A woman who goes by the initials EG has a graduate degree, an accomplished career, and speaks two languages. She is also missing her left temporal lobe, which is considered the seat of language development and processing. EG only found out about her missing chunk of brain as a young adult in 1987, when a scan showed that there was only spinal fluid in that area of her skull. Doctors believe it may have been due to a stroke in her infancy, but she has never suffered from seizures, language problems, or any other expected symptoms.
Over the years, she says, doctors have repeatedly told EG that her brain doesn’t make sense. One doctor told her she should have seizures, or that she shouldn’t have a good vocabulary—and “he was annoyed that I did,” she says. (As part of the study at MIT, EG tested in the 98th percentile for vocabulary.) The experiences were frustrating; they “pissed me off,” as EG puts it. “They made so many pronouncements and conclusions without any investigation whatsoever,” she says.
EG volunteered for a neuroscience study of how her brain had adapted to the loss of her left temporal lobe. Scientists studied her brain activity as she performed language and non-language tasks. They found that her language skills were processed in the right temporal lobe. But was it always that way for her, or did her brain re-wire itself? Read about the woman who gets along fine with a large part of her brain missing at Wired. And then think about what your own brain might look like if it were ever to be scanned. -via Real Clear Science
(Image credit: Evelina Fedorenko, Greta Tuckute/Brain and Cognitive Sciences)