March 22, 2023
"When she was 9 months old, surgeons removed the left side of her brain. Yet at 15, Mora plays soccer, tells jokes, gets her nails done..."
"... and, in many ways, lives the life of a typical teenager. 'I can be described as a glass-half-full girl,' she says, pronouncing each word carefully and without inflection. Her slow, cadence-free speech is one sign of a brain that has had to reorganize its language circuits. Brain plasticity is thought to underlie learning, memory, and early childhood development. It's also how the brain revises its circuitry to help recover from a brain injury — or, in Mora's case, the loss of an entire hemisphere."
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12 comments:
Color me skeptical of another “kids are so resilient” feature. Other children, like say Jazz Jennings, can’t get any major media coverage for lamenting the fact they had parts chopped off at a tender age and that fucked up their whole life. Is that too cynical a take on regime mouthpiece NPR? Nah. It’s impossible to achieve a “too cynical” state with the shitty media we have.
I think the key is surgery at an early age.
Her brain had to adapt.
Someone very close to me had brain surgery on the speech side, and although much better, her speech suffers when she is tired.
It's amazing that this kind of surgery can be done successfully at all...
I have a book on a child, I think in Argentina, who had half the brain removed. That means half the cerebral cortex. Children can recover, not adults.
Sometime in the third trimester of Ann Leeb's pregnancy, the child she was carrying had a massive stroke on the left side of her brain. No one knew it at the time. Mora was born in September of 2007.
Another reminder that it's easy for others to deem a life not worth living, whereas that person comes to embrace it as his or her one and only chance for life.
out of curiosity does her unbalanced skull-head tilt to one side >>>
david niven movie : When NATO transfers some of its funds from Paris to Brussels by train, a criminal mastermind posing as a British colonel plans to steal it but two petty French thieves also have the same intent.
Absolutely amazing.
3,2,1, cue the Joe Biden jokes... I've read of people who have virtually no brain at all who live nearly normal lives (or am I imagining that?). That was not a joke or a reference to anyone in politics. I'm above that sort of thing.
This caught my attention because I have gone through this on a much milder level.
While repainting my house in 2015 fell off the extension ladder onto the driveway. Fractured skull, injuries to the occipital and frontal lobes. In hospital for a month (much less than expected), then two years of therapy and rehabilitation two or three times a week.
Speaking of "plasticity", therapists explained that my brain had to find and establish new pathways for doing things that normally the injured parts handle. So I can make still make decisions, make plans, remember things, understand what I read or hear, put sentences together. However it's more difficult, consistently slower, and often requires new strategies (such as Google Keep checklists, dry erase boards).
I am fortunate to have mostly recovered, although I (however one defines that) am not the same. I can still work although last year retired early from my primary vocation because it became increasingly clear I no longer had the mental and emotional resources. The car still runs but two of the cylinders aren't contributing much.
Science cannot discern origin and expression. However, there is a correlation between the nervous system and consciousness. That said, six weeks to baby meets granny in legal state. #LifeDeemedWorthyOfLife
Plasticity, reorganization, or redundancy?
Old and slow (11:30am):
You're probably thinking of the stories I read 10-29 years ago about people whose heads were full of water, with their brains only 1/2" thick all around the inside of the skull. (Whether they slosh when they roll over in bed was not mentioned.)
'Water on the brain' is caused by a valve malfunction where water (lymph?) is pumped into the brain faster than it's pumped out. Victims tend to have giant skulls, squashed brains, and very low IQs, and are generally kept in asylums where people won't stare at them. I did once see one on a bus with a lot of other oddballs on a day trip from the local mental home. He was ~4 feet tall with a head ~2 feet in diameter. Hard not to stare, but I managed it.
Anyway, there are apparently some mild cases of water on the brain where the pressure increases slowly enough that the brain is able to adjust to being squashed, with the results mentioned above: a normal-sized head, with brain that's a thin layer inside the skull. As I recall, one of the two guys with this condition was a bureaucrat in the French income tax system, so he may have been somewhat below average in intelligence and still done the job adequately by being diligent and careful. But the other one was a grad student in math at Cambridge University, so he must have been very much above average in general intelligence. And yes, there probably was some 'rewiring' going on as the brain was slowly squished.
Does all this ring a bell?
Yes, Dr. Weevil, that is exactly what I was half remembering. Makes me wonder what all the rest of the brain is up to if that is possible.
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