Remarkable story of maths genius who had almost no brain (2006) (opens in new tab)

I discuss this a bit in my https://www.gwern.net/Hydrocephalus as well because it has become the most legendary instance. If you follow the replication crisis and history of scientific fraud and the careers of people like Didier Raoult, there are a lot of things about this story which should raise your hackles (quite aside from the eagerness of people to try to use this to prove the existence of a soul or ESP).

First, the telephone effect: he wasn't a 'maths genius', he simply had a undergrad degree according to Lorber. Lorber also never seems to explain why he was being examined in the first place if he was a totally normal, healthy, ordinary young adult ('unrelated'? why not tell us what? and do specialists really refer for 'a bit too large' a head?). No comparable cases have surfaced in the 40 or so years since Lorber claimed to have found this guy (while his claims about above-average intelligence in many hydrocephalus patients implies we should have seen a lot of them), and Lorber's own failure to publish any detail at all, even scans, is very suspicious (while having plenty of time to talk to journalists and documentarians), especially because scans were rather low quality back then. And this area has had a few instances of fraud detected already by other authors etc. Lots of problems.

I consider it entirely possible that he never existed, or if he did, the extent of his hydrocephalus was greatly exaggerated.