Regarding Terri Schiavo:
If you are one of those who categorically bought the "75% of her cortex is fluid, it's hopeless" line, it might be interesting for you to read up on the work of Dr. John Lorber, a British neurologist who published a controversial paper "Is Your Brain Really Necessary?" back in 1980. Dr. Lorber's work centered on hydrocephalism, where abnormal amounts of fluid cause damage to the brain - sometimes actually replacing the tissue.
One case he presented, for example, involved a young man with an IQ of 126 who had achieved a first-class honors degree in mathematics (a difficult accomplishment indeed) and lived a normal life in spite of the fact that his brain was less than 1/10 normal size. His cranium was filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid, leaving a layer of brain tissue near the skull only about 4/100 of an inch thick.
Lorber had performed brain scans on nearly 600 patients and obtained similar results in other cases - many of the people suffering from hydrocephalus had relatively unimpaired mental performance, among those whose craniums were 95% filled with cerebrospinal fluid, half had IQs above 100.
There have been many reports of people with horrendous brain injury who have recovered despite massive loss of brain tissue. Some have ended up in a state approaching normalcy, others have been put into a state approximating profound retardation, but they have indeed occurred.
While Lorber's work is still controversial, there are many instances known to medical science where people who should be "brain dead" are in fact able to function at some level. "No hope" is not an ironclad medical diagnosis where the brain is concerned, and in the case of someone like Terri Schiavo, no one really knows whether they have consciousness at some level or not - sometimes people are "trapped in there" and unable to communicate, but that doesn't mean they can't think and feel. Might be worth considering that the next time a case like Terri's comes up....
Check out more on Lorber at:
http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/scienc..._necessary.htm
A few interesting quotes:
Quote:
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. Skeptics have claimed that it was an error of interpretation of the scans themselves. Lorber himself admits that reading a CAT scan can be tricky. He also has said that he would not make such a claim without evidence. In answer to attacks that he has not precisely quantified the amount of brain tissue missing, he added, "I can't say whether the mathematics student has a brain weighing 50 grams or 150 grams, but it is clear that it is nowhere near the normal 1.5 kilograms."
Many neurologists feel that this is a tribute to the brain's redundancy and its ability to reassign functions. Others, however, are not so sure. Patrick Wall, professor of anatomy at University College, London states "To talk of redundancy is a cop-out to get around something you don't understand."
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