Homer Simpson irl

I ran a lot of MRIs for my PhD. I saw somewhere around 100-200 different brains. About 10% of them had abnormalities. Of all the technicians, scientists, and (non-clinical) doctors I spoke with, we all agreed this was a very high rate of discovery. All my friends graduated without seeing anything weird. My advisor liked to joke that I was cursed. Eventually I stopped inviting my friends to do my experiments because I didn't want to deal with the risk of them having an abnormality - thanks to some combination of HIPAA and medical liability laws, I wasn't allowed to say anything about it, even if asked point blank. I didn't like that very much.

I made one exception, as a friend of mine came in for a study and I saw a golf ball sized cyst in his sinus. He had it surgically removed and he told me he stopped snoring the next day. It felt good to make a difference for him.

But, I saw one brain similar to the one documented here. It belongs to one of my close friends. It was harrowing. Entire left hemisphere was malformed, the ventricles were way too big and the cortex was way too thin. But the right side of his brain was underdeveloped, maybe the size of a tennis ball.

The weirdest part, he is 100% normal. In fact, he competed at a high level of college athletics. Normal Cognition, normal motor function, great sense of humor, and a very caring person. Now he has a great job, wife and kid, and we hang out often. But I can't bring myself to say anything, and every time I see his son I wonder about his brain.

thanks to some combination of HIPAA and medical liability laws, I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it, even if asked point blank

Are you sure that you understood that right? In every study I've helped out with, and when I'm dealing with patients, rule #1 is that the participant/patient has access to their information produced from the procedures and gets counseled by a doctor involved in the process if anything is found. There's a neuroscience professor who famously recorded his own experience in the textbook he wrote, where he participated in an MRI study because his insurance wouldn't approve an MRI. The tumor was found in the study, passed over to his healthcare team, and they were able to use it to get the surgery approved.
- That's the short of it - but we passed all brain data to a university affiliated neurologist for review. We also allowed participants to take a copy of their brain data if they wanted. I've got a CD of my own brain kicking around somewhere, and I even helped a few people 3D print their brains.
  
  But, anything that I said about the participants brain opened me up to liability. What if I said their brain looked OK and there was a tumor? Or vice versa? The University felt I could be sued, so we were trained to not speak about their brain.
- I think the person might not have been qualified to make diagnoses at that point? With any MRT I've ever had taken, the people who actually took it told me they weren't allowed to comment on it in any way, and I had to wait for the doctor to take a look.
I can just imagine you at their garden party, sweating, while your friend brags how their son is doing so well at school but seems to just not understand some really mundane topic.
- Eh, I don't think autism is related to the appearance of brain.
I’m a Neuroradiologist and occasionally people ask me “Have you ever scanned your own brain?” when they find out my profession.

Abso-fucking-lutely not. I’ve seen how many people have random abnormalities that are unknown until discovered incidentally when having an unrelated problem evaluated. Finding something abnormal in my brain would no doubt keep me up at night even if it was something medically considered unimportant. No way I’m going to scan myself just for fun.
He's not 100% normal, you just haven't experienced the things he cannot process properly or at all, which is likely a lot of higher reasoning... They just don't affect his day to day, which gives us clues that day to day functioning is very low level and likely mostly autonomous.
- Eh, college is hard and so was his sport. Sure, it's not an exhaustive battery of testing but I'm confident to say he's a normal dude.
Love your username, especially with that context 😁
Imagine what would happen if we substituted the water for more brain.
- Well it's not quite water, it's cerebrospinal fluid and it plays a lot of important roles in waste clearance, immune protection, protection from concussion, and more.
I'm curious, what exactly are you worried about with your friend? Are the abnormalities you saw linked to a treatable disease?
- Nope, not related to any disease I've ever seen. The best guess i have is fetal alcohol syndrome but it isn't a perfect match. It's just weird knowing he has a very odd shaped brain. And there's a lot of unknowns surrounding it.
  
  What if he sees another doctor and they mention it to him? Would he be upset I didn't say anything? What if it is linked to some disease and I didn't tell him, and he gets sick?
  
