Woman of 24 found to have no cerebellum in her brain

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329861.900-woman-of-24-found-to-have-no-cerebellum-in-her-brain.html#.VBHaCWRdURl

by shahmeern • 12 years ago

496 179 12 years ago

newscientist.com

otoburb• 12 years ago

"[...] the woman joins an elite club of just nine people who are known to have lived without their entire cerebellum. A detailed description of how the disorder affects a living adult is almost non-existent, say doctors from the Chinese hospital, because most people with the condition die at a young age and the problem is only discovered on autopsy."

Is this woman the only one of the nine to have lived this long? Incredible given how critical the cerebellum is.

zequel• 12 years ago

Well autopsies are rare so it's an unknown number of survivors.

gwern3• 12 years ago

I would think that people who die very young, like kids, would get autopsied all the time, simply because such deaths are rare and there would be suspicion of foul play or other issues.

mrb• 12 years ago

This is fascinating considering that the cerebellum contains more neurons than the rest of the brain(!) (source: http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s3/chapter05.html). I wonder what other problems she experiences (the article only says she started speaking and walking at age 6-7).

thanatropism2• 12 years ago

The cerebellum is a much more primitive neural network, though. It's feed-forward only - it actually looks like a tree in MRIs - so it's a lot harder to encode anything. Normal neural networks ("connectomes") in the brain are massively interconnected in all directions, which allows for parallel computation; with the tree-like, feed-forward-only architecture of the cerebellum, neurons from different "branches" don't communicate.

pionar• 12 years ago

Interesting. How was it determined that they're feed-forward-only? Can signals not travel back down the "tree"? (Note, I'm not even an amateur neurologist).

jrkelly• 12 years ago

The robustness of evolved systems is just crazy.

kolev• 12 years ago

If only we had this in the much simpler than a brain computer systems, right?

adamio• 12 years ago

Yea try booting up with half a CPU.

mturmon• 12 years ago

It's all the more humbling when you realize how little power is consumed by all that processing and redundancy.

Compare a favorite computer robustness technique: triple-modular redundancy (TMR).

vhost-• 12 years ago

The brain knows how to survive, that's for sure... http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/12/woman.brain/index.html?...

Osmium• 12 years ago

Her doctors describe these effects as "less than would be expected"

Understatement of the century? I wonder, then, what parts of the brain (if any) truly are essential for conscious thought?

josu3• 12 years ago

The main role of the cerebellum is the motor function. According to the wikipedia it's still unclear if it plays a part in some cognitive functions such as attention and language, and in regulating fear and pleasure response

rmc2• 12 years ago

Define conscious thought.

e0m• 12 years ago

Wow, could you imagine building a computer so resilient that it still works after a part equivalently important disappeared‽

C--• 12 years ago

Not really a computer but some distributed systems already work that way. I've read somewhere that Netflix (might have been Amazon?) is designed in such a way that it's capable of satisfying certain requirements even when services are down.

aeturnum• 12 years ago

It's netflix: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-in...

scrollaway3• 12 years ago

Are we talking about a "fallback db servers take over when the main ones drop", or "static assets server morphs into temporary db server if the main one drops"? Because there is a massive difference.

vidarh• 12 years ago

Some high end servers have hot-swappable CPU's, RAM etc. (using mirroring in the case of RAM [1]). Of course you need to keep enough installed at any one time to keep the system running. Couple it with a suitable dual-ported storage array, and almost any system component can be replaced without taking down the server.

The main reason it's not more common is that few people are willing to pay for it vs. getting redundancy via multiple cheaper servers, especially once you've got enough load that you need to scale out anyway.

[1] http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0259.html

jamessb• 12 years ago

One of the features of 'amorphous computing' is the use of a large number of redundant subunits, giving resiliance against failure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_computing

However, such an architecture arguably means that any single part is not particularly important.

sitkack5• 12 years ago

Riak is just such a storage system.

duaneb• 12 years ago

Not really; riak is composed entirely of nodes that are more or less identical. Losing your cerebellum would be like losing a component on every one of your nodes because you only have one cerebellum.

