'It's been well worth it': Face transplant patient reveals incredible transforma
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https://news.sky.com/story/its-been-well-worth-it-face-transplant-patient-reveals-incredible-transformation-11567561?fbclid=IwAR3GooE2MII3IBgV3mXGi6Bianfc_qg0ls_NOx0i6tBskAkodPaYEd7PKuQ
goddamn science is amazing
JESUS CHRIST
Man's got some fabulous eyes, that's one hell of a recovery
https://twitter.com/nyulangone/status/1068176164370427904/photo/1
Man thats crazy. The fact hes still able to grow facial hair as well is pretty amazing even after all that along with his face reshaping the way it did there.
All that in the span of a year too. Love me some nice news here and there.
So the beard still grows, huh. Is it his hair or the donor's hair?
Wow, it's actually not that far off his original facial structure. I know that skull shape dictates a lot of that, but lots of other facial transplant patients don't have such an alarming resemblance to their pre-surgery selves.
I read about a guy who directly shot himself through the brain and survived. He lost the ability to smell and taste things I think but for the most part was very much himself. Hopefully this major occurrence in this person's life will serve as a platform for him to get better and no longer be in a suicidal situation. It is remarkably fortunate that the transplant went this well and saved him from such severe disfigurement.
Man, he looks better than some people that I know. It's fucking amazing how far medicine has gone in the last century.
There's a ton of accounts of people taking direct brain injuries and living fairly average life. You can lose half your hemisphere and the other will pick up the slack. The human brain is incredibly varied and adapting organ and you might lose some functionality but it will find a way.
Im curious to how he looks compared to the donor. Though i guess he seems to have only gotten a partial transplant.
I am not sure what is more impressive to be honest. Removing an entire hemisphere as a clean medical procedure or an ultra random and messy incident with a rapidly accelerated chunk of metal. I believe there were even cases of people's brains recovering from a lobotomy.
My favorite has to be a coal miner from the 1800s who had a rail spike go up his jaw, through his skull and right through the front of the brain.
It was just pulled out with some good'ol 'surgery' and the fucker lived another 40 years and died due to natural causes.
Aww, I'm glad he thinks so!
Happy for the fellow.
That one's a famous case, he apparently turned into a real awful cunt after the incident though.
Yeah, apparently it affected the "personality" section of his brain.
In other news, the Human body is basically powered by pure witchcraft and has an uncanny ability to do all sorts of wacky shit like just kinda casually accepting someone else's face as their own (let alone organs).
If the brain is like a mirror of the soul that reflects its expression then a damaged brain is like a warped or broken mirror.
Human body is weird as fuck in so many ways that it's an absurdist miracle that it's working this well. Why is our walking a series of controlled falls? Why are human women so mysteriously endangered by childbirth if it's such a vital function to an organism? Why do we possess the capacity to seemingly eat fucking everything that is organic? Why do some people flawlessly survive falls from airplanes and major car crashes while others fall into a coma after having a bad fall?
"Local species' entire evolution process discovered to have been dictated by a magic 8 ball"
Or perhaps by an unusually sadistic dwarf fortress/sims player.
Wow impressive. To be trapped behind the aftermath before must have been a horrible daily reminder. This should bring some hope for a good future.
It's also known to be very fragile sometimes. There's people who's had half their brain removed, people who've had railroad tools jammed up through them, and went on to live quasi-normal lives. There's also people who've tripped over their own shoelaces and died the moment their heads hit the ground.
The childbrith in particular is very well understood evolutionarily. We have massive heads relative to our bodies, because there are obvious, enormous benefits to intelligence. But fitting that melon through your vaginal cavity is really dangerous. It's one of the prices we pay to be so intelligent. But obviously the trade off is worth it.
That's fucking incredible. You probably wouldn't be able to tell at all if he had glasses on as well.
Brain size has no correlation to intelligence. Einstein's brain was on the lower end of average and crows are astonishingly intelligent birds even though they have really small heads. Having a hyper intelligent organism evolve to be dangerous to the mother during childbirth when it is hypothetically possible to have a much smaller brain and still be ultra intelligent makes zero sense.
If brain size had direct correlation to intelligence then elephants and blue whales would be the most intelligent species on the planet.
This is further reinforced by the fact that there are procedures which remove an entire hemisphere of the human brain while having it fully retain its function.
Dying at childbirth due to natural causes makes sense because a lot of species die at childbirth from being eaten by predators in nature, having the baby itself be threatening to the mother is kind of silly though. Having the human child be defenseless for such a massively long time and take such an immensely long time to reach full maturity is also rather strange.
Obviously it's more complicated than sheer brain size alone. As I said before, we're talking about brain to body size ratio, as large animals obviously have larger brains than smaller animals. It's a bit more complicated than that if you want to get a really good measure of the size of this animal's brain relative to what we'd expect for an animal that size (you want to generate an encephalization quotient, which is based off a bunch of reference species). When you take into account body size, yes, brain size does correlate to intelligence. It's obviously not the only factor in intelligence, but it's most definitely a factor. So, a larger animal tends to have a larger brain size. But AFTER that variation, larger brains in similarly sized species tend to result in more intelligent species. One way a species can become more intelligent is to dedicate more mass to the part of the body responsible for thinking, and that's part of how human intelligence developed.
You're making an argument here that if there's hypoethetically a way to be highly intelligent while still having a small brain, then it doesn't make any sense for an organism to not have evolved a small, intelligent brain. I don't think you're considering how evolution actually works. Evolution doesn't pick a target structure, say "we'd be better off with that", and then make changes to reach that structure. Evolution starts with random changes, and whatever benefits the animal, among those random changes, spreads throughout the population. But that variation has to be able to realistically show up through random mutations. Now, if brain size and body size are linked, and the aspect of brain size which is tied to body size doesn't seem to affect intelligence, then shrinking down one's brain while retaining one's intelligence would also mean shrinking down your body size. That doesn't help our birthing situation at all. Sure, if we were in a genetic engineering lab in 2418 maybe we could genetically engineer a new human brain condensed down to a safer size, by creating all new development genes that let us alter brain size without inherently affecting body size, but evolution doesn't have the option to just rebuild entire developmental processes from the ground up. Massive changes like that only happen step-by-step, very slowly, and only if there's an evolutionary benefit to each one of those steps; it doesn't matter if the end result would hypothetically be much better unless each step along the way is also beneficial for some reason.
I realize that evolution is a force of least possible effort and I fully consider it, as well as how reactive it is to things. The main observation that I was really making with my post is that the way in which certain organisms evolved or ended up being in a certain way can be quite perplexing and puzzling sometimes, and we frequently acquire a lot of questions that are not always easy to answer. I definitely get that evolution does not really have an understanding of "just incase" and it has no understanding of "more comfortable" or "more convenient", for the most part it only cares about survival.
It's strange because human beings are stuck in a paradoxical combination of ruthless biological brutality while frequently being very intelligent and highly emotional creatures. It's almost like having a show about teletubbies where they rip each other's hearts out.
In modern culture the juxtaposition of these two forces stands out particularly strongly.
A large brain relative to the size of our bodies, more blood to the brain is my understanding of it.
There has a to be a trauma ratio.
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