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Traditional views are that the brain creates consciousness. But more information is emerging that challenge this view.

 In July 2007, a 44-year-old French man went to a hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. When doctors learned that the man had a spinal shunt removed when he was 14, they performed numerous scans of his head. What they discovered was a huge fluid-filled chamber occupying most of the space in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue.

It was a case of hydrocephalus, literally—water on the brain. Dr. Lionel Feuillet of Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille was quoted as saying, “The images were most unusual ... the brain was virtually absent.” The patient was a married father of two children and worked as a civil servant apparently leading a normal life, despite having a cranium filled with spinal fluid and very little brain tissue.

This was reported in the Lancet entitled, “Tiny Brain Normal Life.” An analysis of more ...