Woman who doesn’t have part of her brain sparks scientists’ interest in ‘impossible’ abilities

The next issue of the scientific journal Neuropsychology It tells the story of an unidentified woman who lost her left temporal lobe, a part of the brain involved in processing language. Science says that such a patient must have seizures and difficulties in communication, but the abilities of this woman, a graduate and bilingual, go against everything that experts believed until then.

The article, led by neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sought to shed some light on the development of brain regions responsible for playing a role in language learning and understanding.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to capture the woman’s brain activity while she performed certain tasks, such as reading sentences. The team looked for evidence of language activity in the left frontal lobe, then compared this brain activity to similar data from people with healthy left temporal lobes.

The analysis led to the conclusion that the left frontal cortex is quite capable of supporting high-level cognitive functions, and in the absence of the left temporal lobe, the language processing task appears to have been simply transferred to the right hemisphere.

The article notes that most language processing takes place in the left hemisphere of the brain, with the exception of some people, whose burden is shared equally between the two hemispheres. Even in rare cases, the right hemisphere takes on most of the task. In any case, language processing occurs mainly in the frontal and temporal regions.

In general, scientists still lack a lot of information about how the system develops, because this requires access to the brain that is still developing, that is, in children between the ages of one and three years. But in the woman’s case, the research group found an opportunity to understand how the remaining brain tissue reorganized cognitive tasks.

source: NeuropsychologyAnd wired