If you take the premise that UI actually has multiple brains then he would end up (a) deformed (b) able to multitask (c) with very interesting dreams as his multiple subconciounce (what’s the plural of that?) process information. Since siamese twins don’t seem to have any problems synchronising their involuntary body functions then I take for granted that Starks “brains” won’t argue with each other about his digestive system but you would still end up with a multi-tasking morlock in pain.

If you take the premise that UI has more peripheral nerve receptors then you end up with Max Carrados (or Daredevil, depending on what kind of books you like to read).

OK. I need to stop thinking about this.

After all, we start out with lots of extra brain cells, many of which are pruned and die off, as we develop.

It’d be a matter of increasing the density, filling in spaces left by the dead cells, not so much of expanding the surface area or volume.

The main catch would be if white matter had filled up the interstices. If that could be pruned back by the same process, it might be possible to add a whole buncha neurons.

on the more medical/science related front

5) Bigger brains don’t necessarily make you smarter. Though obviously an excess of processing power beyond what it takes for everyday functioning can’t hurt. In fact as any computer literate person will realize, smaller is often the key to faster. Of course that’s actually more like nearer leads to faster, because of the finite speed of signal transmission, fairly close to the speed of light in a vacuum for electrical conduction and more like the speed of sound in air for the transmission of nerve impulses by ionic pulsed and chemical signalling.

6) Parallelism. Human brains are ‘clocked’ very slow. One way they make up for it is by doing lots of things at once, typically in specialized / dedicated subregions, rather than working on one thing at a time like the traditional computer CPU(a). So if you want to suspend some disbelief, Tony could be quicker by offloading tasks to what would be essentially smart reflexes (b) and he could be smarter by offloading mental processing to little brains (c).

(a) Some other ways are by simplifying and chunking things, sacrificing accuracy or precision for speed, and of course ignoring as much irrelevant input as possible. Photoshop has to worry about every single pixel in a image, but the human visual system extracts the most salient features and concentrates on a small portion of what is seen and of course has this preprocessing done on-chip in the camera as it were instead funneling it all to and through the main processor/higher levels of consciousness.

(b) Akin to the Mars Rovers being sent tasks and programs for accomplishing them, instead of sending one command at a time. Move arm, report back, wait several minutes at least for next instruction… would be very slow.

(c) Akin to SETI@home and such. Or to a team or organisation with many different workers splitting work up between them. Unlike the way as Polite Scott points out the doctors on House spend their time doing the work of other trained specialists.

1) Card’s ‘Ultimate Ironman’ isn’t a brilliant innovative and driven _human_ engineer but an artificial meta-human with superhuman intellect.

2) Just like Card’s ‘Bean’, from the ‘Ender’s Game’ universe, isn’t according to the later ‘Shadow of…’ series, a brilliant innovative and driven military strategist but an artificial meta-human with superhuman intellect.

3) FYI Bean is extra smart because the switch that stops brain growth was disabled, so he has more brains and they keep growing, as does his head cranium not fused, which will eventually kill him.

4) Compare to UI smarter due to extra nerve tissue scattered through body with side effects of increased physical sensitivity and chronic pain. No doubt contributing to eventual development of alcholism.

to be continued…

SPOILER ALERT!!

Maria did not purposefully endanger her child. She didn’t know she was pregnant and then she got exposed to the regeneration virus by accident. Her ethics are (from what we know this far) good, but her OSHA compliance clearly is not.

I agree and think young Tony would end up quite deformed…

And to make a medical nit-pick: Fetus or no, Maria’s child will still have far more neural tissue than a human is supposed to have so technically, whilst her child may be intelligent (or not) it will also be quite deformed. In fact, won’t it have the same disease that some scientists think the Elephant Man had which cuased his nerves to either become enlarged or have growths on them?

Davinder,
You’re right, the GA Green Lantern was susceptible to all forms of wood, just as the SA Green Lantern was susceptible to all forms of yellow. I know I was stretching to make a point, but it still seemed a bit curious to me

They’ve actually done some interesting studies on Harvard students showing that nerve conduction velocity is significantly associated with school performance. Size of brain does not appear to matter for humans, although on a species level, the amount of brain per weight (cephalization index, I believe it is called), is strongly correlated with what think of as more intelligent animals.

As for the remaining brain scattered around the body, I actually understood that to mean that he will have more peripheral nerve receptors, and likely be more sensitive to pain/have more neuropathic pain problems, as seen in X-Statix with the character The Orphan (or whatever his name was). Maybe I misread it.