Brains

[Sriram]

Hi everyone,

Here is a CNN report and video about people living with large parts of the brain missing.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160610-some-people-may-live-with-surprisingly-small-brains

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If you were born with half a brain, would you even notice?

We’ve long known that the size of the brain appears to matter less than you may assume. This is true across the animal kingdom and in our own evolutionary history. Neanderthals were better endowed up there than us modern humans, yet it was our species that emerged to build civilisation.

As our columnist Tom Stafford explained in 2014, one girl was born without a key part of the brain – the cerebellum towards the base of the skull – that normally contains half our neurons, yet she appeared to have lived a relatively normal life; graduating from school, getting married and having a baby. Although her movements were always a bit clumsy, the effects were relatively minor given just how much of her brain was missing.

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Cheers.

Sriram

[Maeght]

The brain is a wonderful thing.

[Shaker]

Especially when used.

[Rhiannon]

Is that what it's for? I did wonder.

[Harrowby Hall]

Plasticity is a well-known property of very young brains. Children with brain abnormalities may grow up able to perform nearly as well as children with normal brains - functions normally associated with specific locations may be dispersed to other locations.

However, anencephaly usually results babies being dead at birth or dying shortly afterwards. It will be interesting to see how microcephalic babies exposed to Zika will fare.

Children born with brain abnormalities may grow up to behave apparently normally but you can be assured that adults suffering brain injury will not be so fortunate. Frontal lobotomy did not produce normal behaviour.

[torridon]

Some degree of adaptability is also present in adults, thus we get London cabbies with an enlarged hippocampus to accommodate all those streets.

There is also the fact that many brain functions are distributed; there are 30 or so brain areas involved in visual perception apparently so if you are missing one or two of those you maybe would still see but the quality of your visual sense might be different.  And given that we cannot compare our subjective experience, simply because it is subjective by definition, we might never know if our experience differs from the norm.