Oct 13 2009
Overcoming Obstacles with Half a Brain
This morning, I read an article that shows how some push themselves to beat the odds. A couple in Falls Church, VA always knew that something was not right with their daughter. She didn’t have cerebral palsy nor did she have downs syndrome. They could not figure out why their daughter, Mack, fell behind when doing things their other children did at certain mile stones. No amount of probing, or DNA testing was able to give them answers.
Nearly ten years ago, Dr. Jordan Grafman, chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the National Institutes of Health, finally diagnosed the problem.
An MRI scan revealed she was missing nearly half of the left side of her brain. While it was clear Mack has some problems, Grafman said he and the family were shocked by the extent of the damage.
How did Mack cope? It seems, her brain rewired itself.
Mack has fairly normal language abilities, certainly basic language abilities, she can construct a sentence, she can understand instructions, she can find words when she’s talking, but actually she has some trouble in some aspects of visual-spatial processing,” said Grafman. The human brain is the center of the human nervous system and is a highly complex organ.
