Neuroplasticity: Girl's brain rewires before birth, saves vision

In "Half a brain girl recovers vision", the BBC reports:

Scientists say they have solved the mystery of how a girl with half a brain has near perfect vision in one eye.

The experts were baffled by the 10-year-old girl who was born missing the right side of her brain, whose job it is to map the left field of vision.

Scans revealed the German girl's brain rewired itself during development when she was still in her mother's womb.

Also,

Dr Lars Muckli, of the university's Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, working with German colleagues from Frankfurt, said: "The brain has amazing plasticity but we were quite astonished to see just how well the single hemisphere of the brain in this girl has adapted to compensate for the missing half.

"Despite lacking one hemisphere, the girl has normal psychological function and is perfectly capable of living a normal and fulfilling life. She is witty, charming and intelligent."

Only recently has it become possible to determine that some people simply don't have half or more of their brains. When that is a natural condition to which they have had time to adapt, they often do surprisingly well.

More "brain absent" or related stories from The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience and spirituality:

Just how much brain do you need?

Brain? Do you really need a brain?

The inner lives of people classed as vegetative

We still have no explanation for why humans have minds or thoughts

Brain: Octopus develops advanced brain, but what does it do?

The nautilus, assumed to be a living example of the ancestors of modern octopus and squid, lacks the brain structures of these animals, yet appears to have both short and long term memory:

Training Nautilus pompilus to associate the smell of food with a blue light, the cephalopods eventually learned to respond to a flash of blue light by extending their tentacles. Then the scientists tested the cephalopods memories with a flash of light 3min, 30min, 1h, 6h, 12h and 24h after training. Amazingly, Nautilus remembered their training for up to an hour before the memory was lost, but then the memory returned 6h later, lasting up to 24h. Nautilus has both short and long term memory, just like modern cephalopods, despite lacking the same brain structures. (The Company of Biologists (2008, June 1). Living Fossils Have Long- And Short-term Memory Despite Lacking Brain Structures Of Modern Cephalopods. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 3, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/05/080531074905.htm)

Modern cephalopods (octopus and squid) have complex central nervous systems and coleoid brains, but they must be doing something for the animal other than helping it remember where food is.

Consciousness: How much depends on your brain?

Here's an interesting article by Bruce Bawer in Science News on the attempt to understand consciousness,

In October 2004, Swedish neuroscientist Bjorn Merker packed up his video camera and joined five families for a 1-week get-together in Florida that featured several visits to the garden of childhood delights known as Disney World. For Merker, though, the trip wasn't a vacation. With the parents' permission, he came to observe and document the behavior of one child in each family who had been born missing roughly 80 percent of his or her brain.

Overall, most interesting. I suspect that the effort to locate consciousness in one single area of the brain is doomed.

Once again: How much brain do you need?

Regular readers of this space will know that I've been running comments from Dr. Mike Egnor, who - like Dr. Jeff Schwartz - has said kind things about The Spiritual Brain, on the subject of how people who have very little brain often manage to cope quite well:

I have many patients with surprisingly little brain tissue who are quite normal or even bright people. Conversely, I have many patients who are quite disabled who have brains that look pretty normal on MRI scans.
One of the best examples of excellent neurological function with diminished brain volume is a little girl who I've been caring for since birth. She is one of identical twins, and she was born with a huge fluid cavity that has replaced at least a third of her brain. I had the option to drain the fluid surgically, which might have helped her brain function. Yet since birth, she has been normal neurologically, and we have an excellent control- her twin sister (with a structurally normal brain). I've never drained the fluid because I couldn't find any evidence that she was impaired.
The little girl with the 2/3 brain is 6 years old now, and she is exceptionally bright, excelling in school, and cognitively doing better than her sister. She isn't quite as coordinated as her sister, but her motor function is well within the range of normal for her age.
I've cared for hundreds of patients with significantly diminished brain mass who are normal. In fact, it is well established that brain weight has no correlation with intelligence over quite a broad range- from about 1200 grams to about 1700 hundred grams (normal is about 1500 grams for an adult).

That's really encouraging for small people like me and people with impaired brain function. Don't let life get you down.

Just how much brain do you need? Could you use that space for something else?

Recently, I blogged on a guy who was apparently leading a normal life whose head turned out to be full of water. The neurosurgeon who said such kind things about The Spiritual Brain, also writes to say:

The redundancy of much of the brain (most of the cerebellum and cerebral hemispheres) is remarkable. The brain stem and the deeper structures (thalamus, basal ganglia) are less tolerant and more 'hardwired', and it's essential in this business to know what's hard wired and what's not. Most of the brain isn't hardwired. For example, it's well known (in my experience and in the experience of other neurosurgeons) that removal of most of both cerebellar hemispheres (because of strokes or tumors) causes no discernable long-term disability. I have many patients with large portions of their cerebellums missing who are completely normal. The invariable assumption- 'some other part of the brain took over'- is merely an inference. We generally have no actual evidence what, if anything in the brain, 'took over'. Perhaps the inference is because we start with a materialist bias, and we can't imagine neurological function without an identifiable region of the brain to cause it. We really don't understand a lot of whatever correlation exists between neuroanatomy and neurological function.

Many years ago I removed a tumor from the left frontal lobe of a patient. Adequate resection of the tumor required removal of most of the lobe, but I had to take care to avoid injury to the speech areas and the motor areas of the frontal lobe, located posteriorly. I did the surgery under local anesthesia (for the scalp- the brain has no sensation of pain) so I could electrically 'map' the speech and motor areas during the surgery and avoid injury. As I was removing nearly the entire left frontal lobe, the patient (under the surgical drapes) and I had a conversation, discussing life in general, philosophy, family stuff, etc. She never turned an hair as I was removing large portions of her brain.

