

Human brain boiled in its skull lasted 4000 years - daegloe
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029373.000-human-brain-boiled-in-its-skull-lasted-4000-years.html

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Udo
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.

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refurb
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.

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ComputerGuru
> _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://flatrock.org.nz/topics/science/is_the_brain_really_necessary.htm)

[http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-
Brain.pdf](http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lorber](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lorber)

~~~
Udo
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.

~~~
ComputerGuru
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.

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Udo
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.

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ComputerGuru
Thank you. That clarified things.

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chacham15
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?

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namenotrequired
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.

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daned
For certain values of 'lasted'

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

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

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

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zeckalpha
About 10K years.

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bonemachine
What a way to go.

