10 ms·
She was missing a chunk of her brain – it didn’t matter
- ngvrnd 5y agoone point which I think some have missed -- the "missing chunk" is probably due to a stroke the patient suffered as a baby; recovery from damage that occurred when the brain is still extremely plastic might be very different from damage suffered later, or through physical trauma.
- glandium 5y agoI remember seeing a documentary, I'd say something like 20 years ago, about a kid (I think) who was shot in the head, survived, had close to half of his brain gone, and his brain had figured ways to make it all work after a while, rearranging neural pathways. He was functioning more or less as if he had his full brain, except for the obvious hole in his skull. I don't remember much more details, though.
- HL33tibCe7 5y agoAhad Israfil perhaps
- zdragnar 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage Is the seminal example of the brain's adaptability. A more recent example is a teen in the US who was accidentally shot in the head with a spear gun used for fishing. He was awake and talking with his doctors while they initially triaged him- apparently, getting over the abject, visceral reaction of seeing someone with feet of spear sticking out either side of their head was the first difficulty the doctors faced.
- agumonkey 5y agothis makes alzheimer's disease even more pernicious ..
- JJMcJ 5y agoThere was an adult man, I think in France, who was living a perfectly normal life. It was discovered that he basically did not have a brain cortex, which is what is supposed to contain all our higher functions. So there's a lot going on that we don't fully understand in how our brains can compensate.
- cdot2 5y agoThey got quite a way into that before mentioning that her sister is also missing her right temporal lobe
- lurquer 5y agoWhy would they not mention that more prominently? Talk about burying the lede…
- Jtsummers 5y agoBecause it doesn't impact the body of the article. EG's story is a framing device around the broader (and for this article primary) subject of the brain's adaptability and research into that topic. EG missing part of her brain (and her sister as well) just gives a "human interest" touch to the article.
- AQuantized 5y agoIt changes it in the sense that the theorized cause of her temporal lobe being missing (a stroke in infancy) is quite possibly false, and it's actually some sort of genetic trait. Of course, perhaps they were both predisposed to strokes in that lobe, but in either case it adds an extra dimension to the context in which the brain is still very functional with unconventional biology.
- lurquer 5y agoQuite right. My comment was too flippant. Yours provided the detail I left out. Without question, it is a worthwhile study and very interesting. But, losing a lobe in infancy and then having the brain compensate is much different, I would think, than having a brain develop in the womb without a lobr. The sibling’s missing lobe, to my mind, is far more indicative of some genetic abnormality as opposed to some acute event in infancy. But, who knows? Either way, she’s a useful data point and hopefully will advance our meager knowledge of the brain.
- astrange 5y ago
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
- bspear 5y agotouche you and i both
- astrange 5y agoOctopuses have like six of ‘em, which makes it even stranger that they don’t have societies or live longer than a few years.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWhat is the relationship supposed to be between lifespan and number of brains?
- colechristensen 5y agoThey didn’t win the reproduction strategy lottery.
- buryat 5y ago
- babyshake 5y agoI had a small part of brain removed (not an elective procedure). Surprisingly, it hasn't really affected by cognition AFAIK.
- CamelRocketFish 5y agoI’m guessing the “by” was a joke?
- hackernewds 5y agoAre you sure?
- DantesKite 5y agoProbably not intentional, but the title sounds like a pun. "Matter" as in "brain matter".
- Ftuuky 5y agoA classic post by Peter Watts: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116 https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116 "What scared me was the fact that this virtually brain-free patient had an IQ of 126."
- tom_ 5y agoThe image of the brainless skull looks more like one of this man with an IQ of 75: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brain-tiny-idUSN1930510020070720 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brain-tiny-idUSN193051002...
- astrange 5y agoHe’s scared because of a third-hand anecdote about a score on an unknown test decades ago with no reproduction? I’ve always been concerned about the lack of critical thinking skills in people who post about IQ scores.
- solveit 5y agoHave you seen the picture of that brain? Quibbling about the measure of intelligence used was the last thing on my mind because I was amazed the person was alive at all. That said, > He had a first-class honors degree in mathematics. He presented normally along all social and cognitive axes. He didn’t even realize there was anything wrong with him until he went to the doctor for some unrelated malady, only to be referred to a specialist because his head seemed a bit too large. does the very next paragraph assuage your concerns?
