Where are you? | Education | The Guardian
Where are you?

"There's a young student at this university," neurologist Professor John Lorber of Sheffield University told Science magazine in December 1980, "who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honours degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain."

A scan revealed that the student had only 1mm of brain tissue lining the inside of his skull - fluid filled the area where the rest of his brain should have been. His was an extreme case of hydrocephalus, or "water on the brain", whereby cerebrospinal fluid fills the brain instead of circulating around it. Most sufferers can lead normal lives if regularly treated.

But if he had no brain, where was his mind?

Similar questions are raised by cases of "transplant memories". In 1988, Claire Sylvia received a heart and double-lung transplant. After the operation, she underwent some apparent personality changes: she began to have unusual (for her) cravings for beer, green peppers and chicken nuggets; she dreamed about beautiful women and experienced homosexual urges. She also dreamed of meetings with a young man called Tim.

Alarmed, Sylvia sought out her donor's family and discovered that her new organs had belonged to an 18-year-old boy, called Tim. Tim had a penchant for the same foods she was craving - he was eating chicken nuggets when he died - and Sylvia felt he was the boy in her dreams.

In the 19th century, German anatomist Leopold Auerbach observed a complex network of nerve cells in the human digestive tract. This nerve bundle, a "second brain" containing more nerve cells than the spinal cord, was recently rediscovered by Michael Gershon at Columbia University. Professor Wolfgang Prinz in Munich has also studied this, and thinks it could govern some of our emotional and physical responses to thoughts and events - hence, perhaps, "gut feelings".

Georgetown University's Dr Candace Pert has suggested that neuropeptides are linked to our sense of self. These chemicals, found in all our major organs and muscles, enable communication between the mind and body. Pert's theory is that they also carry our emotions and our memories. Is consciousness diffused throughout the body with them?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_LorberJohn Lorber

John Lorber (1915–1996) was a professor of paediatrics at the University of Sheffield from 1979 until his retirement in 1981. He worked at the Children's Hospital of Sheffield, where he became renowned for his work on spina bifida.

He is also known for his writings on medical ethics, against use of intensive medication for severely handicapped infants, and against active euthanasia.

In 1980, Roger Lewin published an article in Science, "Is Your Brain Really Necessary?",[1] about Lorber studies on cerebral cortex losses. He reports the case of a Sheffield University student who had a measured IQ of 126 and passed a Mathematics Degree but who had hardly any discernible brain matter at all since his cortex was extremely reduced by hydrocephalus.

The brain does not show up on X-Ray so it was only when brain scanning technology became available in the mid 1970s that these many cases of hydrocephalus patients with massively reduced brains came to light. Today, greatly improved standards of ante natal care mean that there are far fewer such cases for study.

The article led to the broadcast of a Yorkshire Television documentary of the same title, though it was about a different patient who had normal brain mass distributed strangely in a very large skull.[2]

However, some skeptics assert that the possibility of a mathematics student having "hardly any discernible brain matter at all" was due to an error that Lorber made when he interpreted the brain scan.[3]

David Bowsher, professor of neurophysiology at Liverpool said "Lorber's work doesn't demonstrate that we don't need a brain", and neurosurgeon Kenneth Till said that Lorber is "overdramatic when he says that someone has 'virtually no brain.'" Lorber admitted it later, saying that he "was only half serious", but defends himself with: "I can't say whether the mathematics student has a brain weighing 50 grams or 150 grams, but it is clear that it is nowhere near the normal 1.5 kilograms.". In his later years Lorber expressed great sorrow that more attention had not been paid to his sensational findings.[4]