  What if it's hereditary and his kid has it, does it explain the motor delays? The premature birth? The problems they have with him sleeping?
  
  Just a lot of unknowns.
Oh wow, that is so interesting.

Intelligence wise, are the people who have these sort of brains "normal"? Less inteligent? More inteligent?
- Interesting question. It depends. I linked Ev Fedorenko's Interesting Brain Project at MIT up above, they're doing a deep dive into questions like those.
  
  Broadly speaking, if you're born with these anatomical anomalies, you'll be more or less normal. The article mentions the person in question had an IQ of 70, so that's lower than normal, but not intellectually impaired.
  
  But acquired Brain damage almost always leads to impediments. Strokes and repeated concussions, physical injury, etc.
  
  The brain is "plastic" when you're young, we like to say. That is, it's pliable and can mold into whatever shape it needs to in order to adapt to your environment. That plasticity disappears once you get older. It's how kids can learn language effortlessly - when you're born, you have the most neurons and synapses you'll ever have in your life. You'll keep the same neurons (unless you have a degenerative disorder or kill them with drugs), make new synapses as you learn, but broadly speaking as you grow up you prune synapses that aren't helpful.
  
  This is also why kids can undergo massive resection surgeries (or in the olden days, severing of the corpus callosum) and grow up more or less normal.
- intelligence is a very hard thing to quantify. People who are good at math might be terrible at writing plays, both of which are intelligent processes.
I think I read that brains like these are basically normal in terms of structure and number of neurons, just compressed by the extra fluid pressure.
My advisor liked to joke that I was cursed.

It didn't have quite the same level of personal impact, but I used to associate with a geologist who said something similar about me and geodes.
- Kept finding geodes filled with fresh human blood huh?

Also, you'd think the title was edited for meme-ing purposes...but no. This is just dead ass what they printed in The Lancet 😂

Every time this is mentioned I get the biggest chuckle out of him being a French civil servant.

Explains why it went unnoticed.

When I got an MRI I learned I have some empty spaces in my brain that normally close during infancy. I was there because my family has a genetic marker for cavernous venous malformations primarily in the brain. Luckily it doesn’t affect our intelligence, we just “die of headaches”.

F

That man very certainly uses 100% of his brain.

Average middle manager

Holy shit. That’s fucking wild. I know the brain is adaptable, particularly to things that occur during childhood, but… damn.

I have SO many questions

If we could just let go of the Yakubian myth that more brains = smarter, this wouldn't be so surprising.

I mean the guy has an IQ of 70 so it’s not like he’s of normal intelligence either.
- Measuring the volume of a skull was once a valid way to determine intellect. We make fun of people who believed that, but IQ is arguably a worse instrument, and certainly no better.
  
  The problem is you can't measure intelligence any more than you can measure charm or beauty. All instruments who claim to do so are doomed to embarrass the people who use them.

Isn't it expected for a brainless human to defie science?

We've actually seen a handful of them in the community. MIT has an "Interesting Brain Project" https://news.mit.edu/2023/studies-of-unusual-brains-reveal-insights-brain-organization-function-0221.

If you're born that way, odds are you'll be more or less normal. It's amazing to see how resilient the human brain is.

In fact, one woman in China was born without a cerebellum. She wasn't exactly normal per se, but she was alive and more or less healthy. Even though the cerebellum is smaller by volume it has about the same number of neurons as the cerebrum. So she just had half a brain. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329861-900-woman-of-24-found-to-have-no-cerebellum-in-her-brain/
- Awesome. Thank you for the links! I've been down the rabbit hole thanks to your comments.
a brainless human to [defy] science

I think you spelled 'politics' wrong.
- Brainless people LOVE politics. They consider themselves the biggest specialists in politics.

Ew, I don't want to see other people's brains on here!

Weird, you can just make out letters in one angle, i see a M and G... Was the subject wearing a hat during the scan?

I see an LV

Yaaay, new nightmare unlocked!