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It's actually amazing how much rats (and people) can do despite massive brain damage. A rat with no cortex can do almost everything (other than trimming its nai

It's actually amazing how much rats (and people) can do despite massive brain damage. A rat with no cortex can do almost everything (other than trimming its nails!). The classic summary of these studies is by Whishaw (1990), and there's a copy of it (and similar stuff on humans) in this thread: https://twitter.com/markdhumphries/status/1071052762765541376?lang=en https://twitter.com/markdhumphries/status/107105276276554137... I once met a patient who was missing literally half of their brain due to an epilepsy resection + meningitis. We had a perfectly normal conversation and, had I not seen the MRI, I never would have guessed.

lr4444lr 7y ago
Where was he clinically observed to be deficient, if at all?
- mattkrause 7y ago
  The patient's vision was affected, though not as much as one would think. Visual areas in the left hemisphere represent the righthand size of visual space, while those in the right hemisphere represent the the left part of the world. With one hemisphere totally removed, you'd think the patient would be half blind. However, Dan Guitton's lab showed that D.R. still has some residual "blindsight" and that stimuli flashed in the blind hemifield affect eye movements. I'm not sure what else, though the patient had a rather normal life: held down a job, was involved in some civic organizations, stuff like that.