- astrange 5y agoI agree it’s impressive, but it’s a funny thing to lead with the number. If they were still around and wanted to contribute to science, an fMRI would be interesting for curiosity’s sake; maybe “stress makes their brain work harder” also means it ages differently too? Or counting their neurons, but presumably they have to not be around anymore for that one.
- Bolkan 5y ago
- Victerius 5y agoHow . . . did something like the brain evolve from the primordial soup?
- edgyquant 5y ago4 billion years of iteration gets you a long way.
- buryat 5y agoyou get a lot of atomic hydrogen and given enough time
- tsimionescu 5y agoWell, some functions that the brain performs in higher animals are present even in single-celled bacteria (sensing, decision making), so it's not that hard to imagine a path from a generalized capacity for computation to a cell that is more and more specialized in this, and also to an entire tissue achieving the same. In the end, it's not harder to imagine than muscles or intestine lining or blood evolving.
- Comevius 5y agoIt's physics. Any system responding to a stochastic driving system can be considered computing. In fact any system that retains information about past environmental fluctuations must have information that is predictive of future ones for the system to be thermodynamically efficient. https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271 https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271 This physics creates complexity. It selects for increasingly complex thermodynamically efficient structures with predictive power. Stars die, they become entropy, but until they run out of fuel they drive the creation of localized complexity maxima.
- xoxxala 5y agoPhineas Gage was missing a chunk of his brain due to a mining accident involving an iron bar through the frontal lobe. His personality was drastically different post-accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
- perardi 5y agoWell…maybe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage#Mental_changes_and_brain_damage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage#Mental_changes_an... The extent of the changes were known to be hugely exaggerated by charlatans at the time, and, his personality seemingly returned to something resembling his pre-accident state after about 3 years. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/21/528966102/why-brain-scientists-are-still-obsessed-with-the-curious-case-of-phineas-gage https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/21/5289661... You also…well, you can’t ethically have a control group in this case, and taking out a chunk of your brain probably does something, but there’s the small matter of the dude got a giant chunk of metal through his skull. Hard to fully distinguish between brain trauma and awful PTSD from getting a giant chunk of metal through your skull.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> You also…well, you can’t ethically have a control group in this case, and taking out a chunk of your brain probably does something I couldn't disagree more strongly. There is no ethical problem with having a control group. The ethical problem would be the experimental group.
- perardi 5y agoHaha, yeah, fair point.
- anyfoo 5y agoBut maybe only temporarily, as the same Wikipedia article suggests with some evidence further down.
- hamiltonians 5y agoisnt this what a stroke does
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gnicholas 5y agoCheck out the book Livewired [1] for more interesting stories like this, plus a futuristic take on how the brain could be plugged into various kinds of peripherals. 1: https://www.amazon.com/Livewired-Inside-Story-Ever-Changing-Brain/dp/0307949699/ https://www.amazon.com/Livewired-Inside-Story-Ever-Changing-...
- rigmarole 5y agoI’m curious how much plasticity the neurons in the gut may have to be able to pick up the slack, particularly in cases such as the Peter Watts link.
- javajosh 5y ago>Over the years, she says, doctors have repeatedly told EG that her brain doesn’t make sense. One doctor told her she should have seizures, or that she shouldn’t have a good vocabulary—and “he was annoyed that I did,” she says. (As part of the study at MIT, EG tested in the 98th percentile for vocabulary.) The experiences were frustrating; they “pissed me off,” as EG puts it. “They made so many pronouncements and conclusions without any investigation whatsoever,” she says. This pisses me off, too. The hubris of doctors and scientists is so profound, that they will complain to a person who challenges their preconceptions. Disgusting.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoI think it's less them complaining more them sort of perplexed. I've been "annoyed" at things that go completely different then I expected when I have no explanation for why. Definitely poor patient interaction from the doctors, but I don't think it's their hubris. Just that they're people like anyone else.
- hyperpallium2 5y agoA scientist, encountering evidence contradicting theory, thinks that's interesting... MDs don't practice science; they apply science.
- postingposts 5y agoWhat do you call the person who graduated last in medical school? Doctor.
- idontwantthis 5y agoBut they won’t practice unless they pass the board exam.
- juancb 5y agoOK fine, let's build on the joke. What do you call the person who graduated last in their medical school AND passes the USMLE (United States Licensing Exam) steps with the lowest passing score? Doctor.
