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I’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.
The linked article within that story about the other person missing the entire cerebellum is also interesting.
The article on absent cerebellum says 50% of neurons are there, clearly a smaller cross-sectional area is missing but this statement serves to increase the magnitude of the issue to the layman ... but in the article where it appears most of the cerebellum is present this key point on brain structure isn't noted; that would reduce the apparent magnitude of the injury.
That may be happenstance, or otherwise unintentional, of course.
I’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.
This 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.
For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull. [...] The image hails from a 1980 [...]
Anyway to actually trace back that patient? Do we know who he is (I would like to read about his story and daily life; nothing creepy).
Do we know if he/she is still alive??
What is the minimum viable human brain? If our brains are indeed highly-redundant scale-free networks, would it be possible to eliminate a precisely targeted 99% of neurons without significant degradation? Can we simulate 1% of a brain on today's supercomputers? How about emulating an existing brain? Do animals have the raw hardware to match or exceed human intelligence? Can we download human 'software' into modified animals instead of machines? Are we already being simulated?
This would keep me up at night too.