90% Of His Brain Was Missing And He Did Not Know It
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In 2007 in France, a 44-year-old man went to the doctor complaining of numbness in his leg and underwent a brain CT scan that revealed a shocking truth.
That man didn't have 90% of his brain. The skull was almost entirely filled with cerebrospinal fluid and all that remained of the brain was a thin peripheral portion surrounding the skull.
Yet that man, whose IQ was just below average (IQ 75), had been leading a normal life for years: he was married, had two children, a job and was obviously aware of himself, he moved, laughed, loved and ultimately he lived.
The case shocked the world scientific community and was described in the prestigious Lancet journal, becoming the subject of questions and amazement.
The evidence of the facts raised, as can easily be imagined, many questions about the very concept of consciousness, understood as "awareness of the self" and the possibility of leading a normal life practically without a brain.
The patient's clinical history was reconstructed and it was discovered that he was born suffering from a form of hydrocephalus.
For this reason, a few months before his life, a cerebral shunt was inserted into his skull, capable of draining excess cerebrospinal fluid. That shunt was removed at the age of 14 and the patient, after an initial series of problems that had caused paresis in his left leg, was eventually able to resume an almost normal life and had completely forgotten about the problem.
Over the next 30 years, the liquor began to invade the skull again and progressively erode the brain (90% of the brain!), leading to that feeling of weakness in the leg which prompted the patient to undergo a medical examination. at the age of 44.
But all this was not able to explain how the brain invaded by cerebrospinal fluid and eroded by 90% of its volume had "known" to recalibrate itself over the years, allowing him to lead a normal life anyway.
Axel Cleeremans, a cognitive psychologist at the Université Libre of Brussels, Belgium, attempted to answer these questions in 2016 during a conference of the Association for Scientific Studies on Consciousness, held in Buenos Aires.
According to Cleeremans, the case of the French patient had demonstrated the extraordinary "readaptation capacity" of the human brain. The frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes of the brain, in fact, preside over the main cognitive and perceptive functions, yet in the patient they were practically completely absent and this demonstrated that the brain of that man - and therefore of every man - had been able to "move" those functions to the residual perimeter section of 10%.
The second ability that was made evident by the clinical case under examination was the "plasticity of the brain". According to Cleeremans' hypothesis, "self-awareness" (or detailed self-cognition) is formed through experience, the relationship between oneself and the surrounding world and learning, and is subject to continuous modifications and adjustments in course of life.
The case of the French man who lived a normal life until the age of 44 without 90% of his brain demonstrated to science a fact that had until then been unknown, namely that just 10% of the brain tissue is sufficient to re-elaborate a “theory of the self” and to make that person a man in all respects.
We can’t even begin to know what we don’t know…
>https://twitter.com/thejimwatkins/status/1789143582152229125
Yep, the heroin was an earner, but there was always the chance of child exploitation, organ harvesting, money laundering and likely a host of other side hustles.
Annoying when they plagiarize your words verbatim, right down to … but better out than in I suppose.
“We know they are lying. They know they are lying. They know that we know that they are lying. We know that they know that we know they know they are lying. And still…they continue to lie.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
https://expose-news.com/2024/05/10/theyre-lying-we-know-theyre-lying-and/
Also, a woman's name.