• Neuromancer49@midwest.socialEnglish
    122·
    2 days ago

    I ran a lot of MRIs for my PhD. I saw somewhere around 100-200 different brains. About 10% of them had abnormalities. Of all the technicians, scientists, and (non-clinical) doctors I spoke with, we all agreed this was a very high rate of discovery. All my friends graduated without seeing anything weird. My advisor liked to joke that I was cursed. Eventually I stopped inviting my friends to do my experiments because I didn’t want to deal with the risk of them having an abnormality - thanks to some combination of HIPAA and medical liability laws, I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it, even if asked point blank. I didn’t like that very much.

    I made one exception, as a friend of mine came in for a study and I saw a golf ball sized cyst in his sinus. He had it surgically removed and he told me he stopped snoring the next day. It felt good to make a difference for him.

    But, I saw one brain similar to the one documented here. It belongs to one of my close friends. It was harrowing. Entire left hemisphere was malformed, the ventricles were way too big and the cortex was way too thin. But the right side of his brain was underdeveloped, maybe the size of a tennis ball.

    The weirdest part, he is 100% normal. In fact, he competed at a high level of college athletics. Normal Cognition, normal motor function, great sense of humor, and a very caring person. Now he has a great job, wife and kid, and we hang out often. But I can’t bring myself to say anything, and every time I see his son I wonder about his brain.

    • toynbee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 hours ago

      My advisor liked to joke that I was cursed.

      It didn’t have quite the same level of personal impact, but I used to associate with a geologist who said something similar about me and geodes.

    • beSyl@slrpnk.netEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Oh wow, that is so interesting.

      Intelligence wise, are the people who have these sort of brains “normal”? Less inteligent? More inteligent?

      • Neuromancer49@midwest.socialEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        Interesting question. It depends. I linked Ev Fedorenko’s Interesting Brain Project at MIT up above, they’re doing a deep dive into questions like those.

        Broadly speaking, if you’re born with these anatomical anomalies, you’ll be more or less normal. The article mentions the person in question had an IQ of 70, so that’s lower than normal, but not intellectually impaired.

        But acquired Brain damage almost always leads to impediments. Strokes and repeated concussions, physical injury, etc.

        The brain is “plastic” when you’re young, we like to say. That is, it’s pliable and can mold into whatever shape it needs to in order to adapt to your environment. That plasticity disappears once you get older. It’s how kids can learn language effortlessly - when you’re born, you have the most neurons and synapses you’ll ever have in your life. You’ll keep the same neurons (unless you have a degenerative disorder or kill them with drugs), make new synapses as you learn, but broadly speaking as you grow up you prune synapses that aren’t helpful.

        This is also why kids can undergo massive resection surgeries (or in the olden days, severing of the corpus callosum) and grow up more or less normal.

        • toynbee@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          9 hours ago

          The brain is “plastic” when you’re young, we like to say. That is, it’s pliable and can mold into whatever shape it needs to in order to adapt to your environment. That plasticity disappears once you get older

          So it’s good that we’re getting microplastics in our brains because it allows easier development as we age!

      • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        intelligence is a very hard thing to quantify. People who are good at math might be terrible at writing plays, both of which are intelligent processes.

    • SacralPlexus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      2 days ago

      I’m a Neuroradiologist and occasionally people ask me “Have you ever scanned your own brain?” when they find out my profession.

      Abso-fucking-lutely not. I’ve seen how many people have random abnormalities that are unknown until discovered incidentally when having an unrelated problem evaluated. Finding something abnormal in my brain would no doubt keep me up at night even if it was something medically considered unimportant. No way I’m going to scan myself just for fun.

    • FilterItOut@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      53·
      2 days ago

      thanks to some combination of HIPAA and medical liability laws, I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it, even if asked point blank

      Are you sure that you understood that right? In every study I’ve helped out with, and when I’m dealing with patients, rule #1 is that the participant/patient has access to their information produced from the procedures and gets counseled by a doctor involved in the process if anything is found. There’s a neuroscience professor who famously recorded his own experience in the textbook he wrote, where he participated in an MRI study because his insurance wouldn’t approve an MRI. The tumor was found in the study, passed over to his healthcare team, and they were able to use it to get the surgery approved.

      • VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        I think the person might not have been qualified to make diagnoses at that point? With any MRT I’ve ever had taken, the people who actually took it told me they weren’t allowed to comment on it in any way, and I had to wait for the doctor to take a look.

      • Neuromancer49@midwest.socialEnglish
        11·
        2 days ago

        That’s the short of it - but we passed all brain data to a university affiliated neurologist for review. We also allowed participants to take a copy of their brain data if they wanted. I’ve got a CD of my own brain kicking around somewhere, and I even helped a few people 3D print their brains.

        But, anything that I said about the participants brain opened me up to liability. What if I said their brain looked OK and there was a tumor? Or vice versa? The University felt I could be sued, so we were trained to not speak about their brain.

    • ddash@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      25·
      2 days ago

      I can just imagine you at their garden party, sweating, while your friend brags how their son is doing so well at school but seems to just not understand some really mundane topic.

    • Lemming6969@lemmy.worldEnglish
      134·
      2 days ago

      He’s not 100% normal, you just haven’t experienced the things he cannot process properly or at all, which is likely a lot of higher reasoning… They just don’t affect his day to day, which gives us clues that day to day functioning is very low level and likely mostly autonomous.

      • Neuromancer49@midwest.socialEnglish
        22·
        2 days ago

        Eh, college is hard and so was his sport. Sure, it’s not an exhaustive battery of testing but I’m confident to say he’s a normal dude.

    • Jordan117@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      I think I read that brains like these are basically normal in terms of structure and number of neurons, just compressed by the extra fluid pressure.

    • Ajen@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      I’m curious, what exactly are you worried about with your friend? Are the abnormalities you saw linked to a treatable disease?

      • Neuromancer49@midwest.socialEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Nope, not related to any disease I’ve ever seen. The best guess i have is fetal alcohol syndrome but it isn’t a perfect match. It’s just weird knowing he has a very odd shaped brain. And there’s a lot of unknowns surrounding it.

        What if he sees another doctor and they mention it to him? Would he be upset I didn’t say anything? What if it is linked to some disease and I didn’t tell him, and he gets sick?

        What if it’s hereditary and his kid has it, does it explain the motor delays? The premature birth? The problems they have with him sleeping?

        Just a lot of unknowns.

        • NoSpotOfGround@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          Could you tell him just “you should have another MRI at a clinic”?

          That rule does not seem very ethical to me, in any case.

          • Neuromancer49@midwest.socialEnglish
            3·
            2 days ago

            In the US getting an MRI for “no reason” can be very expensive. Probably wouldn’t have been covered by insurance.

            • meowMix2525@lemm.eeEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              Could you release the already captured images for him to take to a doctor for medical advice?

        • Ajen@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          Personally, if I had something like that, that wasn’t causing me problems and wasn’t linked to future problems, I wouldn’t want to know. Especially because of how unknown it is. It sounds like there’s no way that information could be of use to anyone other than a researcher, so it actually seems right that you can’t share it.

          On the other hand, I’m glad your other friend got their sinus checked out.