# Pinheads!--I saw the movie Freaks the other day! **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [October 9, 2000, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pinheads-i-saw-the-movie-freaks-the-other-day/36279 "2000-10-09T16:24:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2000, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pinheads-i-saw-the-movie-freaks-the-other-day/36279/1 "2000-10-09T16:24:08Z")
I saw the 1932 cult classic _Freaks_ the other day and it raised a couple of questions. What exactly is “pinheadism”? Is it the same as microcephaly? (For what follows I’m assuming that it is.) And how intelligent roughly speaking would these unfortunates be? Most of us are fairly familiar with Down’s Syndrome, but you almost never hear of microcephaly. I note that the comic strip Zippy the Pinhead is published in many papers, without any microcephalic-advocacy group complaining. This tells me that they must be practically nonexistent today. In the movie I was interested to note that the genuine microcephalics who appeared in the movie could talk. Granted they couldn’t discuss the common thread of English humor from P.G. Wodehouse through Douglas Addams, but they could talk well enough to communicate. This interested me because their crania couldn’t have been much bigger than that of a _Homo habilis_ or _Homo erectus_, and no one is really sure if those two species had the power of speech. What I saw in the movie indicates that if these prehistoric species had the anatomical equipment to speak, then they probably had the brain power as well. Comments? Any experts in the field out there?