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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

It was a fight between scientists and non-scientists. The scientists saw the scans of her head that showed a void where there should have been brain. The non-scientists looked at a handful of home movies where here random movements and facial expressions occasionally lined up to make her look aware. Such debate between scientific evaluation and layperson "gut feelings" predate so many of today's debates re climate.

It was also a generational fight. Her husband, the normal go-to for medical decisions was on one side, and her parents on the other. The parents wanted control over their daughter. They could not accept the widespread default that, for most all medical/legal matters, spouses trump parents. And this was Florida. So the "rights" of the older generation were given greater play in the courts than would have happened in other states.

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>"The scientists saw the scans of her head that showed a void where there should have been brain."

People with "no" (very small) brains due to hydrocephalus have been discovered who are successful mathematics students and public servants. So, not sure the scientists are right here. As long as the brain is shrinking slow enough it may not be a huge deal in terms of mental ability.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/70204/man-without-brain

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/oct/02/research.h...

Nope. She had a medical problem related to medication. Her brain went from normal to tiny in the course of perhaps 24 hours. This was not just a small brain, this was a normal brain in which huge areas died away due to lack of oxygen.

I don't know the details but that does sound like the medical issue killed her.

She suffered cardiac arrest from low serum potassium levels (hypokalemia) and she suffered massive brain damage as a result of the lack of oxygen to the brain. It was definitely a sudden, abnormal, and catastrophic change in brain size.

Years ago I ran across those extreme bilateral hydrocephalus cases you linked. As a neuroscientist, naturally they piqued my interest. I was skeptical then, and even moreso now. To my knowledge, in the years since those 2-3 cases popped-up, there has never been any follow-up on those original patients, and no similar bilateral cases have been found in the modern-era of brain imaging.

I will happily stand corrected if someone can provide any evidence from the last 10 years where any case like this has been documented and independently confirmed. Until then, I will continue to consider the brain important.

could you elaborate? Do you think they really didn't have the condition described? If they did then while more evidence would be helpful in establishing likelihood, it would not make a difference in establishing possibility.

I think it's possible that Lorber is misreading and misrepresenting the CT scan, and the actual state of the cortex is very different than what we are being shown.

These cases are extremely interesting, and any high-impact journal would immediately accept a quantitative MRI report or the simplest fMRI study on such a patient (if it were from a reputable source).

This would make the cover of Nature or Science mags, and would capture the attention of the entire neuroscience community. Yet as interesting as they are, none of these existing case studies conform to the standards of modern neuroscience reporting.

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