The man 'no brain' still lives challenging the scientific world

A strange disease caused the brain of this man to dissipate, but he still lived healthy. What happened?

In 2007, the scientific community recorded a very strange case of patients. It was a man of French nationality, about 40 years old. He went to the clinic to treat a prolonged pain in his leg.

Everything seemed to be nothing special. However, according to the medical record, when he was a child, his legs also had the same problem because there were too many cerebrospinal fluid inside the brain ventricles. Therefore, doctors decided to conduct a brain scan again, to determine the cause of the pain mentioned above.

The fluid has "swallowed" his brain, leaving only the cerebral cortex containing neurons.

But the brain scan results startled everyone. His brain was swollen too much, filled with marrow fluid, and the fluid almost replaced the entire brain, leaving only a thin cortex containing neurons. In other words, this man has almost no brain.

And more specifically, the function of the brain works great. Not only was his consciousness unaffected, he also enjoyed a very normal life with a wife and two children, despite a serious flaw in his head.

This bizarre case has caused the scientific community to ask questions, about all the discoveries so far related to the consciousness and operation of the brain.

 

Previously, scientists still believe that the brain has an area called "thalamus" (thalamus), which is responsible for transmitting receptor signals to the cortex. It is an indispensable area to make human consciousness.

This belief comes from a number of experiments - when trying to cause the thalamus to stop working with electrical impulses, the patient will fall into a coma and lose consciousness.

People can think very complexly.

Similarly, another study shows that we can control human consciousness through "basal ganglia" - claustrum. This is the area that carries signals from many brain regions, and is often linked to the thalamus.

However, the case of the strange man beat all.He still survived, still thinking only with a very thin cortex, and none of the two brain regions mentioned above.

Instead, it increases persuasiveness for some other studies, suggesting that the structure of the brain does not determine consciousness. On the contrary, it is simply the way neurons are connected.

For example, a recent study of "thought-generating neurological activities" was published in Royal Society Interface magazine. Research shows that neurons rarely send signals to each other in a fixed path, which finds all possible paths, forming a very flexible and highly variable model.

Human consciousness can come in many different ways, not necessarily going through the nerve centers in the brain.

This may be the answer why people can think very complexly and at the same time create the hypothesis that the other man's neuron may have found other links. , instead of going through the nerve center in the brain.

However, it is still a rare exotic case of medicine, leaving many questions unanswered.