TeMPOraL2• 12 years ago

The brain doesn't seem to be like a single CPU - more like a cluster of millions of CPU. It wouldn't be surprising that the system could work very well even if you disconnected a few thousand of those CPUs here and there.

(NOTE: disconnected, not destroyed; the woman's cerebellum didn't develop; things would be much different if you tried to surgically remove it)

cLeEOGPw• 12 years ago

SSD works like that.

smtddr• 12 years ago

I love how these kinds of discoveries challenge, if not out right shatter, our current scientific understanding of human beings.

Again, I recommend Gattaca movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/

Don't let medical science try to dictate your potential based on gender, race or anything about your DNA. They're only right until they find out they're wrong.

JeremyMorgan• 12 years ago

Exactly. There have already been enough examples to show that intelligence, creativity and potential in the brain occurs in any race or gender, and often defies genetics.

This is one of the reasons I want to find more ways to get technology to poor cities and third world countries. Not just for their potential as programmers or IT people, but to give them the same access to information that we have right now.

The person who can cure cancer could be sitting in the poorest slums of America, a village in Africa or Asia. The sooner people realize that the more inclined they may be to help.

Sorry to divert so much it's just that your comment rings true in so many ways.

Dylan168077• 12 years ago

Doesn't the guy in Gattaca probably have a heart condition? Science can definitely tell you that you're in a group that will probably die upon doing X.

Gender and race moreso are lousy predictors for most things, but they're not useless.

jorgis• 12 years ago

All science can tell you is that if x people with your condition do y, n of them will likely die. Neither you not the statisticians can say with certainty whether you're in group n or x minus n.

maxcan• 12 years ago

"Don't let mainstream misinterpretations and gross oversimplifications of medical science try to dictate your potential based on gender, race or anything about your DNA. They're only right until they find out they're wrong."

FTFY.

Most of the issues you're alluding to are not because medical science says something is impossible but because the media hears "X group has slightly elevated probability of Y" and reports it as "X group has Y".

catshirt• 12 years ago

the original comment was articulated just fine. the point is that science of all varieties has proven wrong over, and over, and over, and over, and over. science is a constant reevaluation of things we "know".

thing is, we don't know what we don't know.

sitkack5• 12 years ago

Creativity and intelligence don't have a strong correlation.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

erroneousfunk• 12 years ago

I love how you compare "missing a huge chunk of brain" to "having a certain race or gender."

karpathy• 12 years ago

This also reminds me of Hemispherectomy[0] where an entire half of the brain is surgically removed in extreme cases to prevent seizures. And amazingly, especially if you do this on younger children:

"Studies have found no significant long-term effects on memory, personality, or humor,[4] and minimal changes in cognitive function overall."

If you don't _really_ need half of the brain and you don't _really_ need the cerebellum, I wonder how little (and what part) of the brain we actually do _really_ need. And then there are so many people living just fine with lesions in so many parts of the brain.

It's just amazing. Imagine going into our code bases and tearing out entire classes or modules; That wouldn't go down well.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy

3rd3• 12 years ago

Maybe the redundancy offers an evolutionary advantage?

CapitalistCartr• 12 years ago

Severe brain injuries are all too common in modern times and were probably more common in prehistoric times. X-rays of (mostly) men with foreign objects through their brain are all too common. I suppose being flexible about which part of the brain does what would make the difference between a survivable and recoverable injury, and a debilitating injury, probably leading to death.

Edit: Steven Pinker, in "The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined", makes it out to be 15% average death by violence, so, pretty common. Explaining his graphs, he says, “The topmost cluster shows the rate of violent death for skeletons dug out of archaeological sites.” “The death rates range from 0 to 60 percent, with an average of 15 percent.”

lostlogin5• 12 years ago

> It's just amazing. Imagine going into our code bases and tearing out entire classes or modules; That wouldn't go down well.<< It's probably more like removing half the CPU cores and your clever code being ok with this.

knd775• 12 years ago

Actually, it's more like ripping out the GPU and the CPU still being able to handle video decently.

