“The brain is one of the most important human organs. Without a brain, a person cannot think, he turns into an outright moron, a living plant! Who told you this crap?
Harpoon stitched
There was a knock on the office of the doctor on duty at the Havana City Hospital. The medic, without looking up from his notes, replied: "Wait a minute." After completing the recording, the doctor straightened up and said: "Come in!" The door opened and the patient entered. The doctor almost fell off his chair: a harpoon protruded directly from the forehead. He pierced through the head, the point protruding from the back of the head. "Doctor, is this something serious?" - "How can I tell you … not really"
Oscar Garcia Chirino, 9, worked at one of the reservoirs. On October 14, 1996, he and his friend decided to hunt for a large fish. It is not clear how a person can be mistaken for a fish, but his friend had a good eye, a steady hand, and Oscar got a harpoon right in his forehead.
Surprised Oscar quickly earned his flippers, trying to get away from his friend as far as possible, swam 80 meters to the shore on his own, got out on land and headed to the nearest hospital.
The spear was removed, Oscar survived, recovered. The injury did not affect his mental abilities at all, he retained control over his body and clarity of thought. Leaving the hospital, Oscar thanked the doctors and went to look for his friend, whom he was so eager to see and hug tightly.
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Punched brains
There are many cases when people, having received severe wounds in the head, remained alive after that. Kutuzov lost his eye not as a result of cataracts - the officer's head was pierced through by a Turkish bullet. However, the future field marshal remained alive and not only did not lose his mental abilities, but in the future he managed to outplay the glorious Napoleon Bonaparte.
In 1848, a metal rod 3 cm in diameter pierced through the head of F. Gage, a railway worker. Gage lost his eye, but survived and returned to his work.
In 1978, as a result of an accident, a proton beam passed through the head of physicist Anatoly Bugorsky. The beam burned through skin, bone and the researcher's brain. He should have died, but he survived. Subsequently, he wrote and defended his Ph. D. thesis.
But it turns out that you can maintain clarity of mind even if you lose most of your brain!
Partially without brains
At the age of 14, Carlos Rodriguez got high on some kind of rubbish, which "blew his head off" in the literal sense of the word. The teenager stole a car and crashed into a pole at high speed. Carlos flew through the windshield and landed on a concrete track, losing half of his head.
Doctors saved Rodriguez's life. Back in society, Carlos continued his career as an offender. As it turned out, 40% of the brain is quite enough for this.
However, this volume is quite enough for more important matters.
In 1989, 29-year-old James Cordell consulted the neurosurgeon Bruwell. The young scientist has just completed his PhD in Economics and Law at Harvard University. The intense tension sent James headaches. The patient underwent a tomography of the head, and it turned out that he was completely missing the right hemisphere of the brain! However, as we can see, this did not stop Cordell from making a scientific career.
No brains at all
The German professor Hoofland shocked the scientific world with his message. He performed a posthumous autopsy on a patient and found that he had no brain at all! In the cranium of the deceased, he found only about 300 g of liquid! On careful questioning of the doctor, the relatives replied that the deceased remained clear of mind and a sense of humor until the last days.
A similar pathology was found in the Dutchman Jan Gerling, who died in 1976. His skull was also filled with fluid instead of brain. The relatives called the doctors' conclusion vile slander. Jan Gerling was the most famous watchmaker in the country, who manually assembled the most complex mechanisms. And you want to say that he was without brains ?!
So what do we think?
Australian neurophysiologist John Eccles, 1963 Nobel laureate, hypothesized that the brain is just a "receiver", that the source of all our thoughts and creative ideas is outside our body. The brain has nothing to do with our intelligence. It has completely different functions. Which ones are still a question (see also - "how to keep the brain working").
There is another theory. The brain is, of course, the concentration of nerve cells. But they are found in other organs, in the intestines there are more than 100 million of them, more than in the spinal cord. Some scientists believe that in extreme situations, some nerve cells are able to replace others and are quite serious about the "abdominal brain". So the phrase "What do you think, with your head or … with your stomach?" does not carry anything offensive in itself.
Klim Podkova