in IQ as much as one might assume. Typically less than 15 points. Some have no change and others even a slight improvement.
While not directly comparable, as these are brains with massive problems, you don't remove half just for the fun of it, it's still a testament to the resilience and redundancy of the organ.
Re: Man with tiny brain shocks doctors (2007)
#10This reminds me of dropout regularization where you improve a neural network by removing random neurons from the neural network. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropout_(neural_networks) and https://youtu.be/u4alGiomYP4?t=33m53s
Dropout is only used during training a neural network and also neurons are turned off not removed.