Pxtl3• 12 years ago

Thinking of the brain as a computing platform is never a good metaphor. Neural networks do not have a rigid delineation between instruction-storage, data-storage, and CPU. Every neuron wears all three hats and intertwingles those concepts.

outworlder• 12 years ago

Where does the code live, though? :)

FUCKUP• 12 years ago

I would imagine that it would be like cutting a hologram in half or what you described.

wwweston• 12 years ago

In fact, it's almost like a typical state-of-the-art computer is a limited (perhaps even poor) metaphor for the brain.

narag• 12 years ago

I wonder how little (and what part) of the brain we actually do _really_ need.

Maybe we need the software. The cloud provider sometimes has more available instances, other times less of them

mamcx• 12 years ago

Not that crazy to say "You only use % of your brain!".

So, naive question: Could be correct to think that if half the brain is "enough" to have a full life, then the other half is utilized (in normal brains) but is wasting in doing unnecesary work? ie: Could be the brain is truly under-utilized, under-performing all the time? Like, is lazy?

tim3332• 12 years ago

Brains are probably lazy for the same reason animals in general are lazy - to save energy. The brain accounts for something like 25% of the body's energy use. I'm guessing it's similar to CPUs where most of the time they are under-utilised but can fire up when needed.

Symmetry• 12 years ago

You're only using a certain percent at a time, but all the different sections of your brain do different things. And they are lazy when they can get away with it, read Thinking, Fast and Slow for some more details but even when you're thinking hard you're not using your whole brain. It's not at all obvious to me that the glucose supply, oxygen supply, or cooling of the brain are sufficient for you to run it at 100% without dying.

ionforce• 12 years ago

As others have mentioned, I think this is closer to treating them as redundant CPU cores.

Ripping out code would be like... radiation. Mucking with DNA. And that can be really adverse, just like ripping out/changing code.

inportb• 12 years ago

Radiation would probably be analogous to burning out random transistors, and you could target specific areas if you wanted to.

sitkack5• 12 years ago

WTF?! Why wouldn't this have the same side effects as a stroke? Blindness, deafness and paralysis?

leoc• 12 years ago

The answer to that seems to be "yes, it would": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bach-y-Rita#Research_into...

Sanddancer• 12 years ago

Age is one of the big issues. The brain's fairly good at routing around problems when you're young and the brain's flexible; it's why young polio patients were able to learn to walk again even after spending months in an iron lung. When you get older, because there's a lot more well-established connections, the brain becomes less capable of adapting to sudden loss of functionality.

wpietri2• 12 years ago

If you enjoy thinking about this, you might like the book "Blindsight," a sci-fi novel written by a biologist. The main character had a hemispherectomy as a child, and all the major characters are far from neurotypical. The book is creepy as hell, but incredibly interesting.

josu3• 12 years ago

Is the picture of the CT scan real or just an illustration? Because I would assume that even if the woman doesn't have a cerebellum the brain should expand to occupy that space.

johnjhayes• 12 years ago

The article indicates it's the actual scan and says the space "was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions the brain and provides defence against disease."

lostlogin5• 12 years ago

Don't read the article provided too carefully. The image isn't a CT and has been dumbed down from the source. The image is an MR not a CT, and the image below is some sort of made up composite image. Original source with proper images: http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/22/bra...

schmichael• 12 years ago

Please read the article before asking questions:

The space where it should be was empty of tissue. Instead it was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions the brain and provides defence against disease.

josu3• 12 years ago

Sorry, you are right. I only skimmed trough the article. It probably took me longer to write the comment that what it would have taken me to read the whole article.

blennon4• 12 years ago

This condition is known as cerebellar agenesis. A review of many of the case studies was done by a prominent cerebellum researcher [1]. Typically the individuals that survive past birth live relatively normal lives but with impaired motor skills which are slower to develop. Their abilities are remarkable given that acute lesions to the cerebellum result in much more significant impairments (e.g. not being able to touch your nose with the tip of your finger in one smooth, coordinated movement).

