Current mood:	happy
Current music:	Drone Zone:[SomaFM]
Entry tags:	brains, science

A no-brainer
Ever since I heard about cases of anencephlia (absence of brain matter) where the sufferer is fully conscious and functional (instead of, to quote 'The Man With Two Brains', sitting in the corner and going *pttttthhhhh*), I've been trying to find actual source material to quote here.

Thanks to Nature, here is some:

"Three years ago, a 44-year-old man was admitted to hospital in Marseille, France, complaining of weakness in his left leg. He had no idea what doctors would find to be the source of the problem: a huge pocket of fluid where most of his brain ought to be.

Normally, fluid continuously circulates throughout the brain and is drained away into the circulatory system. But in this case, the man's drainage tubes had narrowed, resulting in an accumulation of fluid in the ventricles and an enlargement of the skull due to the great volume of fluid pressing against it. This had squeezed his brain into a narrow layer around the outside of the fluid, doctors report in the Lancet1 today.

"We were very surprised when we looked for the first time the CT scan," says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University, Marseille. "The brain was very, very much smaller than normal." Nevertheless, subsequent tests showed the man to have an IQ of 75 — at the lower end of the 'normal range'.

The patient was a married father with two children and a job as a civil servant. His problems with his left leg were a neurological symptom of the condition, says Feuillet."

(Insert Civil Service joke here. Yes, I used to be one. That's my excuse.)

The case I especially love - and cannot source - is of a guy whose fine apart from headaches... and only having a thin strand of neural tissue where his corpus callosum should be and the rest of his skull is filled with cerebro-spinal fluid. If anyone has a reference on that, do tell me!