Introducing the brain: normal function, no temporal lobe (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, September 05, 2022, 20:16 (597 days ago) @ David Turell

Born with a perinatal stroke, no left temporal lobe:

https://globle.io/the-curious-hole-in-my-head/

Comment: I cannot copy content, but the website carries his entire story of normal function. Fits all we have learned about brain plasticity. Found an article I can copy:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/04/science/brain-language-research.html?unlocked_articl...

"In those early days of my life, my parents wrung their hands wondering what my life, and theirs, would look like. Eager to find answers, they enrolled me in a research project at New York University tracking the developmental effects of perinatal strokes.

"But month after month, I surprised the experts, meeting all of the typical milestones of children my age. I enrolled in regular schools, excelled in sports and academics. The language skills the doctors were most worried about at my birth — speaking, reading and writing — turned out to be my professional passions.

"My case is highly unusual but not unique. Scientists estimate that thousands of people are, like me, living normal lives despite missing large chunks of our brains. Our myriad networks of neurons have managed to rewire themselves over time. But how?

My childhood memories are filled with researchers following me around with pens and clipboards. My brain was scanned several times a year, and I was tasked with various puzzles, word searches and picture-recognition tests. At the end of each day of testing, the researchers would give me a sticker, which I would keep in a tin container next to my bed.

***

Over the years, the scientists realized that I wasn’t like the other children in the study: I didn’t have any deficits to track over time. When I was around 15, my dad and I met in the cluttered Manhattan office of Dr. Ruth Nass, the pediatric neurologist leading the research. She questioned if I had actually had a perinatal stroke. In any case, she said frankly that my brain was so different from the others’ that I could no longer be in the study.

***

"I went to college and majored in neuroscience. After graduating in 2015, I spent two years working in a lab studying concussions. I spent hours in the magnetic resonance imaging room, watching as other peoples’ brains appeared before me on a computer screen.

"But I never thought much about my own brain until this spring, when I happened upon a story in Wired magazine about a woman just like me: astonishingly normal, apart from a missing temporal lobe.

***

"The researchers’ studies found that the brain of the Connecticut patient had adapted by switching sides: For her, these sentences activated the right temporal and frontal lobes, according to a case study published in the journal Neuropsychologia.

My brain, however, surprised everyone, yet again.

"'A preliminary analysis of the scans showed that, even without a left temporal lobe, I still process sentences using my left hemisphere.

“'I had thought that any large left hemisphere early lesion leads to the migration of the language system to the right hemisphere!” Dr. Fedorenko said. “But science is cool this way. Surprises often mean cool discoveries.”

"A possible reason behind this discovery, according to Dr. Fedorenko, is that my lesion is primarily in the front of my left hemisphere, leaving enough healthy tissue in the back for the language system to take root."

Comment: she was luckier than others who have defects in cognition. What is not explained are those cases we've seen with a shell of a brain and normal cognition.