Human brain boiled in its skull lasted 4000 years | Hacker News Reader

Human brain boiled in its skull lasted 4000 years

newscientist.com

49 pointsdaegloe26 comments

A little addendum: brains are amazingly flimsy structures, not just due to the enzymes causing rapid decomposition, but because of their consistency which is equivalent to jello. This is why brains are generally denatured before dissections. Which is essentially what the heat did to those 4000 year old specimen.

This prompts a whole new level of respect for brain surgeons. And helmets.

Not to mention fear of lobotomies - I remember watching Shutter Island and wondering what they actually did during a lobotomy and doing some quick research and being deeply disturbed by descriptions of what was involved.

Isn't it a fairly simple procedure of "insert ice pick into eye socket, tap with hammer, done"?

A bit more than that - you have to wiggle the ice pick just so...

The other interesting thing is that your brain couldn't function with cerebralspinal fluid. The weight of your brain would crush the brain cells at the bottom if it simply sat in your skull. Cerebralspinal fluid has a density that results in a bouancy that effectively reduces the weight of the brain to only a few grams.

In practice, this means that the weight is spread from just the bottom to all over its surface area, right? And that puts it under the threshold for squishing?

Also, I think you mean "couldn't function without".

It's not just about the squishing at rest, you have to consider movement as well. The trick is essentially how to preserve a very delicate ball of thinking jello while it's inside a football player. To achieve this, the liquid bath is essential to act as a buffer. The brain is also contained in a hard sack of tissue, suspended in its cavity by a myriad little trusses - much like the Overlord upgrade in StarCraft.

> couldn't function with cerebralspinal fluid

s/with/without/ (also, though this is just nitpicking, s/cerebralspinal/cerebrospinal/)

Cerebrospinal fluid (hereafter referred to as CSF) is actually very interesting. I don't think scientists/doctors have it fully figured out just yet (given how little we understand the brain in general, no surprise).

Of particular interest are persons with very anomalous findings: fully functioning with virtually no real "brain" to speak of, just plenty of CSF sloshing around. When I first came across this, I was certain it was a hoax.

Later, a colleague at Sheffield University became aware of a young man with a larger than normal head. He was referred to Lorber even though it had not caused him any difficulty. Although the boy had an IQ of 126 and had a first class honours degree in mathematics, he had "virtually no brain". A noninvasive measurement of radio density known as CAT scan showed the boy's skull was lined with a thin layer of brain cells to a millimeter in thickness. The rest of his skull was filled with cerebrospinal fluid. The young man continues a normal life with the exception of his knowledge that he has no brain.

Although anecdotal accounts may be found in medical literature, Lorber is the first to provide a systematic study of such cases. He has documented over 600 scans of people with hydrocephalus and has broken them into four groups:

   -those with nearly normal brains
   -those with 50-70% of the cranium filled with cerebrospinal fluid
   -those with 70-90% of the cranium filled with cerebrospinal fluid
   -and the most severe group with 95% of the cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid.

Of the last group, which comprised less than 10% of the study, half were profoundly retarded. The remaining half had IQs greater than 100.

More citations:

http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/science/is_the_brain_really_ne...

http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lorber

This "virtually no brain" business is highly misleading, and the implication that the brain is not the seat of the mind or intelligence is simply unscientific.

A lot of hydrocephalus patients have brainmatter displaced in the center, with the actual cortex often somewhat intact lining the cranium. It's true that the brain is amazingly redundant and especially damage sustained at a young age can often be fully compensated. But let's not jump into pseudo science. You can't take this "no brain" thing literally.

No, of course not. However, if the basic observations were truthfully reported, a brain one tenth the mass of a normal brain still able to somehow function (in some individuals) as well as a brain ten times it's weight is certainly food for thought.

The title of that article is of course tabloid trash. But I think there is something as of yet unexplained of interest in the mentioned subjects and their physiological situations.

True, but it bears repeating that the surface of the brain is where the magic happens, and that's only casually related to mass. Most of the mass in the center is for support structures and a place to thread interconnect fibres through. All that stuff still has to happen for a hydrocephalus patient to function, but there's a lot more mass than technically needed. Intelligence decrease in hydrocephalus comes from the tissue trauma associated with it, not necessarily the decrease in overall mass itself. Unexplained might be a bit of an overstatement, but there is certainly a lot to be learned from examining a little closer how the brain deals with damage.

Thank you. That clarified things.

It doesn't matter how much grey matter you have if those neurons aren't connected in any meaningful way.

A man with next to no brain is better at math than me, who, according to my doc after a CT(?) scan, have a remarkably dense brain...

Means you lack the discipline to push yourself hard enough to ben good at math... Or your brain is dense in the wrong sections (without a dense/large PFC, what's the point of the rest of it?)... Or you haven't learned the right techniques... Or your environment keeps you from using your brain 100% (living with people dumber/lazier than you does this)... Or...

Now I am completely freaked out. I could have no brain and not even know it!

It's ok, we know it. :(

While all of this is really cool, did they learn anything from the 4000 year old brain? Has the brain changed at all in that time?

It seems that they have yet to analyse that more deeply. For now all they know is how it's possible that they have it in the first place.

For certain values of 'lasted'

So, when I see this things I always wonder: can they extract DNA from it?

Would the DNA of a human living 4000 year ago be significantly different from yours or mine? What could we learn from it?

Definitely nothing, but I have always been curious about how long DNA can rest preserved.

About 10K years.

What a way to go.

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