These individuals probably also exhibit diminished cognitive function as well. Only recently has it been recognized that the cerebellum is also involved in cognition [2]. It's interesting to note that you don't need a cerebellum to move or think, but the loss of it impairs both. Contrast this to damage to your motor cortex which can result in paralysis.

[1] Glickstein, M (1994). Cerebellar Agenesis. Brain, 117, 1209-1212. [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23996631

TheLoneWolfling5• 12 years ago

These individuals probably also exhibit diminished cognitive function as well.

I wonder how much of that is "the cerebellum is also involved in cognition" and how much of that is "with the rest of the brain picking up the additional load, there's less "processing power" available for other things".

blennon4• 12 years ago

My PhD adviser and I have had that debate a number of times. For the congenital case, we can't say one way or the other. But in the acute case, where there are localized lesions to the parts of the cerebellum thought to be involved in cognition, the effect seems to be primarily cognitive. From anatomical studies, we also know that there are "loops" formed between non-motor areas of the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum.

Pxtl3• 12 years ago

Or just "if there's something so wrong with your brain that the cerebellum is completely missing, odds are there is some hard-to-detect abnormalities in the rest of the brain".

yohanatan• 12 years ago

Could it be that the cerebellum is merely a communication channel for other parts of the brain which are more focused on cognition. After injury one would not expect immediate re-routing of these channels.

ekr• 12 years ago

I'm not very invested in this field, however, this "processing power" metaphor sound like those ideas "where people only use 10% of their brain". The brain doesn't work like that, it's not a general purpose computer. It's made up of several independent mechanisms, that have little to do with each other, and that have emerged at different points in evolution, driven by different forces. So their creation is rather chaotic.

wpietri2• 12 years ago

A very interesting question!

For me, some of the way I think things through seems very physical to me. The sort of thing you do when you pick up lunch table objects and say, "Ok, this salt shaker is the web server, this fork is the firewall, and..." Except I'm more likely to do it with just gestures, or just thinking about placing things in an imaginary space.

I wonder how much of that is really enlisting the cerebellum versus it being an output-only thing. Perhaps nominally output-only devices do more. As in rubber-duck debugging or Flannery O'Connor's line, "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say."

Crito• 12 years ago

The article mentions:

"Problems in the cerebellum can lead to severe mental impairment, movement disorders, epilepsy [...]"

However this seems potentially much worse than the symptoms this woman without a cerebellum is experiencing. Is it theoretically possible that people with damaged but otherwise intact cerebellum to be identified at birth so that they can have their cerebellum removed completely? My thinking is that if you do it early enough, plasticity might allow other parts of their brain to take over and do the job better than the damaged cerebellum would be able to.

This is probably one of the reasons why I am not allowed to perform surgery without a license...

x00542• 12 years ago

This is probably one of the reasons why I am not allowed to perform surgery without a license...

Indeed :) A damaged cerebellum at birth might still be useful because it can fulfill some, if not all of the tasks it is supposed to. We don't know enough about this yet to really make any kind of call about it. For all we know, many people are borne with malformed cerebellums but never experience any problems, thus we just don't know about them.

collyw2• 12 years ago

I did see a documentary about some young girl with a brain problem. I can't remember exactly (severe form of epilepsy?), but they wanted to do something pretty severe to her brain, and do it within the first year, as it still had the neuro-plasticity to recover at that stage.

cordite• 12 years ago

What fills up that space? Liquid? Scar tissue?

jccooper• 12 years ago

Cerebrospinal fluid in this case and most; it's the general purpose volume-filler of the central nervous system.

skj2• 12 years ago

This condition is known as cerebellar agenesis.

To tease you a little bit, I read this as

This condition is known as being born without a cerebellum.

I don't know why we need a latin name for everything!

ntumlin• 12 years ago

If I had to guess, I'd say it's because it's slightly faster, still makes sense if you have learned the right bits of Latin, and because it makes you feel smart.

wlesieutre• 12 years ago

It certainly makes it easier to find in a book or via search. You have one word for what it's called, instead of having some under "Born without a cerebellum," some as "Missing cerebellum," others in "No cerebellum," "Undeveloped cerebellum," etc.

