Literally. They run in the family. Does it follow that my brain is also bigger than average or is there just a lot of “packing material” filling the extra space?
I’m a size 7-1/2. Always have trouble finding a hat that fits, so luckily I don’t like wearing hats. See? S-M-R-T smart!
sometimes I think my brains are too big in my normal sized head.
Not that they’re any smarter. Just too much wasted space in that grey matter.
Supposedly they studied Einstein’s brain and found it to be much more wrinkled than a normal brain. The theory goes that the more wrinkled you brain is the smarter you are. My head is also unusually large and I don’t feel unusually smart.
I wear size 7-5/8 hats, so yeah, I know what it’s like. I have a big head, big shoulders, big belly and big beard. I look like a 6-foot-tall fantasy dwarf - a dwarf at 1.25 scale.
I am smart - or at least, I do well on standardized tests - but I don’t think it’s connected. I know plenty of people smarter than me with smaller heads than mine.
Yep, same here. It is damn hard to find hats that fit. 7 5/8 is perfect, 7 1/2 will fit.
I can sometimes find a 7 3/4 I can squeeze into. Once I get one molded to my head I tend to keep it. Both my favorite hiking hat and my yard work hat have been in use since the mid to late 90s.
Mrs. Martian claims I fill the extra volume with useless information (I.e., trivia).
Anecdotes aside, anybody know what’s filling my skull? Big brain? Thick skull? Extra goo?
I’m only 7-3/8, but my go-to joke is:
“Mommy, mommy, all the kids call me fathead!”
Make wide circles with hand as if rubbing a very very large head …
“Don’t mind them, dear… don’t mind them.”
Not what you wanted to find out, but where else am I going to have a chance to post this video, from the sadly now defunct British panel comedy show Mock the Week. The host, Dara O’Briain, is a Irish comedian with a famously big head.
This sounds like “benign familial macrocephaly”.
Generally the extra volume is extra subarachnoid fluid and occasionally the ventricles are slightly big too, but imaging is usually not required.
Usually the dad also has, well, never worn turtlenecks. The presumptive pathophysiology is that there is a period of time during infancy to toddlerhood that the arachnoid villa don’t reabsorb the fluid so well, but it is not actually known. These kids are either completely normal developmentally or a bit delayed in gross motor milestones, likely just because it is hard to master balancing that big noggin on top!
I’m a pinhead myself.
I too have a somewhat bulbous head; buying hats is a pain if they are the type of hats that don’t stretch at all. Fancy dress type novelty felt hats are a complete waste of time for me - they just perch comically on top of my cranium.
Subarachnoid?
Spiders on the brains enough?
Yikes!
Yes. The early anatomists felt that the middle of the three membranes covering the brain looked like a spider web and named it accordingly. (The webbing is filled with fluid and thus gives cushioning.)
The tough outer membrane is the dura mater, and the very thin delicate inner one is the pia mater: literally “tough mother” and “tender mother” respectively. Kind of poetic how the tough mother faces outward protectively while the tender one cradles the brain, with the more complex spidery webbed one connecting the other two mothers’s sides!
There’s a CNV in 1q21.1 where a duplication of some part of 1q21.1 causes a larger head, and a deletion causes a slightly smaller head.
Interesting. From what I can find with a quick search it seems to be a rarer cause and often associated with other developmental issues such as autistic spectrum disorders.
There is also familial megalencephaly as a less frequent but not rare cause of familial large head. In this case the large head is in fact reflective of a larger brain, not extra fluid, as more brain cells were made than usual. Occasionally that causes delays but usually these kids develop normally.
I’m a pinhead. My brain doesn’t fit; I get a mild to moderate concussion with any moderate blow. There’s even less room now with the two liters of snot my sinuses are producing each day (how is that even possible?).
There is a slight correlation between brain/head size and intelligence, but there are a lot of factors that are more important. So basically, assuming a normal brain anatomy, people with bigger heads are statistically likely to be slightly more intelligent.
Einstein’s brain was actually smaller than the average brain today. But, notably, his brain had a much higher neuron density. So neuron density is much more important than overall size. Along similar lines, Neanderthals had a larger brain than modern Homo Sapiens. But Homo Sapiens were more intelligent, though Neanderthals weren’t the stupid “ug ug” type cavemen that they are often portrayed as. The differences were more subtle.
It’s also possible to be reasonably intelligent with almost no brain. There is a condition called hydrocephalus which is basically fluid build-up in the skull. If it happens from birth, most of the skull fills up with fluid, and instead of being nice and wrinkly, the brain is squished into a flat later around the perimeter of the skull. Most people with this condition have severe brain damage, but some have the condition for their entire life and never know it. Then they die and get an autopsy, and whoever is performing the autopsy opens their skull to find nothing inside and is like “ok, who is the jokester who already took his brain out?” Typically, these types of folks have a slightly larger than normal head. They also tend to have a max IQ around 135 or so, which ain’t too shabby for a skull with almost no brain in it.
My family has very bigs heads. My dad was working on his boat one day and he slipped and banged his head and got knocked out. He was discovered some hours later. The blow was bad enough that he went deaf in one ear and lost his sense of smell. The doctor said a “normal” person would likely have had more severe injuries but his thick skull (and I guess also extra fluid, based on what I am reading above) saved him.