Last month we showed you some disturbing but strangely beautiful photos by Adam Voorhes, who was commissioned by Scientific American to photograph a preserved specimen of a healthy human brain at the Texas State Mental Hospital. What he found there was a collection of over 100 diseased and deformed brains, which then became the subject of a macabre photography collection. But we recently found out there's more to the story: the most bizarre find in that collection also has an aura of mystery surrounding its former owner, as revealed in an article for New Scientist.
The smooth, blob-like mass in Voorhes's photo above is indeed a malformed human brain, but that's only the beginning of this case: a rare condition called agyria or lissencephaly results in a lack of the brain's familiar wrinkled formations (called “sulci”), and people with even milder forms of the disease seldom live past age 10. That's why scientists are still puzzled over how this particular sufferer, whose entire brain appears to have been afflicted, managed to survive to adulthood.
According to the article, all that's known about the patient in question is that he or she resided at Texas State Mental Hospital, and died in 1970. After a year of searching, no other records have been found, but Voorhes is still set on solving the mystery...