Good news for people with giant heads: the journal Neurology reports that people with bigger heads are less likely to show signs of Alzheimer's disease--even when they have the same percentage of brain cell death as people with smaller heads.
Scientists involved say that head size can reflect brain size, which in turn may be correlated with the "reserve" brainpower that subjects may be able to draw on when the brain is otherwise damaged.
I'd love to see the proposal for this study--it seems so comically old-fashioned. ("Well, see, we're goin' ta look at the egg-heads, see, and the pin-heads--ya follow?--an' we're gonna compare 'em, see...") It's actually surprising that scientists are willing to correlate brain size to head size, given that relative brain sizes between demographic groups are at the forefront of controversial debates about "intelligence." I guess the idea that character traits can be read from the appearance of a person's head will always be seductive--the question is whether it's too seductive to be realistic.
