Brains plasticity amazes as boy recovers from drastic surgery
The developing brain of a growing child has incredible ways of compensating for the loss of an essential brain region, a new case study shows. A young boy has retained his ability to recognize faces even though surgeons removed one-sixth of his brain, including the region that normally handles that task, his doctors said.
Essentially, the other side of the 10-year-olds brain has shouldered the added burden of facial recognition on top of its normal duties, in an astounding feat of adaptation.
Even more compelling, the boys intellect, visual perception and object recognition skills have all remained age-appropriate, even with a large portion of his brain gone.
In a childs brain, there is the potential for this kind of reorganization and recovery, said senior researcher Marlene Behrmann, a professor with Carnegie Mellon Universitys Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. A childs brain is still undergoing dynamic change. It can find these novel solutions.
Four years ago, surgeons operated on the boys brain to stop his terrible and uncontrolled epileptic seizures.
The 6-year-old boy had a benign brain tumor in his right occipital lobe, which processes information related to the left visual field, Behrmann said. The tumor had caused epileptic seizures from age 4, and no medication could control the seizures.
Doctors worried that if left unchecked, the seizures could harm brain development and potentially threaten of the life of the boy, a bright and curious kid referred to as UD in the case report.
To stop the seizures, doctors removed the right occipital lobe, essentially taking away a third of the right hemisphere of his brain.
The cure worked, but it came at a cost.
The boy permanently lost his ability to see anything within his left visual field. The world to the left of his nose simply isnt there.
When that part of the brain is removed, there is no receiving area for information coming from the left visual field and its lost, Behrmann said. That is a sad finding from this case.
Doctors worried the boy also would lose his ability to recognize faces, a complex ability mainly governed by the right hemisphere of the brain in right-handed people. It takes a lot of high-powered processing in the brain to perform complicated pattern recognition, such as distinguishing between different faces and different words, Behrmann said. Because of this, the brain divvies up these responsibilities.
In a typical right-handed individual, face recognition is done more by the right hemisphere than the left, Behrmann said. Both hemispheres participate, but the right hemisphere carries most of the burden of the skill. The left hemisphere is optimized for word recognition, she added.
The question we had is, now he doesnt have the right hemisphere, what will the status of face recognition be? He doesnt have that region that can acquire the skill to be an expert face recognizer like we all are, Berhmann continued. Tracking UDs progress through brain scans and behavioral tests, the doctors found that the boys brain had undertaken an amazing juggling act to make sure that hed still be able to recognize faces.
The left hemisphere essentially jostled itself to make room for the duty of facial recognition, which wound up located right next to the area that normally handles word recognition, the findings showed.
This sort of epilepsy brain surgery is rare, performed on only 4 per cent to 6 per cent of patients with epilepsy that doesnt respond to any other treatments, the researchers said in background notes.
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