Plus it's more convenient to say. Not a big deal for us, but to people who deal with crazy medical conditions all day long, describing each one in natural language would be imprecise and time consuming.

crimsonalucard2• 12 years ago

It's better to have a shorter and noun form for referencing being born without a cerebellum. It's especially convenient for researchers who write about it and have to refer to being born without a cerebellum multiple times in a single paragraph.

It's better to have a shorter and noun form for referencing cerebellar agenesis. It's especially convenient for researchers who write about it and have to refer to cerebellar agenesis multiple times in a single paragraph.

gabipurcaru• 12 years ago

Because it's much more convenient to have one single name for it in all of Earth's languages.

thaumasiotes3• 12 years ago

Well, I'd read it as "this condition is known as failing to develop a cerebellum". Even if everyone was born without a cerebellum and you were expected to grow yours by the age of 10, not growing one would be sensibly termed "agenesis".

Also, "agenesis" is greek, like most medical terminology ;)

_ZeD_• 12 years ago

I don't know why we need an english name for every keyword in programming languages!

wastedhours• 12 years ago

Same with Greek! Can't wait for that "not-quite-finished-version-of-a-software-product" to be released!

hmsimha• 12 years ago

It's interesting to note that you don't need a cerebellum to move or think, but the loss of it impairs both. Contrast this to damage to your motor cortex which can result in paralysis.

This strikes me as akin to saying that you don't need a GPU to perform graphical processing, but not having it impairs your graphical processing capability. The brain wires itself throughout a human's development to take advantage of the specialization of its components and their parallelism.

Damaging an adult's cerebellum once those connections are in place would be the equivalent of removing a GPU before trying to play a game that has been developed to rely on it.

At least that's my simplified analogy drawn from my admittedly imperfect understanding of how the human brain and computers work.

collyw2• 12 years ago

I don't think anyone is anywhere close to "understanding perfectly how the brain works".

Jweb_Guru• 12 years ago

Trying to reason about the brain like it's a computer is a very common thing for computer scientists to do. Unfortunately, it's also mostly fallacious (since for a whole host of reasons, neurons don't work like integrated circuits), and simplistic analogies like cerebellum = GPU are probably not going to give much insight into what's really going on. I'm not saying "the brain is beyond human comprehension" or anything silly like that, just that you have to approach it from a biochemical context.

rmc2• 12 years ago

Remember things like this when people talk about biological differences between men and women's brains. Studies sometimes find tiny differences, and then some people claim that's why 19 out of 20 board members are men. It's not bias, it's science!

But if people can live missing massive chunks of their brain, is it really believable that tiny differences can cause such massive societal outcomes?

MadManE2• 12 years ago

What a large chip you must have on your shoulder. This is not even in the same ballpark of discussing gender differences in how brains function. This article is saying that even with certain portions of the brain missing, that other portions can compensate. What you are talking about is the different way that things are processed (if any) between male and female.

But good job on sticking it to THE MAN. I'm sure that your social media activism is revolutionizing the world.

anonbanker2• 12 years ago

Please don't make posts like this on HN. Your sarcasm made the post overwhelmingly negative, and contributed nothing to the conversation. This would have been a much better post had you removed the first sentence and the last two.

gwern3• 12 years ago

But if people can live missing massive chunks of their brain, is it really believable that tiny differences can cause such massive societal outcomes?

Congratulations, you are today's demonstration of 'proving too much': you have also just proven that things like lesions and scars cannot affect cognition, warp personalities, create agnosias and aphasias, and result in bizarre conditions like those Oliver Sacks has so memorably documented, because lesions're so tiny and such small parts of the brain - 'if people can live missing massive chunks of their brain, is it really believable that tiny differences can cause such massive societal outcomes?'

caseydurfee• 12 years ago

The OP was not talking about the magnitude of the differences, but the nature of them.

