Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Neuroplasticity


This story keeps getting crazier the further you read. 

Woman with no left temporal lobe developed a language network in the right side of her brain
Apr 2022, phys.org

A woman without a left temporal lobe developed a language network in the right side of her brain that allowed her to communicate normally. She only came to realize she had an unusual brain by accident—her brain was scanned in 1987 for an unrelated reason. 

By all accounts she behaved normally, earning an advanced degree and excelling in languages—she speaks fluent Russian—which is all the more surprising considering the left temporal lobe is the part of the brain most often associated with language processing.

It was likely the woman had lost her left temporal lobe as a child, probably due to a stroke. The area where it had been had become filled with cerebrospinal fluid. To compensate, her brain had developed a language network in the right side of her brain that allowed her to communicate normally.

She also had a sister who was missing her right temporal lobe, and who also had no symptoms of brain dysfunction—an indication, the researchers suggest, that there is a genetic component to the stroke and recovery process in the two women.

via MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, UCLA and Harvard: Greta Tuckute et al, Frontal language areas do not emerge in the absence of temporal language areas: A case study of an individual born without a left temporal lobe, Neuropsychologia (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108184

See this similar study on smell:
Left-handed women can have normal olfaction without apparent olfactory bulbs, and scientists are very confused.

via the Weizmann Institute: Human Olfaction without Apparent Olfactory Bulbs. Tali Weiss, Noam Sobel, et al. Neuron, volume 105,  issue 1, page 35-45.E5, Jan 2020. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2019.10.006


No comments:

Post a Comment