- gomox 5y agoA relative of mine grew up with essentially half of his brain after he underwent surgery at a very young age to control his epileptic seizures. A book was written about his case and the incredible recovery results, titled "half a brain is enough". https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Antonio-M-Battro/dp/0521783070 https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Antonio-M-Battro/dp/0521783070
- a-dub 5y agoi once worked with a clinical pipeline for epilepsy resections and was always amazed at how much tissue they'd remove. they'd take extreme care to not remove anything that results in functional deficits, but would often resect near entire lobes. i was shocked, but they said recovery was robust and that stopping disease progression was a much more important goal for long term wellbeing. epilepsy can be progressive in intractable cases, the untreated endpoint is not a good one.
- buzzard1 5y ago
- jve 5y agoI have a relative who got into a serious car accident. Brain was severely damaged and surgery was more a practice... doctor personally took out damaged brain part that does the speech. He was 22. He is alive and well and able to speak, work and everything. Without that part of the brain. You can't tell he had any problems, apart from seam on his head and very rare seizures that started many years after accident. He got married 2 years after that. So he recovered rather quickly. No-one expected him to live except the people who very much prayed for him. (I don't want anyone arguing here on religious beliefs, I provide that for the "full picture" and I wanted to provide this data point about this man as it very much relates to article.) I've heard the doctor doing surgery on him, wrote a publication about him. However I can't confirm - haven't ever searched for that paper. So whats amazing here is that he wasn't a child where article points out that at that stage brain gets rewired.
- ildon 5y agoIt's not the size that matters, but how you use it
- xenadu02 5y agoI would be very cautious here. There are many stories about how miraculously people function after brain damage or with half a brain but when examined more closely it turns out there are deficits, just not a super obvious one like inability to speak. Some of Oliver Saks' cases in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat demonstrate how functionally people can adapt to the point that others may not notice. In many of these cases there are various skills and modes of perception impacted. Artistic talent, abstract visualization, etc. Proprioception, visual perception (not just acuity but things like recognizing abstract shapes vs "gnosis" of objects). Impulse control. Emotional regulation. Many different kinds of memory. Even the oft-told story about Phineas Gage is mostly false. He had serious metal problems for the remainder of his life, including very poor impulse control. Was it a miracle he survived? Yes. Did he made a full and complete recovery? Absolutely not. I would also be careful about correlating brain volume with complexity. We know volume doesn't correlate with intelligence between species. Whales are not more intelligent than humans despite having larger brains... their brains are just less densely packed. So being born with a brain that is "too small" can be less of a deficit than you might expect in some cases if the brain matter that is present is of higher complexity - though keep in mind most babies born with smaller than expected brains have profound and permanent disabilities so any contrary cases are very rare exceptions.
- douglasisshiny 5y agoAs someone who has had a severe TBI (traumatic brain injury) as a child, I, at times in my life, have spent time thinking about this. And I agree with your sentiment. On one hand, I'm a competent software engineer. I think I'm fairly good at problem solving -- not great and really only learn by example as opposed to creating novel solutions on my own. I have learned, anecdotally, that I may have a better biographical memory (including world events happening at the time when recalling life experiences) than some of my peers. On the other hand, I feel like I lack certain skills that most adults have or are expected to have (whether it be due to impulse control, etc.). And then there are more abstract things, like abstract visualization as you mention. I realized (thanks to a BBC article [1] on Hacker News a number of years ago) that people generally are able to visualize images in their head to various degrees. Some can represent images with picture- perfect quality, say of a loved one. Others at the very least can conjure up an image of, say, a crowded beach on a summer day. I on the other hand can't visualize anything at all, which I realized impacted my score on an IQ test after my TBI in which I was told a series of numbers and was expected to visualize them sequentially in my head. Whether it has anything to do with my TBI, I'm not sure. But I would love to find out more all these years later. 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054
- kashyapc 5y agoThe title is click-bait as hell and is actively misleading. Damage to prefrontal cortex (PFC) — the region of the brain that's important for emotion regulation, cognition, impulse control, planning, etc — can be very subtle. Visibly, someone with an impaired PFC, or other parts of the brain, might behave "rationally", but emotionally they can be severely broken[0]. This topic of is now abundantly studied by leading neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and others. FWIW, here's some references[1][2][3], if you're not actively studying neuroscience. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31037882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31037882 [1] Descartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio [2] Behave, by Sapolsky [3] On Task, by David Badre