Well, no. But maybe he could have. He died young from a seizure that I'm guessing had something to do with his injury, and he famously became a complete asshole after his injury.
But that said, wikipedia suggests that he began recovering his social skills in the years after his injury. Perhaps if he hadn't died young, he could have returned to some sort of normalcy.
From this article it's not clear if the rat has many fewer neurons than normal, or small neurons compressed together. Given its high level of function, I'd be more surprised by the former.
> It was only after they traced chemicals in the brain that they were able to verify that, indeed, the hippocampus was that squished, displaced object pushed toward the back of the brain.
Main takeaway (misleading title) is that this rat had a brain, but a region of fluid developed and pushed the brain towards the edges of the cranial cavity. The rat was still able to do most of the other basic tasks as the other rats, but may have suffered from anxiety.
And that's the extent of this article. I don't think we know how higher order functions were affected. I would guess that these (like what humans have) are not necessary to sustain life. A species can exist indefinitely as long as they can feed and reproduce faster than they die. These things are easy to do without higher order functions if food and reproductive mates are readily available.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lab rat without 99% of their brain didn't change much or could still complete basic tasks. I would be surprised if a human without 99% of their brain could function normally in society today, which requires relatively heavy higher order brain function.
Huh. I had a memory of reading about a human who had the same issue you quoted (I honestly have not clicked through to the article about the rat) and found an article about it with images I am finding extremely familiar.
> A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.
> Scans of the 44-year-old man’s brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue (see image of the patient’s brain, above left).
The important part is the cortex, so in this case he might have lost some white matter connectivity but kept most of the gray matter structures. IQ of 75, though.
Interesting piece thanks. The tl;dr is we probably need all the neurons inside our brains and evolution didn’t miss a trick to make us run on mini brains.
It's actually amazing how much rats (and people) can do despite massive brain damage. A rat with no cortex can do almost everything (other than trimming its nails!).
I once met a patient who was missing literally half of their brain due to an epilepsy resection + meningitis. We had a perfectly normal conversation and, had I not seen the MRI, I never would have guessed.
The patient's vision was affected, though not as much as one would think.
Visual areas in the left hemisphere represent the righthand size of visual space, while those in the right hemisphere represent the the left part of the world. With one hemisphere totally removed, you'd think the patient would be half blind. However, Dan Guitton's lab showed that D.R. still has some residual "blindsight" and that stimuli flashed in the blind hemifield affect eye movements.
I'm not sure what else, though the patient had a rather normal life: held down a job, was involved in some civic organizations, stuff like that.
Similarly the story of Noah Wall, The parents of a boy born with only 2 percent of his brain have spoken out about their son's "extraordinary" development.
Shelly and his father Rob Wall spoke of how their six-year-old son has since gained function in 80 percent of his brain. [1]
I remember seeing a journal article decades ago: Is the Brain Necessary? I don't remember any other details, only that due to some condition, only a thin shell of active matter remained.
I somehow read that initially as RedHat as well. Curious as to how my habit of skim reading and incorrectly logging information has filled by brain with bitrot over the years.
>
It was determined that the axe had missed the jugular vein[7] and a clot had prevented Mike from bleeding to death. Although most of his head was severed, most of his brain stem and one ear were left on his body. Since basic functions (breathing, heart rate, etc.) as well as most of a chicken's reflex actions are controlled by the brain stem, Mike was able to remain quite healthy.
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
HN is nice, but it is too humorless, people take themselves way too seriously here. Banter and humor are great social lubricants.I miss that coming from Slashdot. So thanks.
I agree, but I think there's a fear that people will take it too far and we'll end up in Reddit hell with endless chains of worn out puns and unfunny copy/pasted jokes.
For a rat, the spinal cord could be just as big, or bigger than the brain in mass. It's possible that the spinal cord does majority of processing for rats, like cockroaches.
I wasn't really aware of cockroaches possessing spinal cords.
Flippancy aside, rats are sophisticated mammals with basically the same set of higher order functions as ourselves, although of course in different quantities.
>I would be surprised if a human without 99% of their brain could function normally in society today, which requires relatively heavy higher order brain function.
We can always send them to the European Parliament ... no one will notice.
It says it may have “heightened anxiety”. It probably knows his own brain was limited in some sort of abilities, so it subconsciously limited risk taking
53 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadBut that said, wikipedia suggests that he began recovering his social skills in the years after his injury. Perhaps if he hadn't died young, he could have returned to some sort of normalcy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage#Social_recovery
Main takeaway (misleading title) is that this rat had a brain, but a region of fluid developed and pushed the brain towards the edges of the cranial cavity. The rat was still able to do most of the other basic tasks as the other rats, but may have suffered from anxiety.
And that's the extent of this article. I don't think we know how higher order functions were affected. I would guess that these (like what humans have) are not necessary to sustain life. A species can exist indefinitely as long as they can feed and reproduce faster than they die. These things are easy to do without higher order functions if food and reproductive mates are readily available.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lab rat without 99% of their brain didn't change much or could still complete basic tasks. I would be surprised if a human without 99% of their brain could function normally in society today, which requires relatively heavy higher order brain function.
> A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.
> Scans of the 44-year-old man’s brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue (see image of the patient’s brain, above left).
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-b...
It makes sense. I don't know how Game AI Enemies are scripted but they seem to use very minimal code.
This should also imply that the spinal cord is more important, as the brain is just 1/10ths ? of the nervous system.
The classic summary of these studies is by Whishaw (1990), and there's a copy of it (and similar stuff on humans) in this thread: https://twitter.com/markdhumphries/status/107105276276554137...
I once met a patient who was missing literally half of their brain due to an epilepsy resection + meningitis. We had a perfectly normal conversation and, had I not seen the MRI, I never would have guessed.
Visual areas in the left hemisphere represent the righthand size of visual space, while those in the right hemisphere represent the the left part of the world. With one hemisphere totally removed, you'd think the patient would be half blind. However, Dan Guitton's lab showed that D.R. still has some residual "blindsight" and that stimuli flashed in the blind hemifield affect eye movements.
I'm not sure what else, though the patient had a rather normal life: held down a job, was involved in some civic organizations, stuff like that.
Gwern has a good summary, including criticisms: https://www.gwern.net/Hydrocephalus
Shelly and his father Rob Wall spoke of how their six-year-old son has since gained function in 80 percent of his brain. [1]
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/miracle-boy-born-no-brain-grows-bac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken
same case but in humans, he had a "normal" life.
and in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10810454
Gwerns very detailed write up on the conditoon
Flippancy aside, rats are sophisticated mammals with basically the same set of higher order functions as ourselves, although of course in different quantities.
We can always send them to the European Parliament ... no one will notice.