Do you believe that neuroplasticity remains constant throughout a person's lifetime? Unless you believe that, your statement is incoherent.

Lesions and scars are acute changes in the brain that happen after birth. That's different from starting out missing massive chunk of your brain.

OP: "Look at that person who was born with no arms due to a birth defect. They're able to live a fairly normal, happy life. Maybe arms aren't essential to human happiness."

You: "So you're saying if you got your hand mutilated in a garbage disposal, that wouldn't make you unhappy? A hand is much less than a whole arm."

(I'll leave what this makes you a demonstration of as an exercise for the reader.)

cjslep• 12 years ago

is it really believable that tiny differences can cause such massive societal outcomes?

Yes it is believable, as evidenced by numerous people that work on, get funding for, and continue to do research on a large slew of topics that contain "tiny differences", such as <insert any sort of engineering>.

EDIT: (Hint: "tiny differences" is fundamental to the notion of calculus.)

tedks• 12 years ago

Indeed. You'd think that just a normal life of experiencing variance between humans would dispel that notion, but people are irrationally wedded to their prejudices.

clubhi• 12 years ago

It's so amusing how intelligent people can come to such ignorant conclusions. I have no doubt I do it myself from time to time.

delecti• 12 years ago

You took it in the exact opposite direction of logical.

She's missing a huge portion of her brain and managed fairly well. Wouldn't that lead you to believe that it would take quite a bit of structural difference to cause noticeable societal outcomes?

TeMPOraL2• 12 years ago

To add to other excellent comments refuting this line of reasoning - brains are not rocks, they are very complex systems, and the more complex something gets the more delicate it is, i.e. even a tiny chance has a chance to alter behavior of the system in significant ways.

As an illustration, think of your computer. If you open it up and remove one RAM die, it will most likely run fine, albeit slower. Were you to introduce a "tiny difference", say, swap two pins on a die, you risk getting everything from machine not booting up, to crashing constantly, to running fine but spewing out nonsense and corrupting data every now and then. Were you to introduce a little bigger change - say, saw the die in half, you'll likely fry the whole machine.

sramsay• 12 years ago

"Don't mind the gap . . ."

Perhaps a more tasteful lead-in was in order.

blisterpeanuts• 12 years ago

This is fascinating because the cerebellum is part of the "reptilian brain", one of the three sections of the mammalian triune brain that include the limbic and neocortex as well.

The reptilian brain is responsible for basic motor functions, heart rate, temperature regulation, and balance, and evolutionarily seems to be the part of the brain that is most connected to that of ancient fish and reptiles, as the name implies.

A person who is missing a portion of this rigid subsystem should still be able to think, process new information, and remember it, but might suffer from imbalance and other basic health issues as in fact this woman does. Yet, she can do lots of stuff. Apparently the surviving portions of her reptilian brain are able to compensate for the loss of the cerebellum.

It sheds a whole new light on a phrase like "my cold reptilian hindbrain tells me to ruthlessly proceed". We think of ourselves having this sort of emotionless hindbrain that is moderated by the more modern brain centers for sympathy, empathy, emotion, and higher reasoning. But what if in fact there is no such thing as a ruthless, primitive hindbrain and we are all completely in charge of our behavior, ethically and emotionally speaking?

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_cr/d_05_cr_her/d...

sitkack5• 12 years ago

Maybe it isn't that the cerebellum is "gone" but maybe the surrounding tissue that bordered the cerebellum has sort of involuntarily taken over the same function. Those nerve endings that would terminate in the cerebellum are probably still intact?

fiatjaf2• 12 years ago

It's strange how materialists of all sorts (just look at the comments) take it for granted that, no matter how scientifically absurd, these facts cannot be used as evidence for non-materialistic explanations of the life and the world. Everything will be explained by materialistic science, and that is settled.

muyuu• 12 years ago

If what you mean by materialistic is non-supernatural (or just natural) then that much is quite settled, yes.

lutusp6• 12 years ago

Okay, but consider the alternative -- that the existence of a non-materialistic reality is assumed without empirical (i.e. material) evidence. If that were to be accepted as a given, then we might build a pseudoscience on that foundation, one that would burden everyone with assumptions about empirically untestable, non-objective properties of reality. We would have created psychology.

acornax2• 12 years ago

Empirical evidence isn't material evidence.

