A man with an unusually tiny brain managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, caused by a fluid buildup in his skull, French researchers reported on Thursday. 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."He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr. Lionel Feuillet and colleagues at the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille wrote in a letter to the Lancet medical journal. The man went to a hospital after he had mild weakness in his left leg. When Feuillet's staff took his medical history, they learned he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away hydrocephalus -- water on the brain -- as an infant.

The shunt was removed when he was 14.So the researchers did a computed tomography (CT) scan and another type of scan called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They were astonished to see "massive enlargement" of the lateral ventricles -- usually tiny chambers that hold the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the brain.Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled, either.

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it was in fact because he has had the condition since birth. the brain isn't fully 'hardwired' until about 10 years of age or so . it is amazing what our brains can do. if this had happened soley as an adult he wouldn't have lived through it let alone be able to function.

Impressive.

TeraLink Was Here!

oh wow, that's crazy. We're a rather amazing species...

Tiny brain no obstacle to Frenchman




You just have to love this.

lol and yet it's an obstacle for bush

Absolutely Stalker, absolutely!

The situations to which the human body can adapt are truly amazing not to mention the incredible resilience of the human spirit to carry on regardless!

i remember watching a star -trek episode--one of the 60's ones with spock where they encountered a humanoid with a gigantic brain . spock was ready to give up--there brains were 10x the size of ours !

ever notice computers were huge on the old star trek ? same idea--bigger = better .

well computers haven't evolved that way-- a bigger computer die has several things that hold it back-- the smaller the die will most often make a more powerful CPU. -

-we could find the same thing one day out in the universe-- a very small--creature with a very small brain--but is much smarter than us.

that's not true when it comes to brains. bigger is better. smaller is more prone to basics. Man's brain was smaller and we were less enhanced , less able to process information. the same is true for all animals.

Computers were visualized big then because it took that size to handle all the info - it itself hadn't components that were small and could handle the amount of information. it was just a matter of hardware.