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Liu et al.
By Alison George
A boy who had a large part his brain removed to relieve his severe epilepsy is still able to function normally, showing how well our brain can adapt.
The boy began having seizures at the age of four. No treatment could stop his epilepsy, while a surgeon of last resort removed a third of the right hemisphere from his brain just before his seventh birthday. This "lobectomy" surgery has removed all of his occipital lobe, which performs visual processing, and most of his temporal lobe, which processes visual and auditory information.
The researchers wanted to know how the boy's brain would recover after losing one of its visual centers – we usually have two, one in each of the brain's hemispheres. A key question was what would happen to the boy's "higher order" visual abilities, such as the ability to recognize faces and objects – mainly the work of the right hemisphere.
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Studying the Boy's Brain and Behavior Three years after his surgery, the team was able to see what parts of his brain were able to recover. Remarkably, they discovered that his intellect, visual perception, and facial and object recognition abilities were all normal for his age
Brain Reorganization
The only thing the boy can not do is to see the whole visual field. "He is essentially blind to information on the left side of the world.All that is to the left of his nose is not transmitted to his brain because the occipital lobe of his right hemisphere is missing and can not receive this information, "says Marlene Behrmann of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, it seems that humans need two hemispheres to have 180-degree vision, she says.
that the boy's ability to "see" with the right side of his brain never recovered, the team found that his left hemisphere was reorganizing himself on high-level tasks such as facial recognition This hemisphere is normally more involved in tasks like word recognition, such as knowing that a round and green object you see is an apple.
"We have seen some sort of hustle and bustle in the left hemisphere between regions, "says Behrmann
these high-level abilities may have been able to recover because they were still developing when the boy's lobectomy began, says Behrmann. Other people who lose one of their visual systems may not be able to do as well, she warns.
The boy says that he wants to become a neurologist when he grows up.
Journal: Cell Reports DOI: 10.1016 / j.celrep.2018.06.099
To learn more: 24-year-old woman without cerebellum
More on the subject: [19659019]
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