Is Your Brain Really Necessary?

Article from "Science" magazine about John Lorber, a scientist who claimed to have discovered certain adults with "virtually no brain" who had above-average IQs. (1983)

web.archive.org...://www.enidreed.com/serv01.htm

And another one...

www.unknowncountry.com...

Fascinating stuff. This supports Pribram's holographic brain theory...

I have often wondered how certain induhviduals have managed to survive and operate in society with a decided lack of gray matter....

Isn't it something like 25% of your brain that you use?

Hmmm?

Saying that....some of the residents i work with in mental health a very smart and i really feel that they are gifted, even though they are handicapped!

I'm gibbering now aren't i????

Wow, quite interesting. Although I know a few people who have a brain who act like there is nothing there .

Of course you can live with out a brain , its just a cooling device. So life with out it is possible, but you might need a spacesuit to regulate your temperature.
The Heart is the most important organ since it contains the very essence of your individuallity.



HAHAHA!!!!

That was the contention many, many years ago anyway.

" "When we' did a brainscan on him," Lorber recalls, "we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid."

It's an hoax, isn't it ? I'm sure it's an hoax... It MUST be an hoax.

In a debate about brain size affecting evolution and migration out of Africa, I heard that it was the number of folds in the brain, not the size. I'm sure someone here could confirm or deny this.

Just watching the Food Network and they said they tested Jell-O (EKG?) and it had the same brainwave activity of an adult human. Now if we could only get it to take an IQ test...

[Edited on 25-5-2003 by SmileyMan34]

i have a brain i think never had a cat scan or anything but i have an IQ of 151

That's to weird. I thought a brain was one of the few things that was essential, as in surgery other things can be shut down and operated by machine. But that is spooky.

Considering we use such a tiny proportion of the organ, and the degree to which we use the parts that we do is inconclusive, this comes as no great shock. I wonder what we could achieve if we could use just 50% more...

Originally posted by dragonrider
I have often wondered how certain induhviduals have managed to survive and operate in society with a decided lack of gray matter....

Very well I expect, take a look at your current President, Dubya.

Originally posted by Trader
Considering we use such a tiny proportion of the organ, and the degree to which we use the parts that we do is inconclusive, this comes as no great shock. I wonder what we could achieve if we could use just 50% more...

Sorry, but there is no scientific proof that we only use a certain percentage of our brain.

I have heard of people that have had their right side of the brain taken out. Fluid replaces what was originally there. The patient has both cognition and imagination and is also in perfect health.

Yeah, that's right... That "we use a tiny percentage of the brain" thing is an urban legend...

Bandit and 29 are correct -- the "10% of your brain" is urban legend.

Others are also correct that you CAN live with part of your brain gone, but there are SIGNIFICANT lifestyle and sensory changes that happen as a result. Cognition changes, word usage is affected, and your ability to process information changes.

The report does raise some questions and doesn't give any details about this "higher than normal IQ population" (and UP is right... that's not the normal distribution; half are profoundly retarded, and half above normal. Something is odd there.) Are they physically handicapped, for instance. Are there speech and other problems?

It's interesting, and I'd like to see other research on it.

Note that spina bifida is a congenital condition. These children were born this way. You could not remove 90% of an adult's brain mass and see no impact.

Now I have reason to believe that this is all a hoax. What do you guys think??

Same here. when you refer to "I" you're reffering to your brain. your whole body's purpose is to keep your brain alive. You are your brain and vice versa.

The left part of the brain is very analytical, whereas the right part of the brain is for more artistic type of stuff. The right brain cannot speak in words.

They two halves of the brain are connected by a huge bundle of fibers. If you sever this bundle, the person will still seem normal but if you have them do certain things, their brain halves will interfere with each other. For example, they did an experiment on people who had both halves separated, due to seizures. They had the people focus on a spot on a screen, then flashed two pictures, one on each side of the screen, before these people.

Each brain half controls the opposite side of the body (left brain controls right side, right brain controls left side). On the left side of the screen was an image of a spoon I think, on the right side, a knife. When asked what image the person had seen, since the left brain (controlling the right eye) can respond with spoken language, it confidently stated that there was a knife shown.

The person was then asked to feel behind a curtain with their left hand for the object they saw. This is where it got realyl interesting. The person pulled out a spoon. They then asked the person why they pulled out a spoon instead of the knife, since they saw the knife.

The right brain was controlling the left hand, and since the halves were separated, they functioned on their own. The right brain knew it was wrong, but since it can't speak with spoken language, the person couldn't respond with words. Instead, they just shook their head.

Each half of the brain has its own capabilties and is in a sense its own version of the same person. You really have two versions of yourself in a sense, inside your head. Normally, they work together. If one half of the brain can perform a task a lot better than the other half, the other half will shut down. But if the halves are separated, they work as if each one is the only brain in the head in some sense.

One of the really neat things about the brain is that it is excrutiatingly slow in terms of performing normal calculator-like computer calculations, which is why computers can figure out complex mathematical problems at far greater speeds than the human brain.

YET, the brain is INGENIOUSLY designed to perform highly, HIGHLY-advanced parallel processing, which is needed for things like facial recognition and so forth. Modern, man-made computers are incredibly weak at this, which is why they can't recognize faces anywhere near as well as a human brain.

One of the amazing things about the field of artificial intelligence in computer science is it shows just how insanely complex of a problem many rather seemingly simple-seeming brain functions are, which shows just how amazing the brain really is.

What I want to know is if you could build a clone of yourself without a brain, then take one half of your own brain out and stick it into that clone, would that clone be another version of you, but limited in its thinking?

If that clone recieved the right brain, would it lack speech? Or would it be able to speak, albeit in a limited manner? Would it steal all of your artistic abilities if it had the right brain and you had the analytical left?

it sure would be neat talking to another version of yourself for accomplishing what you thought was impossible. What's realyl funny is you both would be the same person talking to each other, just a slightly different version.

The original version would be like, "Wow, it worked, the clone has half a brain," and the clone would be like, "Wow, I successfully transported myself into a clone body!"

There is probably a bunch of science that goes against something like that, but it's still fun to think about.

WheelsRCool

Thats intresting lol...probably due to the fact it near 5am and im still up doing my honour report for uni (Computer Science you made me reply lol)

I always thought the brain over time adapted to change eg loosing part of its self it would create new pathways or something to try solve the issue.

Also is'nt the brain actually rather fast computationally its us that are generally lazy....because you can train yourself to do mathmatics fast...Believe in China or least Asian country this occurs (Remember it from tv program about the dude that can do maths and pi up to some rediclious number)

AI is fantastic area depending on the area you are intrested in...recently done OWL at uni which is used or least form of the genome data and virus structure...which was rather intresting if not confusing.

I do sort of believe that we do not use our full mental ability due to our nature of being lazy....its like a computer you need to train it to do something faster bit like a recursive algorithm or a program to find quickest route it need several attempts before it pull off the same route every time.

if none of that made sence lol forgive me I aint slept in months...week to go on my course and my report (guide of 10,000 words) is at 16,000 words and I am trying to get diagrams done lol and it making me crackers...

Im never doing computer science again lol...even if im on course for a first or 2:1

Originally posted by TheBandit795
Now I have reason to believe that this is all a hoax. What do you guys think??

I'm calling it Really Bad Science. I may have to come up with some sort of image (like the O RLY owl in a tinfoil hat) and a link to "What Makes For Bad Science" for stuff like this.

[edit on 23-4-2006 by Byrd]