23 ms·
Woman of 24 found to have no cerebellum in her brain
- clueless123 12y agoThat is nothing... I know of several politicians that have no brain at all, and no one has noticed yet. jk,jk
- timle 12y agoI have always found it fascinating that the cerebellum has more neurons than the rest of the brain. What the heck is going on in there.
- toblender 12y agoTalk about living on "Hard" mode.
- z3t4 12y agoA friend of mine lost the left side of his brain ... And he's all right now!
- otoburb 12y ago>"[...] the woman joins an elite club of just nine people who are known to have lived without their entire cerebellum. A detailed description of how the disorder affects a living adult is almost non-existent, say doctors from the Chinese hospital, because most people with the condition die at a young age and the problem is only discovered on autopsy." Is this woman the only one of the nine to have lived this long? Incredible given how critical the cerebellum is.
- mrb 12y agoThis is fascinating considering that the cerebellum contains more neurons than the rest of the brain(!) (source: http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s3/chapter05.html http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s3/chapter05.html). I wonder what other problems she experiences (the article only says she started speaking and walking at age 6-7).
- thanatropism 12y agoThe cerebellum is a much more primitive neural network, though. It's feed-forward only - it actually looks like a tree in MRIs - so it's a lot harder to encode anything. Normal neural networks ("connectomes") in the brain are massively interconnected in all directions, which allows for parallel computation; with the tree-like, feed-forward-only architecture of the cerebellum, neurons from different "branches" don't communicate.
- pionar 12y agoInteresting. How was it determined that they're feed-forward-only? Can signals not travel back down the "tree"? (Note, I'm not even an amateur neurologist).
- thanatropism 12y agoIt's a different kind of neuron altogether. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum_granule_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum_granule_cell
- jrkelly 12y agoThe robustness of evolved systems is just crazy.
- mturmon 12y agoIt's all the more humbling when you realize how little power is consumed by all that processing and redundancy. Compare a favorite computer robustness technique: triple-modular redundancy (TMR).
- kolev 12y agoIf only we had this in the much simpler than a brain computer systems, right?
- adamio 12y agoYea try booting up with half a CPU.
- crimsonalucard 12y agoit can be done! You can disable cores!
- rikacomet 12y agowell not everyone knows how to do that. And perhaps similarly.. not every brain knows how to switch of the cerebellum.
- vhost- 12y agoThe brain knows how to survive, that's for sure... http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/12/woman.brain/index.html?iref=24hours http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/12/woman.brain/index.html?...
- Osmium 12y ago> Her doctors describe these effects as "less than would be expected" Understatement of the century? I wonder, then, what parts of the brain (if any) truly are essential for conscious thought?
- e0m 12y agoWow, could you imagine building a computer so resilient that it still works after a part equivalently important disappeared‽
- TeMPOraL 12y agoThe brain doesn't seem to be like a single CPU - more like a cluster of millions of CPU. It wouldn't be surprising that the system could work very well even if you disconnected a few thousand of those CPUs here and there. (NOTE: disconnected, not destroyed; the woman's cerebellum didn't develop; things would be much different if you tried to surgically remove it)
- C-- 12y agoNot really a computer but some distributed systems already work that way. I've read somewhere that Netflix (might have been Amazon?) is designed in such a way that it's capable of satisfying certain requirements even when services are down.
- aeturnum 12y agoIt's netflix: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-in...
- scrollaway 12y agoAre we talking about a "fallback db servers take over when the main ones drop", or "static assets server morphs into temporary db server if the main one drops"? Because there is a massive difference.
- Dylan16807 12y agoThere are crazy cases of plasticity like that, this is more of "massive nosql caching infrastructure is down, everything else works overdrive to still mostly function correctly".
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- smtddr 12y agoI love how these kinds of discoveries challenge, if not out right shatter, our current scientific understanding of human beings. Again, I recommend Gattaca movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ Don't let medical science try to dictate your potential based on gender, race or anything about your DNA. They're only right until they find out they're wrong.
