Comment by gwern

the scans are actually of a retarded person with hydrocephalus, and are not scans of the near-mythical never-verified anecdote from Lorber (https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/1980-lewin.pdf) of the 126 IQ guy (Hawks gives a couple reasons why that might not have been as impressive as it seems: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/development/ten_pe... ).

So the best example doesn't have hard fMRI scan evidence, and the documented cases of hydrocephalus going along with an IQ of 70 or whatever are much less impressive - if you think the brain is doing something, you would expect profound deficits like that!

More interesting is a recent paper: "Miniature spiders (with miniature brains) forget sooner", Kilmer & Rodriguez 2019 https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2019-kilmer.pdf