Ananova:

A man with an unusually tiny brain managed to live an entirely normal life as a civil servant.

Scans of the 44-year-old man's brain showed a huge fluid-filled chamber took up most of his skull.

French researchers say it left room for little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue.

"He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr Lionel Feuillet of the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille wrote in a letter to the Lancet medical journal.

The man went to a hospital after he had mild weakness in his left leg.

When Dr Feuillet's staff took his medical history, they learned he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away water on the brain as an infant.

The researchers were astonished when scans showed a "massive enlargement" of the lateral ventricles - usually tiny chambers that hold the fluid that cushions the brain.

Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled, either.

"What I find amazing to this day is how the brain can deal with something which you think should not be compatible with life," said Dr Max Muenke, a brain specialist at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

"If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side."