- JeremyMorgan 12y agoExactly. There have already been enough examples to show that intelligence, creativity and potential in the brain occurs in any race or gender, and often defies genetics. This is one of the reasons I want to find more ways to get technology to poor cities and third world countries. Not just for their potential as programmers or IT people, but to give them the same access to information that we have right now. The person who can cure cancer could be sitting in the poorest slums of America, a village in Africa or Asia. The sooner people realize that the more inclined they may be to help. Sorry to divert so much it's just that your comment rings true in so many ways.
- Dylan16807 12y agoDoesn't the guy in Gattaca probably have a heart condition? Science can definitely tell you that you're in a group that will probably die upon doing X. Gender and race moreso are lousy predictors for most things, but they're not useless.
- jorgis 12y agoAll science can tell you is that if x people with your condition do y, n of them will likely die. Neither you not the statisticians can say with certainty whether you're in group n or x minus n.
- Dylan16807 12y agoBut sometimes x=n. And sometimes x is pretty close to n and you should listen to the doctor unless that alternative is truly unacceptable to you.
- karpathy 12y agoThis also reminds me of Hemispherectomy[0] where an entire half of the brain is surgically removed in extreme cases to prevent seizures. And amazingly, especially if you do this on younger children: "Studies have found no significant long-term effects on memory, personality, or humor,[4] and minimal changes in cognitive function overall." If you don't _really_ need half of the brain and you don't _really_ need the cerebellum, I wonder how little (and what part) of the brain we actually do _really_ need. And then there are so many people living just fine with lesions in so many parts of the brain. It's just amazing. Imagine going into our code bases and tearing out entire classes or modules; That wouldn't go down well. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy
- wpietri 12y agoIf you enjoy thinking about this, you might like the book "Blindsight," a sci-fi novel written by a biologist. The main character had a hemispherectomy as a child, and all the major characters are far from neurotypical. The book is creepy as hell, but incredibly interesting.
- 3rd3 12y agoMaybe the redundancy offers an evolutionary advantage?
- CapitalistCartr 12y agoSevere brain injuries are all too common in modern times and were probably more common in prehistoric times. X-rays of (mostly) men with foreign objects through their brain are all too common. I suppose being flexible about which part of the brain does what would make the difference between a survivable and recoverable injury, and a debilitating injury, probably leading to death. Edit: Steven Pinker, in "The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined", makes it out to be 15% average death by violence, so, pretty common. Explaining his graphs, he says, “The topmost cluster shows the rate of violent death for skeletons dug out of archaeological sites.” “The death rates range from 0 to 60 percent, with an average of 15 percent.”
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- josu 12y agoIs the picture of the CT scan real or just an illustration? Because I would assume that even if the woman doesn't have a cerebellum the brain should expand to occupy that space.
- johnjhayes 12y agoThe article indicates it's the actual scan and says the space "was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions the brain and provides defence against disease."
- lostlogin 12y agoDon't read the article provided too carefully. The image isn't a CT and has been dumbed down from the source. The image is an MR not a CT, and the image below is some sort of made up composite image. Original source with proper images: http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/22/brain.awu239.full http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/22/bra...
- schmichael 12y agoPlease read the article before asking questions: > The space where it should be was empty of tissue. Instead it was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions the brain and provides defence against disease.
- josu 12y agoSorry, you are right. I only skimmed trough the article. It probably took me longer to write the comment that what it would have taken me to read the whole article.
- blennon 12y agoThis condition is known as cerebellar agenesis. A review of many of the case studies was done by a prominent cerebellum researcher [1]. Typically the individuals that survive past birth live relatively normal lives but with impaired motor skills which are slower to develop. Their abilities are remarkable given that acute lesions to the cerebellum result in much more significant impairments (e.g. not being able to touch your nose with the tip of your finger in one smooth, coordinated movement). These individuals probably also exhibit diminished cognitive function as well. Only recently has it been recognized that the cerebellum is also involved in cognition [2]. It's interesting to note that you don't need a cerebellum to move or think, but the loss of it impairs both. Contrast this to damage to your motor cortex which can result in paralysis. [1] Glickstein, M (1994). Cerebellar Agenesis. Brain, 117, 1209-1212. [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23996631 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23996631
- cordite 12y agoWhat fills up that space? Liquid? Scar tissue?
