[Hog's Gone Fishin]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

On the subject of brains, there was some TV show on last night about a kid who was born with only 2 percent of a brain. They showed brain scans and he basically had nothing inside his skull. I thought, "Well that's going to be a boring show" and turned to it out of morbid curiosity. (I hate the TV freak shows, but hey, I'm a human with flaws. Don't think less of me.)

The show sucked me in. Instead of dying or being a vegetable, the kid's brain actually started growing, and he started developing intellectually. By age 3 or so, he was up to something like 20 percent of a physical brain, but with a completely different physical structure. It looked like it was growing from the outside in, starting at his skull. Looking at the kid, you wouldn't necessarily know that anything was amiss. He was a bit behind developmentally, but it didn't seem like much. He was able to say some words and understand them, and when they said something like, "Touch your nose", he could do it.

The most fascinating part of this is that he's learning, but he doesn't possess the physical parts of the brain that are traditionally associated with that learning. Those parts of the brain are completely missing. But other parts of his growing brain are wiring themselves to serve those purposes.

The question in everyone's mind was what happens next. Will the kid's brain keep growing, and will he have the developmental ceiling of a normal adult or will he plateau at some point? And will he eventually end up with a full brain that's wired completely differently than normal?

It was pretty amazing stuff.

Was his last name Bolles ?