Woman Missing Large Part of Brain Ranks 98th Percentile in Speech
A recent study sheds light on the remarkable case of a woman who grew up without a key part of her brain and was barely affected by it.
In the endless search to understand the workings of the human mind, scientists take special interest in cases of the most unique brains. The most recent and fascinating is that of a woman known as EG (to protect her privacy.)
Now in her fifties, EG first learned her brain was atypical in her twenties when she had it scanned for an unrelated reason. She was told then that she had been missing her left temporal lobe from infancy, which was most likely the result of an early stroke. This part of the brain is thought to be involved with language processing, which makes EG’s story so extraordinary.
Despite being repeatedly told by doctors that she should have major cognitive deficits and neurological issues, EG has a graduate degree, has enjoyed an impressive career, and speaks Russian as a second language.
Several years ago, EG met Dr. Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T. who studies language. Fedorenko was immediately fascinated by EG’s case and conducted a number of studies, the first of which was recently published in the journal Psychologia.
As part of the study, EG took a vocabulary test and scored in the 98th percentile. Brain imaging revealed that, in the absence of EG’s left temporal lobe, the task of language processing seems to have shifted over to her right hemisphere.
Ella Striem-Amit, a cognitive neuroscientist at Georgetown University told WIRED, “The remarkable thing about this patient and other such patients who were missing large chunks of their language system at birth, is how well they compensate.”
For EG, the study has been a welcome validation, after decades of being made to feel defective.
As she wrote in the published paper: “Please do not call my brain abnormal, my brain is atypical. If not for accidentally finding these differences, no one would pick me out of a crowd as likely to have these, or any other differences, that make me unique.”
Fedorenko’s team plans to conduct several more studies on EG and expects to come away with an even richer understanding of the brain’s seemingly limitless potential for flexibility and adaptation.
EG said she hopes, “it will also take some stigma away from atypical brains.”
3 Ways to Positively Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind
What is Your Subconscious?
Our subconscious is the part of our minds that connects the subtle patterns needed to function in life. Our subconscious is programmed to carry out simple tasks so our conscious mind can ponder the complex.
Our brain functions are incredibly intricate with many facets still not fully understood. In computing terms, the number of operations per second that our brains are responsible for reaches into the thousands of trillions. While that number is truly impossible to conceptualize, to put it into perspective, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers was made to mimic one second of one percent of human brain operation by using 83,000 processors – it took the computer 40 minutes to complete the task.
And though our brains are far superior to these artificial processors, like a computer, certain elements of our brain functions can be programmed in different ways. Our brains are conditioned from a young age and from many directions, including society, family, and academia. Some of this conditioning is necessary and desired, but there are also subliminal elements that fly under the radar and can often be subversive and self-defeating. But the good news is that there are conscious steps one can take to correct this.
