6 ms·
Huh. I had a memory of reading about a human who had the same issue you quoted (I honestly have not clicked through to the article about the rat) and found an a
by saurik 7y ago
Huh. I had a memory of reading about a human who had the same issue you quoted (I honestly have not clicked through to the article about the rat) and found an article about it with images I am finding extremely familiar.
> A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.
> Scans of the 44-year-old man’s brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue (see image of the patient’s brain, above left).
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-b...
- anonytrary 7y agoWell, as promised, color me surprised. Either the brain is extremely resilient to compression, or being a human is easier than I thought...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jarfil 7y agoThe important part is the cortex, so in this case he might have lost some white matter connectivity but kept most of the gray matter structures. IQ of 75, though.
- FeepingCreature 7y agoBut see also /u/gwern's excellent writeup on these dramatic images: https://www.gwern.net/Hydrocephalus https://www.gwern.net/Hydrocephalus
- quickthrower2 7y agoInteresting piece thanks. The tl;dr is we probably need all the neurons inside our brains and evolution didn’t miss a trick to make us run on mini brains.
- foobar_ 7y agoGoddamn, that is the stuff of nightmares. I think it makes sense to think in terms of smaller neural networks that can do more. It makes sense. I don't know how Game AI Enemies are scripted but they seem to use very minimal code. This should also imply that the spinal cord is more important, as the brain is just 1/10ths ? of the nervous system.
- RankingMember 7y agoI don't understand why you and Gwern consider it to be the stuff of nightmares. It's a medical abnormality, but I don't understand the fear response.
- goto11 7y agoMaybe true depending on the definition of "entirely normal life", but an IQ of 75 indicate severe mental damage.
- tokai 7y agoNo, not severe mental damage. Most schemes would put him in the borderline category. That is he's on the cusp of being mentally impaired.