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BETHESDA, MD — A team of neurologists at the National Institutes of Health has located a small but apparently tireless region of Donald Trump’s brain responsible for intercepting numerical information and inflating it before it reaches the speech center, according to a study published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The structure, which the team has named the nucleus exaggerus, sits at the intersection of the prefrontal cortex and a region researchers are newly describing as the “self-mythologizing gyrus.” Its function, they say, is singular: every number that enters it comes out bigger. Every number, without exception, regardless of context, audience, or the easy availability of contradictory information.
“Three hundred percent appears to be the floor,” said Dr. Patricia Wellstone, the study’s lead author and director of NIH’s Division of Cognitive Abnormalities. “That is what we observed on the low end, during what we’d characterize as a calm baseline — a quiet Tuesday, no cameras. The ceiling, as best we can determine, does not exist.” The study documented spikes as high as 40,000 percent when the number related to something the patient was particularly emotionally invested in, such as election results or his own intellectual abilities.
Researchers say the nucleus exaggerus appears to have been operating continuously and without interruption for decades, a conclusion supported by the public record. Among the examples cited in the paper: the subject’s assertion, made in reference to President Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis, that the disease had progressed to “stage 9” — a stage that does not exist in any oncological classification system; his claim that prescription drug prices had fallen by “thousands of percent,” a figure economists described as “unsustainable,” “totally irresponsible,” and, “frankly, bullshit”; his assertion that he personally “solved eight wars,” a total that independent reviewers could not verify against any available inventory of wars; and his contention that wind turbines reduce neighboring property values by 75 percent, against which the entire field of real estate economics has registered a collective objection.
“What’s notable,” said Wellstone, “is the consistency. The nucleus exaggerus does not take days off. It does not show restraint in clinical settings. It does not respond to the presence of facts, fact-checkers, recording equipment, or sworn testimony.”
The study’s most remarkable findings, however, came from a secondary phase of research in which scientists used targeted transcranial magnetic stimulation to toggle the nucleus exaggerus on and off in real time — effectively creating, for the first time in medical history, a switch between what the paper describes as “the subject’s stated reality and actual reality.” The participant was asked a battery of questions in both states. The divergence, researchers said, was “immediate, profound, and in several instances, genuinely upsetting to witness.”
With neurons active, the subject reported that 47 million people had attended his 2017 inauguration, that he had personally read the Constitution “many, many times — more than the people who wrote it, if you think about it,” and that he had recorded “hundreds” of holes-in-one during his golf career, including several he described as “possibly the greatest shots in the history of the sport.” With the nucleus exaggerus suppressed, he reported an inauguration crowd of “I don’t know, a normal amount… it was cold,” acknowledged that he had “looked at” the Constitution, and admitted that his holes-in-one were nonexistent, but he “did hit Ted Cruz once.”
The suppressed-neuron session grew particularly quiet when the subject was asked how many stages cancer has. With neurons active, he had answered “nine or ten, many stages, they keep finding new ones.” Suppressed, he did not answer for eleven seconds. Then he said: “Four.” Then, after a pause: “I mean nine.” This addition led scientists to recalibrate their equipment and, ultimately, use stronger magnets.
When asked how many wars he had solved, he replied, neurons off: “It depends what you mean by solved.” When asked how many people loved him, he said, barely audibly: “A lot. I think. Many of them.”
Researchers noted that the suppressed state appeared to produce mild existential distress in the subject. At one point he looked around the room and asked, “Why is everything so small all of a sudden?” The team’s psychologist on staff described this as “apparently not a spatial question.”
Intake records apparently produced additional data points. On his pre-study medical questionnaire, the subject allegedly listed his weight as 183 pounds, his height as “taller than Barron,” his pre-existing conditions as “gifted athletically” and “high sperm count.” When asked to estimate his net worth for insurance purposes, he wrote a number, crossed it out, wrote a larger number, crossed that out, and then just filled the paper with a one followed by hundreds of tiny zeros.
Dr. Anand Kapoor, a specialist in pathological confabulation who served as a co-author on the study, said the nucleus exaggerus represented something genuinely new to medical science.
“We have seen patients who invent facts. We have seen patients who misremember facts. We have seen patients who are indifferent to facts,” said Kapoor. “What we have not previously seen is a patient whose brain appears to regard accurate numbers as a rough draft.” He added: “The nucleus exaggerus is, in a sense, an editor. A very bad editor apparently unaware that numbers aren’t subjective.”
When contacted for comment, the White House did not respond for several hours, then issued a statement describing the study as “totally fake and possibly the most dishonest thing ever published in the history of medicine, including things published in other countries.” The statement went on to say that President Trump’s brain was “by every measure the most extraordinary brain any neurologist has ever encountered, many of them have said so, some of them were crying.” It concluded by asserting that the 300 percent figure cited in the study was “a massive undercount” and that the real number was “closer to 900 percent, which would actually make it the highest number ever achieved by any president, maybe any person. Some people are now saying extraterrestrials.”
The research team noted that no further testing would be required.
