Remember that guy, 88, with no corpus callosum (he came to medical attention after complaining of mild, common late life issues)? Now this, from New Scientist:
The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors she’d had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadn’t walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6.
There is a hole where her cerebellum, thought to control the learning of voluntary motion, should be.
Although it is not unheard of to have part of your brain missing, either congenitally or from surgery, the woman joins an elite club of just nine people who are known to have lived without their entire cerebellum. A detailed description of how the disorder affects a living adult is almost non-existent, say doctors from the Chinese hospital, because most people with the condition die at a young age and the problem is only discovered on autopsy (Brain, doi.org/vh7).
That elite club would almost certainly have a much larger membership if most people who died had their brains autopsied. Indeed, a number of other brain-absent states might be discovered.
However, in this woman, the missing cerebellum resulted in only mild to moderate motor deficiency, and mild speech problems such as slightly slurred pronunciation. Her doctors describe these effects as “less than would be expected”, and say her case highlights the remarkable plasticity of the brain.
Indeed. Let’s keep the file open.
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