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How did a woman with a missing temporal lobe become bilingual?
- callesgg 4y agoShe basically never had a temporal lobe... its not like parts of the neocortex are specially built for certain tasks. Certain parts of the neocortex just happen to lie close to places where certain information from sensor input happen to flow. As such those said parts specialise in dealing with the information that they happen to be provided with.
- pawsforthought 4y agoRight. There are enough cases of extreme neuroplasticity following lobotomies, even hemispherectomies, that this case doesn’t seem too surprising. It is still fascinating though, that our brains are so malleable and self-reconfiguring.
- mixologic 4y agoMakes me wonder if there is a part of the brain thats actually responsible for reconfiguring/responding to abnormal situations.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoMy understanding is that the answer is probably "all of it"; the brain is built from self organizing pieces (neurons, mostly)
- dilawar 4y agoTaking over the functions is probably only true for the regions in the same part rather than among parts. AFAIK, one region of cortex can compensate for other regions but I doubt that it can compensate for the damage in other part of the brain, e.g. hippocampus or cerebellum. I often wonder about the nature of the control flow in the brain. And if there is any?
- IIAOPSW 4y agoI think the exact opposite but don't have time to go into the detailed evidence so I'm just going to assert the hypothesis tersely: The currency in which brain function is conducted is the brain waves not the neurons. Brain waves are just circular loops of neuron paths activating themselves. There is no particular part of the brain or particular neuron or particular lobe responsible for any one processing task. Granted some processes require shorter loops and can thus end up localized. Eg, all the loops for vision can happen to be in the same cortex (allowing the same frequencies to be reused in a different cortex). But this fact is merely a convenience of implementation. The system would still function just fine if the same loops were embedded in some larger network topology.
- nicoburns 4y agoThere is a case of a woman born without a cerebellum, and the neocortex was able to compensate. Her movement was less smooth than most peoples, but close enough to “normal” that she didn’t discover her cerebellum was missing until well into adulthood when she had a brain scan for an unrelated reason.
- NicoJuicy 4y agoI once read that our brain is an advanced system on top of the lizard brain. The lizard brain has 2 reactions in a lot of cases: - Run - React I think in abnormal/sudden situations, this is still the case.
- ncmncm 4y agoYeah, that's not true.
- NicoJuicy 4y agoBased on? Here's some context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neomammalian_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neomammalian_brain
- ncmncm 4y agoA lot of very confident falsehood is published about brains. The mammal brain is a whole organ. It is not a bunch of smaller organs piled together.
- NicoJuicy 4y agoSource seems to be trustworthy though: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_D._MacLean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_D._MacLean
- ncmncm 4y agoHis interpretation has fallen out of favor in recent years, in response to results of further research. Check books published since 2010.
- NicoJuicy 4y ago? I'm not going to read an entire book. Say what the new interpretation is and give me a source please, instead of beating around the bush ;)
- Teever 4y ago> its not like parts of the neocortex are specially built for certain tasks. Is this a proven fact? I was under the impression that specific parts of the brain were built for certain tasks, but others can be repurposed.
- callesgg 4y agoFor the neocortex yes, but there are other (older & deeper) parts of the brain that are definitely task specific. If you come to me without a basal ganglia or a hippocampus. I would be very very surprised if you were "normal".
- felipemnoa 4y agoFrom what little I know and read it appears that the brain's neural organization is fractal in nature. The same patterns are used and reused at different levels and in all regions.
- trombonechamp 4y agoIt is definitely not true. One of the many trivial examples is that Betz cells only appear in motor cortex.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago[citation needed]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thaumasiotes 4y agoThis article appears to take the rather surreal perspective that a "functional language network" in the brain must have been necessary in order to learn a second language, but not in order to learn a first one.
- notahacker 4y agoYep. Seems like treating it as a sensation is the side effect of monolingual Anglo culture where learning more than a handful of words in a [non-English] second language is seen as a quirky intellectual pursuit, not something the majority of humans in the world do as part of their basic education or out of necessity, irrespective of their general cognitive ability and standard of education. I remember there was a scandal about a Spanish Paralympic basketball side being stuffed with regular semipro basketballers that didn't actually have the kind of intellectual impairment. One of the two guys on the team that actually did have severe learning difficulties was quite capable of giving interviews to foreign media in his non-native English though about his difficult experience though.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoSupposedly, when Roman von Ungern-Sternberg aka The Mad Baron [1] was executed, the autopsy found that the left hemisphere of his brain was severely atrophied. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_von_Ungern-Sternberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_von_Ungern-Sternberg
- freemint 4y agoDo we actually know that what was called left half then we would also call left today?
- danachow 4y agoYes, the word left 100 years ago means the same thing it does today. And the gross anatomy of the brain goes back beyond that.
- freemint 4y agoThe brain is a thing that can be rotated though ... But ok
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- danachow 4y agoThe brain doesn't typically rotate inside the body - a person referred to as left handed today was the same as someone left handed 100 years ago... Got it? -- some of us are even old enough to know people alive in the 1920s and prior, but there are plenty of books to confirm this... the prevalence of right and left handedness didn't swap sometime recently. The left brain is the side of the brain that is on the left side of the body. There was no reason to ever make it more complicated than that. 100 years ago is not that long ago - so the snark is more about the "how can we possibly know?!?!" tone - you can look it up - I think 1800s editions of Gray's anatomy are scanned online. Wikipedia still uses the fucking things from the 1910s because they're out of copyright - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain#/media/File:Gray653.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain#/media/File:Gray65...
- ncmncm 4y agoWell. She became bilingual with grace and aplomb.
- 752963e64 4y agoEpic one... I was wondering myself. now it's effectiv :D