- jccooper 12y agoCerebrospinal fluid in this case and most; it's the general purpose volume-filler of the central nervous system.
- skj 12y ago> This condition is known as cerebellar agenesis. To tease you a little bit, I read this as > This condition is known as being born without a cerebellum. I don't know why we need a latin name for everything!
- ntumlin 12y agoIf I had to guess, I'd say it's because it's slightly faster, still makes sense if you have learned the right bits of Latin, and because it makes you feel smart.
- rmc 12y agoRemember things like this when people talk about biological differences between men and women's brains. Studies sometimes find tiny differences, and then some people claim that's why 19 out of 20 board members are men. It's not bias, it's science! But if people can live missing massive chunks of their brain, is it really believable that tiny differences can cause such massive societal outcomes?
- TeMPOraL 12y agoTo add to other excellent comments refuting this line of reasoning - brains are not rocks, they are very complex systems, and the more complex something gets the more delicate it is, i.e. even a tiny chance has a chance to alter behavior of the system in significant ways. As an illustration, think of your computer. If you open it up and remove one RAM die, it will most likely run fine, albeit slower. Were you to introduce a "tiny difference", say, swap two pins on a die, you risk getting everything from machine not booting up, to crashing constantly, to running fine but spewing out nonsense and corrupting data every now and then. Were you to introduce a little bigger change - say, saw the die in half, you'll likely fry the whole machine.
- MadManE 12y agoWhat a large chip you must have on your shoulder. This is not even in the same ballpark of discussing gender differences in how brains function. This article is saying that even with certain portions of the brain missing, that other portions can compensate. What you are talking about is the different way that things are processed (if any) between male and female. But good job on sticking it to THE MAN. I'm sure that your social media activism is revolutionizing the world.
- anonbanker 12y agoPlease don't make posts like this on HN. Your sarcasm made the post overwhelmingly negative, and contributed nothing to the conversation. This would have been a much better post had you removed the first sentence and the last two.
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- sramsay 12y ago"Don't mind the gap . . ." Perhaps a more tasteful lead-in was in order.
- blisterpeanuts 12y agoThis is fascinating because the cerebellum is part of the "reptilian brain", one of the three sections of the mammalian triune brain that include the limbic and neocortex as well. The reptilian brain is responsible for basic motor functions, heart rate, temperature regulation, and balance, and evolutionarily seems to be the part of the brain that is most connected to that of ancient fish and reptiles, as the name implies. A person who is missing a portion of this rigid subsystem should still be able to think, process new information, and remember it, but might suffer from imbalance and other basic health issues as in fact this woman does. Yet, she can do lots of stuff. Apparently the surviving portions of her reptilian brain are able to compensate for the loss of the cerebellum. It sheds a whole new light on a phrase like "my cold reptilian hindbrain tells me to ruthlessly proceed". We think of ourselves having this sort of emotionless hindbrain that is moderated by the more modern brain centers for sympathy, empathy, emotion, and higher reasoning. But what if in fact there is no such thing as a ruthless, primitive hindbrain and we are all completely in charge of our behavior, ethically and emotionally speaking? http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_cr/d_05_cr_her/d_05_cr_her.html http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_cr/d_05_cr_her/d...
- sitkack 12y agoMaybe it isn't that the cerebellum is "gone" but maybe the surrounding tissue that bordered the cerebellum has sort of involuntarily taken over the same function. Those nerve endings that would terminate in the cerebellum are probably still intact?
- fiatjaf 12y agoIt's strange how materialists of all sorts (just look at the comments) take it for granted that, no matter how scientifically absurd, these facts cannot be used as evidence for non-materialistic explanations of the life and the world. Everything will be explained by materialistic science, and that is settled.
- muyuu 12y agoIf what you mean by materialistic is non-supernatural (or just natural) then that much is quite settled, yes.
