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had previously written about two infants born with no cerebral cortex. Yet despite this rare and fatal defect, they seemed to be developing normally, with no external signs of damage. One child survived for three months, the other for a year. If this were not remarkable enough, a colleague at Sheffield University sent Lorber a young man who had an enlarged head. He had graduated from college with a first-class honors degree in mathematics and had an IQ of 126. He had no symptoms of hydrocephalus; the young man was leading a normal life. Yet a CAT scan revealed, in Lorber’s words, that he had “virtually no brain.” The skull was lined with a thin layer of brain cells about a millimeter thick (less than one-tenth of an inch), while the rest of the space in the skull was filled with cerebral fluid.
    This is an appalling disorder to contemplate, but Lorber pushed on, recording more than six hundred cases. He divided his subjects into four categories depending on how much fluid was in the brain. The most severe category, which accounted for only 10 percent of the sample, consisted of people whose brain cavity was 95 percent filled with fluid. Of these, half were severely retarded; the other half, however, had IQs over 100.
    Not surprisingly, skeptics went on the attack. Some doubters said that Lorber must not have read the CAT scans correctly, but he assured them that his evidence was solid. Others argued that he hadn’t actually weighed the brain matter that remained, to which he drily replied, “I can’t say whether the mathematics student has a brainweighing 50 grams or 150 grams, but it is clear that it is nowhere near the normal 1.5 kilograms.” In other words, 2 to 6 ounces may be involved, but that’s nowhere near 3 pounds. More sympathetic neurologists declared that these results were proof positive of how redundant the brain is—many functions are copied and overlap. But others shrugged off this explanation, noting that “redundancy is a cop-out to get around something you don’t understand.” To this day, the whole phenomenon is shrouded in mystery, but we need to keep it in mind as our discussion unfolds. Could this be a radical example of the mind’s power to have the brain—even a drastically reduced brain—carry out commands?
    But we must consider more than brain injury. In a more recent example of neural rewiring, neuroscientist Michael Merzenich and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, took seven small monkeys who were trained to use their fingers to find food. The setup was that small banana-flavored pellets were placed at the bottom of small compartments, or food wells, in a plastic board. Some of the wells were wide and shallow; others were narrow and deep. Naturally when a monkey tried to retrieve the food, it would be more successful with the wide, shallow wells and fail at the narrow, deep ones, more often than not. However, as time went on, all the monkeys became extremely skillful, and eventually they succeeded every time, no matter how far their little fingers had to reach to retrieve a pellet.
    The team then took brain scans of a specific area known as the somatosensory cortex, which controls the movement of fingers, hoping to show that the experience of learning a skill had actually altered the monkeys’ brains. It was a success. This brain region rewired itself to other regions in order to increase the odds of finding more food in the future. Merzenich argued that as brain regions begin to newly interact, rewiring creates a new circuit. In this form of neuroplasticity, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” In our everyday lives, if we intentionally set out to learn new things or do familiar things in new ways (such as commuting to work via a newroute or taking the bus instead of a car), we effectively rewire our brains and improve them. A physical workout builds muscle; a mental workout creates new synapses to strengthen the neural network.
    Many other