By Stan Greene Beth T'filah Messianic Synagogue
It seems that since the advent of CAT scanning technology an interesting thing has been discovered. There are people out there with high IQ's, honors students, geniuses, who have virtually NO brain. 5% to 50% of normal cortical material. Some of them Lorber describes as having 'no detectable brain', yet they have scored up to 120 on IQ tests.
The original article seems to have appeared in Science 210 December 1980, p. 1232 and there was an article in Science Digest, October 1983 (vol. 91 No. 10).
Lorber cited the case of a boy who had an IQ of 126 and had a first class honors 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."
CAT scanning of folks for any number of other reasons (head trauma, strokes, etc.) over the last two decades has turned up hundreds of such individuals.
These people generally have a history of hydrocephaly, an abnormal build up of cerebrospinal fluid, ("water on the brain") as babies, the pressure killing off most of the cerebral cortex and leaving them with 50-95% empty skull cavity filled with CFS enclosed in a thin (down to 1mm thick) envelope of cortical tissue. Most of these folks function perfectly normally, even beyond normal.
References:
http://www.indiana.edu/~pietsch/lorber.html
http://web.syr.edu/~sndrake/necbrain.htm
http://www.altered-states.net/barry/brain/use100percent.htm