Added this to my “brains are fascinating” note: How memories persist where bodies, and even brains, do not
It seems that a 44-year-old French man had gone to hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. Doctors learned that the patient ‘had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away hydrocephalus – water on the brain – as an infant. The shunt was removed when he was 14.’ When they scanned his brain, they found a huge fluid-filled chamber occupying most of the space in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue. The patient, a married father of two children, worked as a civil servant apparently leading a normal life, despite having a cranium filled with spinal fluid and very little brain tissue.