Missing brains
No, this is not an ad for what we hope our government had as assets and just keeps losing. This is about the two halves — the left and the right hemispheres — inside our heads and the whole picture of reality they present.
Starting in 1962, a series of studies revealed that our right brain told us one story while our left brain told us another. These studies investigated epileptic patients whose pathways from their respective left and right hemispheres (corpus callosum) have been cut to arrest the spread of epileptic activity across the whole brain. They found that when these same patients were shown the same situation to each of their eyes at a time, one eye would see something while the other would see something else. This not only proved that you need that bridge between your left and right brains to move this synaptic caravan of visual information between your two “selves,” but that each side of the brain seems to specialize in specific functions. The neuro-scientist Roger Sperry was the pioneering researcher who revealed our split within and for this he shared the Nobel Prize with Ronald Myers in 1981.
This set most people on to thinking that people are either right-brainers or left-brainers. This is on top of an older knowledge in science that we are born with the same set of neurons that we die with. But in science, labels could be like clothes one outgrows and this is especially true in what they now call the golden age of neuroscience where many new discoveries about the brain are revising older knowledge. That is why “beliefs” are never useful in science. In science, it is just about knowledge — old ones being replaced with new ones, based on better evidence. Now, we are finding out many other things about the power of the brain to grow new neurons and to forge new connections and reshape itself — a fascinating process called “neuroplasticity.” While it still holds true that the two sides of the brain specialize in certain functions, there seems to be new evidence that what one side of the brain specializes in may just be developed on the other side when the other half is missing.
And I have found cases of missing brains. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is a cognitive neuroscientist and educator at the Brain and Creativity Institute and at the Rossier School of Education, both at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She wrote in the current online version of the New Scientist magazine about two cases, that of Nico and Brooke, who have their right and left brains missing, respectively.
The two kids are now teenagers but were not born with missing halves. Nico had his right brain removed when he was three due to severe seizures and Brooke had his left brain removed when he was 11 due to Rasmussen’s encephalitis which was attacking his brain. Dr. Yang wrote that on the surface, they really seemed like normal teenagers, both very sociable and positive. Dr. Yang tested them for something that would require both sides of the brain to figure out. She gave them the “
Dr. Yang tested both Nico and Brooke to react to the statement “I’m going to
In sum, Nico and Brooke were able to produce the sounds. To Dr. Yang, this was a promising case for the ability of a present “half” to compensate for what the missing “half” would have been doing. There were still differences in the way they performed in other tests that looked for the functions over which what their missing halves were supposed to be the master. For instance, Nico was much better at syntax while Brooke was much better at detecting “sarcasm” but what startled Dr. Yang is the boys still addressed the situation at hand — a situation that normally calls for two halves of the brain to huddle and exchange information about.
Dr. Yang analyzed further and cited that Brooke, for instance, would only be able to produce the required syntax if he is given emotional cues. Dr. Yang thought that the boys “seem to have changed the problem to suit their strengths and emotional tendencies more than they changed their strengths to suit the problem.” In other words, the present half is doing with its “resident” strengths what the missing half should be doing with its known strengths.
What this implies is the possibilities in educational strategies. Dr. Yang thinks that we should do more studies on the brain functions that require both hemispheres (example is social emotion) to work so that we can figure out the extent to which these functions can promote neuroplasticity which in layman’s term would simply mean growing minds — in areas we once thought were physiologically improbable.
I laughed when I read Dr. Yang citing “social emotion” as a function of both hemispheres of the brain. That is something I and those who know me acknowledge that I have big deficits on, even when my parents and I have assumed that I was born with both halves present. Having read Dr. Yang, I am now examining the situations where I find myself “emotionally” stimulated and I have to say (without scientific controls) that it is when it involves some kind of discovery about the world. I get friendlier with people who are less interested about where I live and wear than what I read. I cannot stand gossip shows but I can stay amused at UFO believers in Larry King Live presenting their own version of what “evidence” is. But it is not too late. I recently made friends with the excellent neurological team of St. Luke’s
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