In article <BILL.94Jan6160206 at hilus.nsma.arizona.edu>,
Bill Skaggs <bill at nsma.arizona.edu> wrote:
.....
>>This is a classic urban myth. It seems to pop up over and over again,
....
>>The source of the myth is a story (not a research report) in Science,
>from December 12, 1980 (vol. 210, p 1232), called "Is your Brain
>Really Necessary?" The story is about a physician named Jeff Lorber
>who specialized in hydrocephaly and was going around saying some very
>provocative things. Among other things, he described cases of people
>with normal or high intelligence whose brain weights were far below
>normal. But it was all anecdotal. There was no solid evidence cited
>to show that these people truly had shrunken brains, and to my
>knowledge no such evidence has ever appeared. (I didn't see the PBS
>series, so I can't evaluate it.)
In the PBS series they showed nice MRIs of the woman's brain, and
only the occipital portion was of any appreciable size. Also, they
used some kind of imaging (I don't think it was PET) to show activity
during various tasks, and only that part of the brain exhibited any
"significant" activity (significant in quotes, because it was significant
to the method of imaging). So, I don't believe that this was a case
of simply comparing brain sizes. I'll try to hunt down the reference.
Leslie Kay
lmk2 at garnet.berkeley.edu
