Thursday, February 9, 2017

The Woman With a Hole in her Brain

A 24 year old woman in the Shadong Province of China had a CAT scan done, which revealed that she had been born without a cerebellum. Although she learned to speak and walk much later than most people do and had some trouble with walking, she had managed to live a relatively healthy life to the age of 24. This goes to show how well the human brain can adapt and redistribute functions if need be. This is really interesting because many people who have a stroke cannot speak or eat properly; however, other parts of the brain (which are normally not in charge of speech or eating) can be taught to take over those functions adequately. Even when it comes to paralysis of limbs after a stroke, a different part of a stroke patient's brain can be trained to take over and carry out the motions of that limb. This also goes to show how amazingly versatile and flexible our brains are and how much there that we still don't know about them.

Your postcentral gyrus is another very important structure that is located in the parietal lobe of the brain. Because it is where the primary somatosensory cortex is located, it is responsible for one's sense of touch. Because the parietal lobe is in charge of language, sensory integration, and spatial reasoning, injuries to it can have a very broad range of consequences. People who have suffered severe injuries to their postcentral gyrus, for example, have poor spatial recognition skills and cannot speak or learn properly. If this part of the brain were completely missing, the person would be unable to sense touch as well, making it very difficult - if not impossible - to survive. 

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