The student in question was academically bright, had a reported 
IQ of 126 and was expected to graduate.  When he was examined by 
CAT-scan, however, Lorber discovered that he had virtually no 
brain at all.

Instead of two hemispheres filling the cranial cavity, some 4.5 
centimetres deep, the student had less than 1 millimetre of 
cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column.

The student was suffering from hydrocephalus, the condition in 
which the cerebrospinal fluid, instead of circulating around the 
brain and entering the bloodstream, becomes dammed up inside the 
brain.

Normally, the condition is fatal in the first months of 
childhood. Even where an individual survives he or she is usually 
seriously handicapped. Somehow, though, the Sheffield student had 
lived a perfectly normal life and went on to gain an honours 
degree in mathematics.

This case is by no means as rare as it seems.  In 1970, a New 
Yorker died at the age of 35.  He had left school with no 
academic achievements, but had worked at manual jobs such as 
building janitor, and was a popular figure in his neighbourhood. 
Tenants of the building where he worked described him as passing 
the days performing his routine chores, such as tending the 
boiler, and reading the tabloid newspapers. When an autopsy was 
performed to determine the cause of his premature death he, too, 
was found to have practically no brain at all.

Professor Lorber has identified several hundred people who have 
very small cerebral hemispheres but who appear to be normal 
intelligent individuals. Some of them he describes as having 'no 
detectable brain', yet they have scored up to 120 on IQ tests.

No-one knows how people with 'no detectable brain' are able to 
function at all, let alone to graduate in mathematics, but there 
are a couple theories.  One idea is that there is such a high 
level of redundancy of function in the normal brain that what 
little remains is able to learn to deputise for the missing 
hemispheres.  Another, similar, suggestion is the old idea that 
we only use a small percentage of our brains anyway -- perhaps as 
little a 10 per cent.  

The trouble with these ideas is that more recent research seems 
to contradict them.  The functions of the brain have been mapped 
comprehensively and although there is some redundancy there is 
also a high degree of specialisation -- the motor area and the 
visual cortex being highly specific for instance. Similarly, the 
idea that we 'only use 10 per cent of our brain' is a 
misunderstanding dating from research in the 1930s in which the 
functions of large areas of the cortex could not be determined 
and were dubbed 'silent', when in fact they are linked with 
important functions like speech and abstract thinking. 

The other interesting thing about Lorber's findings is that they 
remind us of the mystery of memory.  At first it was thought that 
memory would have some physical substrate in the brain, like the 
memory chips in a PC.   But extensive investigation of the brain 
has turned up the surprising fact that memory is not located in 
any one area or in a specific substrate.  As one eminent 
neurologist put it, 'memory is everywhere in the brain and 
nowhere.'

But if the brain is not a mechanism for classifying and storing 
experiences and analysing them to enable us to live our lives 
then what on earth is the brain for?  And where is the seat of 
human intelligence?  Where is the mind?

The only biologist to propose a radically novel approach to these 
questions is Dr Rupert Sheldrake.  In his book A New Science of 
Life Sheldrake rejected the idea that the brain is a warehouse 
for memories and suggested it is more like a radio receiver for 
tuning into the past.  Memory is not a recording process in which 
a medium is altered to store records, but a journey that the mind 
makes into the past via the process of morphic resonance.

But, of course, such a crazy idea couldn't possibly be true, 
could it?

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