I was cured of my 'materialist' neuroscience dogma. The brain's important, needless to say, but there's much more to the mind than the brain. To paraphrase Eddington, not only is the mind-brain interface stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.

Dr. Egnor draws my attention to Dr. Wilder Penfield, who - like Mario - worked in Montreal. He writes,

Brain surgery under local anesthesia is fairly common, usually to treat intractable epilepsy but also at times to remove tumors while permitting stimulation of the brain to test for functional areas that cannot be removed safely. The press pays a fair amount of attention, but science reporters rarely discuss the philosophical implications of this kind of surgery. When they do discuss the implications, its usually to vaguely support a materialist neuroscience perspective.

Wilder Penfield was a Canadian neurosurgeon in the mid-20th century who was the pioneer in epilepsy surgery. He is one of the finest scientists the field of neurosurgery has produced. He started out as a materialist, but his experience with brain surgery on thousands of conscious patients made him a mind-body dualist.

His insights are fascinating. He found that he could elicit all kinds of things from electrically stimulating the brain- memories, emotions, movements of the body, etc. The mental processes elicited were remarkably vivid.Yet in all instances, patients knew that the evoked response was not caused by their own will. Penfield called it 'double consciousness'. Patients always saw the response from a third person perspective, as well as experiencing the response in the first person. Patients always knew that the response was done to them, not by them. Penfield noted that patients always experienced their own responses as observers, as well as participants, and they could always distinguish their own coincident experience from the simultaneous induced response. There always remained a first-person subjectivity that was untouched by electrical stimulation of the brain.

Penfield recognized that there was an irreducible component of human experience that was itself independent of neurophysiology. He noted "Something else finds its dwelling place between the sensory complex and the motor mechanism. . . . There is a switchboard operator as well as a switchboard." (reference in link above).

Science clearly points to mind-body duality. The materialist monist model of the mind is an ideological construct, and is indefensible philosophically and empirically.

Further, he adds, "Penfield's experiments and observations are still considered superb neuroscience. He firmly believed in the distinction between the mind (soul) and the brain. He wrote a book on his observations on the soul-brain duality. The default position of materialism in neuroscience is a recent aberration."

But what about lobotomies? Remember how that guy in Planet of the Apes was turned onto a total zombie by a lobotomy? Dr. Egnor comments:

Lobotomies were rather imprecise procedures that had a variety of effects on people. Some people were quite functional afterwards.

This is particularly interesting to me because thirty-five years ago I met and talked with a woman who had had a lobotomy (to cure some mental ailment that had resulted in frequent hospitalizations). She wasn't the brightest light on the string, but she seemed quite normal - and I actually don't know what she was like before the lobotomy. Lobotomy sounds like an awful idea and I can't imagine anyone in their right mind thinking of it today, but that woman certainly wasn't a zombie.

If you want to pursue the question of (mostly) brain absent people who appear to function normally in more detail, here's an article from the early 1980s, and a link to additional resources.

My sense is that we are only just beginning to discover the relationship between the mind and the brain, and the last thing we need is a bunch of materialists telling us that the mind doesn't really exist. Still, I would not advise you to try renting out that space upstairs. It all undoubtedly does something really important for you - but it clearly isn't the sum total of who and what you are.

Brain: How much brain does a man really need?

Not much, apparently, according to this recent Nature News item.

Three years ago, a 44-year-old man was admitted to hospital in Marseille, France, complaining of weakness in his left leg. He had no idea what doctors would find to be the source of the problem: a huge pocket of fluid where most of his brain ought to be.

The graphic is awesome. It reveals only a narrow rim of brain material.

No, that guy was not the brightest light on the string, but the fact that he was even alive and kicking, and had a job and family, tells you something about how adaptable the brain is. Maybe the mind makes it so?

Brain: Do you really need a brain?

Recent research has cast doubt on just how neurons transmit information in the brain, and some wonder just what role the brain as a whole plays in thinking. Here is an interesting case:

In 1970, a New Yorker died at the age of 35. He had left school with no academic achievements, but had worked at manual jobs such as building janitor, and was a popular figure in his neighbourhood. Tenants of the building where he worked described him as passing the days performing his routine chores, such as tending the boiler, and reading the tabloid newspapers. When an autopsy was performed to determine the cause of his premature death he, too, was found to have practically no brain at all.

Apparently, he wasn’t the only one, hence the "too" in the last sentence. In "Is Your Brain Really Necessary?", in Ability of Love Journal , Richard Milton goes on to ask,

... if the brain is not a mechanism for classifying and storing experiences and analysing them to enable us to live our lives then what on earth is the brain for? And where is the seat of human intelligence? Where is the mind?

From what I have learned as co-author of The Spiritual Brain, I suspect that the problem lies in treating the brain as a filing cabinet of a certain dimension, when it is in fact an organ that is full of quantum processes that may not have a specific location at all. Asking “where” a thought or memory is might be akin to asking “where” and electron is or “where ” a wave is. The system probably just doesn’t work that way. And we do not actually know how much space/how many neurons are needed, at minimum, for various tasks.

(Note: People who regularly check this space may have noticed that I am sometimes absent for a week or so. Usually, I am writing a long article, or editing or indexing a book. Remember, bloggers are volunteers. I do what I can.)

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), anoverview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).