Dylan168077• 12 years ago

Science describes the world as it is, no matter how strange, whether or not it's 'materialistic'.

fiatjaf2• 12 years ago

Science describes the material portion of the world, and ignores the rest, or says: "the rest will be discovered as having a material foundation in the future and by that time we will describe it, we will not bother to describe it now".

This is a quite big assumption, and has none to do with describing "the world as it is".

tim3332• 12 years ago

I don't see any of "these facts" as "scientifically absurd." Which are absurd in your opinion?

lizzard• 12 years ago

I hope she knows all the lyrics to The Ramones' "Teenage Lobotomy".

"Then I guess I'll have to tell 'em / That I've got no cerebellum."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ssoBUb2cJk

shanev• 12 years ago

I was just going to post this! First thing I thought of.

lostlogin5• 12 years ago

The upper image which I assume is her MRI scan is interesting. It isn't just her cerebellum missing - her brain stem looks odd too. Where is the pons? Where are the cranial nerves attaching? Need more images! Edit. On closer reading this article isn't great. <<Doctors did a CAT scan and immediately identified the source of the problem – her entire cerebellum was missing (see scan, below left)>>. Assuming it isn't some sort of problem related to me viewing the article on a phone, that image is an MR. No CATs involved.

timle2• 12 years ago

? The top image is most definitely from a CAT scan. If it was MR, there would be way more artifact around the eye/nose/throat.

lostlogin5• 12 years ago

No it isn't. Look at the contrast and the signal from fat and water, look at the tongue. That is a T1 sag. Edit: Article, or images anyway, appear on multiple sites labeled as MRI. Pretty sure the fuzzy writing says T1 FLAIR on this site. http://io9.com/doctors-discover-a-woman-with-no-cerebellum-1... Edit 2: Here is another link and the ax T2 is seen at bottom of the images. Edit 3. The actual journal article. New scientist screwed up didn't didn't read it properly. Patient had a CT then an MRI as per the image label. New Scientist only kept the MRI image as brain MR is way nicer than CT but kept the journal text saying CT. http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/22/bra...

2xlbuds• 12 years ago

I'm really curious, how would this woman react to alcohol?

mmcclellan• 12 years ago

I'm being sincere here. I am surprised and excited to see interest in this. Someone very close to me has no discernible cerebellum and no one we've seen or known has ever considered it medically interesting.

sehutson• 12 years ago

I felt the same way when I saw this article. My cousin's daughter was recently diagnosed with cerebellar hypoplasia (a missing or smaller than normal cerebellum), and it's been pretty terrifying for them. They live in a rural area where no one has ever dealt with the problem, and they're spending insane amounts of time and money on therapy (in a city an hour away) to help her learn basic skills. She celebrated her 3rd birthday this week and she can't walk, talk, or even stand unassisted.

On one hand, this article thrills me to think that at some point, her daughter might lead a relatively normal life. It's heartbreaking to see the way she suffers right now - like there's more going on in her head than she can tell us, and you can see the frustration on her face when she tries to do things or get her point across. On the other hand, I'm hesitant to send the article to my cousin because I know everything related to her daughter's problem is deeply depressing to her as she's dealing with a frustrated child who makes very little progress from day to day.

clueless123• 12 years ago

That is nothing... I know of several politicians that have no brain at all, and no one has noticed yet. jk,jk

timle2• 12 years ago

I have always found it fascinating that the cerebellum has more neurons than the rest of the brain. What the heck is going on in there.

toblender• 12 years ago

Talk about living on "Hard" mode.

z3t4• 12 years ago

A friend of mine lost the left side of his brain ... And he's all right now!

lostlogin5• 12 years ago

Better article and original source. http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/22/bra...

Woman of 24 found to have no cerebellum in her brain

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