Limitations are largely self-imposed - "Man born with "virtually no brain" has advanced math degree."

Boing Boing: "The subject of this paper grew up with a normal cognitive and social life, and didn't discover his hydrocephalus -- which had all but obliterated his brain -- until he went to the doctor for an unrelated complaint...

"The point, though, is that under the right conditions, brain damage may paradoxically result in brain enhancement. Small-world, scale-free networking— focused, intensified, overclocked— might turbocharge a fragment of a brain into acting like the whole thing. Can you imagine what would happen if we applied that trick to a normal brain?"