Born Without a Brain

This week in class we learned about the functions of the brain. I was fascinated by everything the brain and body goes through just to get us to feel a burnt finger, or stubbed toe. Then, I remember seeing a video of a boy named Nicholas Coke who was born with only a brain stem, and somehow lived to the age of two. I found the article on the news station’s website.

Basically, because he was born with only a brain stem, doctors expected him to die within hours of being born, but to their amazement, he lived to be two years old. There aren’t any recent articles about the baby boy, so I don’t know if he passed or not. At the time of this video, he was on 12 medications, 8 solely for seizures.

This is something I didn’t quite understand. Today we learned that a seizure is a result from the chaos of signals being sent, for no reason, from one side of the brain to the other. If baby Nicholas Coke doesn’t have a brain, how can he have seizures?

As I’ve mentioned, Nicholas only has a brainstem. This would mean that he is incapable of talking, seeing, feeling, understanding language, thinking, and developing a personality. The brainstem contains the medulla, pons, reticular formation, and thalamus. The medulla is in charge of heartbeat and breathing, the medulla is keeping Nicholas alive. Pons help coordinate movement, so baby Nick can move, but not a lot. The reticular formation is what controls arousal, and the thalamus is where every thought and action goes so it can be sent to the brain. These two parts of the brainstem aren’t helpful in Nicholas’s case because he don’t have a brain to make them function properly. So, essentially, Nicholas Coke can only breathe, slightly move, and has a beating heart.

Here is the link to the article and video of this baby boy: Nicholas Coke