- lutusp 12y agoOkay, but consider the alternative -- that the existence of a non-materialistic reality is assumed without empirical (i.e. material) evidence. If that were to be accepted as a given, then we might build a pseudoscience on that foundation, one that would burden everyone with assumptions about empirically untestable, non-objective properties of reality. We would have created psychology.
- acornax 12y agoEmpirical evidence isn't material evidence.
- lutusp 12y agoThat's exactly what it is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence Quote: "Empirical evidence (also empirical data, sense experience, empirical knowledge, or the a posteriori) is a source of knowledge acquired by means of observation or experimentation.[1] The term comes from the Greek word for experience, Εμπειρία (empeiría)." The definition goes on to contrast empirical evidence with reasoning and other ways of approaching analysis -- all the non-materialist approaches.
- acornax 12y agoRead the quote again, you're begging the question. Empirical evidence is experiential by definition - it can be material evidence if it relates to claims about matter, but it can also be evidence about other domains. Ex. If God exists, then religious experience is empirical evidence of this. It is not probably not material evidence however.
- lizzard 12y agoI hope she knows all the lyrics to The Ramones' "Teenage Lobotomy". "Then I guess I'll have to tell 'em / That I've got no cerebellum." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ssoBUb2cJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ssoBUb2cJk
- shanev 12y agoI was just going to post this! First thing I thought of.
- lostlogin 12y agoThe upper image which I assume is her MRI scan is interesting. It isn't just her cerebellum missing - her brain stem looks odd too. Where is the pons? Where are the cranial nerves attaching? Need more images! Edit. On closer reading this article isn't great. <<Doctors did a CAT scan and immediately identified the source of the problem – her entire cerebellum was missing (see scan, below left)>>. Assuming it isn't some sort of problem related to me viewing the article on a phone, that image is an MR. No CATs involved.
- timle 12y ago? The top image is most definitely from a CAT scan. If it was MR, there would be way more artifact around the eye/nose/throat.
- lostlogin 12y agoNo it isn't. Look at the contrast and the signal from fat and water, look at the tongue. That is a T1 sag. Edit: Article, or images anyway, appear on multiple sites labeled as MRI. Pretty sure the fuzzy writing says T1 FLAIR on this site. http://io9.com/doctors-discover-a-woman-with-no-cerebellum-1633439918 http://io9.com/doctors-discover-a-woman-with-no-cerebellum-1... Edit 2: Here is another link and the ax T2 is seen at bottom of the images. Edit 3. The actual journal article. New scientist screwed up didn't didn't read it properly. Patient had a CT then an MRI as per the image label. New Scientist only kept the MRI image as brain MR is way nicer than CT but kept the journal text saying CT. http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/22/brain.awu239.full http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/22/bra...
- 2xlbuds 12y agoI'm really curious, how would this woman react to alcohol?
- mmcclellan 12y agoI'm being sincere here. I am surprised and excited to see interest in this. Someone very close to me has no discernible cerebellum and no one we've seen or known has ever considered it medically interesting.
- Yourfags 12y agoThat seems hard to believe...sounds like doctors gobble up that type of information, are you in a very remote area or something?
- sehutson 12y agoI felt the same way when I saw this article. My cousin's daughter was recently diagnosed with cerebellar hypoplasia (a missing or smaller than normal cerebellum), and it's been pretty terrifying for them. They live in a rural area where no one has ever dealt with the problem, and they're spending insane amounts of time and money on therapy (in a city an hour away) to help her learn basic skills. She celebrated her 3rd birthday this week and she can't walk, talk, or even stand unassisted. On one hand, this article thrills me to think that at some point, her daughter might lead a relatively normal life. It's heartbreaking to see the way she suffers right now - like there's more going on in her head than she can tell us, and you can see the frustration on her face when she tries to do things or get her point across. On the other hand, I'm hesitant to send the article to my cousin because I know everything related to her daughter's problem is deeply depressing to her as she's dealing with a frustrated child who makes very little progress from day to day.
- lostlogin 12y agoBetter article and original source. http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/22/brain.awu239.full http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/22/bra...