Strange Cases Involving the Human Brain

The brain can be responsible for some pretty strange changes in us and even though we have been taught by culture an entire brain is necessary to function, that doesn’t seem to be the truth. In humans the average brain size is about 1.3kg and has about 10 billion nerve cells. These cells are linked to each other. We have heard derogatory saying about people all our lives which refer to their brain power such as half-wit, addle-brained and other things. When someone thinks something is very simple they call it a no-brainer. There was a math student who went for a doctor visit. The student had an IQ of 126. As the doctor examined him he noticed his head seemed a little too large and referred him to another doctor who had a specialty which might be more useful. When the second doctor scanned the skull of the student he was horrified to see he had almost no brain. All that was there was a layer of tissue above his spine which was less then 1mm deep. The second doctor was Dr. John Lorber and he was famous for examining brain problems. What he had found in his studies was some people who have 95 percent of their skulls filled with fluid instead of brain material are either profoundly mentally disabled or have IQs over 100. This does seem to be impossible doesn’t it and yet there it is.

A boy in China had a brain disease which caused doctors to have to remove half of his brain and skull to save his life. His name is Hou Guozhu and he had Rasmussen’s Encephalitis. When the newspapers got hold of the story he was given the cruel nickname of “half-brain boy.” Donations flooded in to the family and they were able to pay for doctors who created a titanium mesh skull to his head giving him the appearance of normalcy. The boy seems to function normally. It is hard to find much data on him now. If you are like me finding people who have only partial brains and yet seem to be normal is quite a surprise. It does make me wonder about our brains and whether we are not using our entire brains. If we can live normally without an entire brain, could it be possible our brains may have reached their full size but have not reached their full potential?

It is not only partial brains that function like full ones which is strange, there are a lot of other things which involve our brains which are also strange. I knew a lawyer who was walking on the grounds of a hospital. Some hospitals have very heavy wire mesh screens over the windows. As he walked by a building one of those heavy mesh screens fell off the window and hit him in the head. He was rushed into surgery. As he lay on the table he began to talk in several languages which he previously had no knowledge of. Doctors were astonished. The people who believe in reincarnation would have a ball with this. They would probably think he must have learned these languages in previous lives. He wasn’t the only one this ever happened to, it has happened more times than we would expect. A boy was playing soccer in Atlanta Georgia when he suffered a severe concussion. English was the only language he knew, well that was until the concussion, suddenly without any lessons he was fluent in Spanish. Not only is he fluent, it is said he has a perfect Spanish accent.

One man had a bizarre experience. He had been in a coma. When he woke up he was fluent in Swedish and had no memory of his current life. He believed he was a different person and from Sweden. He really was a US Navy vet with a completely different name. In this case he didn’t speak English anymore and didn’t recognize his relatives. A Swedish translator was called in and did an interpretation of what he was saying. Sometimes people wake and have foreign accents. This is an actual condition known as foreign accent syndrome. The more complex condition is where someone wakes up, thinks he or she is someone else who comes from another country and doesn’t speak English such as our Navy vet.

There are a lot of strange cases where young children think they lived another life and have all sorts of facts which seem impossible for them to know, but as they get older they lose this information, or do they. Perhaps it is buried deep in their psyche and some traumatic event can bring it back out and the above cases are proof of this? There is still a lot about the human mind we don’t understand and that becomes obvious when we look at cases about the brain that have been stumping the medical profession for years. Some doctors believe the cases where people wake up thinking they are someone else and speaking a foreign language are strictly psychological, others think there is more to this.

In one famous court case a murderer was on trial for his life. He had escaped from prison after killing an elderly couple and as part of his defense his lawyer brought brain scans of the man and introduced them into evidence. They showed that 10 areas of the murderer’s brain were completely inactive and other parts were working far too much. The defense attorneys claimed his brain was not checking his wilder impulses and he was mentally ill. The jury, after hearing this evidence waived the death penalty and gave the murderer life in prison.