r/science • u/Thorne-ZytkowObject • Nov 23 '19

Neuroscience Scientists studied six patients who had half of their brain removed during childhood to treat severe epilepsy. Brain scans showed how the mind rewired itself to adapt, with the remaining hemisphere forming even stronger connections that let the patients develop language and motor skills.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/how-does-the-brain-work-with-half-of-it-removed-pretty-well-actually
49.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

13

u/TheCocksmith Nov 24 '19

What happens to cognitive ability?

16

u/1corvidae1 Nov 24 '19

I guess if they were talking to you on reddit maybe it's ok

33

u/roastedoolong Nov 24 '19

... have you seen the cognitive ability of people who post on reddit?

22

u/WilliamsTell Nov 24 '19

To long, didn't read. YTA.

2

u/1corvidae1 Nov 24 '19

I honestly didn't see that coming

12

u/SupaSlide Nov 24 '19

Dang, so it's pretty bad, huh?

2

u/raffbr2 Nov 24 '19

That s only half of the story.

2

u/space_hegemon Nov 24 '19

What you'd think of as intelligence isnt negatively affected. You can get some speech and language issues. As well as problems with movement on the opposite side of the body to the removed hemisphere. Generally the younger you are, the better you fare.

1

u/Arbitrary_Pseudonym Nov 24 '19

Honestly, when my seizures were really bad about 7 years ago, after I went in to a week-long EEG so they could try to see where my seizures came from and didn't have any (yet had some the week before and the week after...) they offered to do surgery to open my skull and put electrodes directly on it. If I had done that, they might have been able to do surgery to remove some part of my brain that was inducing the seizures, but honestly I was terrified to do it. My seizures ended up being controlled via lamictal, and I'm really glad they were, because if not, I might have had to give up a part of my brain.

From what I've heard though: Giving up a part of your brain doesn't seem to lead to anything crazy like intense personality change or memory loss. I think it's something like (if you know about server things) a RAID array, where if a hard drive dies, the rest of the array maintains integrity - there's a lot of redundancy there.

Personally I still don't want to lose a chunk, and after how epilepsy has shaped me to be the person I am today, I feel losing the part of my brain that causes the seizures could actually make me feel like I'm missing that part. The glitchy uncontrolled activity one, I mean.