How did a woman with a missing temporal lobe become bilingual? | Hacker News Reader

How did a woman with a missing temporal lobe become bilingual?

journal.medizzy.com

75 pointsHooke33 comments

She basically never had a temporal lobe... its not like parts of the neocortex are specially built for certain tasks.

Certain parts of the neocortex just happen to lie close to places where certain information from sensor input happen to flow. As such those said parts specialise in dealing with the information that they happen to be provided with.

Right. There are enough cases of extreme neuroplasticity following lobotomies, even hemispherectomies, that this case doesn’t seem too surprising. It is still fascinating though, that our brains are so malleable and self-reconfiguring.

Makes me wonder if there is a part of the brain thats actually responsible for reconfiguring/responding to abnormal situations.

My understanding is that the answer is probably "all of it"; the brain is built from self organizing pieces (neurons, mostly)

Taking over the functions is probably only true for the regions in the same part rather than among parts. AFAIK, one region of cortex can compensate for other regions but I doubt that it can compensate for the damage in other part of the brain, e.g. hippocampus or cerebellum.

I often wonder about the nature of the control flow in the brain. And if there is any?

I think the exact opposite but don't have time to go into the detailed evidence so I'm just going to assert the hypothesis tersely:

The currency in which brain function is conducted is the brain waves not the neurons. Brain waves are just circular loops of neuron paths activating themselves. There is no particular part of the brain or particular neuron or particular lobe responsible for any one processing task. Granted some processes require shorter loops and can thus end up localized. Eg, all the loops for vision can happen to be in the same cortex (allowing the same frequencies to be reused in a different cortex). But this fact is merely a convenience of implementation. The system would still function just fine if the same loops were embedded in some larger network topology.

There is a case of a woman born without a cerebellum, and the neocortex was able to compensate. Her movement was less smooth than most peoples, but close enough to “normal” that she didn’t discover her cerebellum was missing until well into adulthood when she had a brain scan for an unrelated reason.

I once read that our brain is an advanced system on top of the lizard brain.

The lizard brain has 2 reactions in a lot of cases:

- Run

- React

I think in abnormal/sudden situations, this is still the case.

Yeah, that's not true.

Based on?

Here's some context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neomammalian_brain

A lot of very confident falsehood is published about brains.

The mammal brain is a whole organ. It is not a bunch of smaller organs piled together.

Source seems to be trustworthy though: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_D._MacLean

His interpretation has fallen out of favor in recent years, in response to results of further research. Check books published since 2010.

I'm not going to read an entire book.

Say what the new interpretation is and give me a source please, instead of beating around the bush ;)

The new interpretation is that brains are way, way more complicated than the just-so stories we like to make up about them.

Source would be useful ( as mentioned before) :)

Since the lizard brain theory doesn't denies that the human brain is complex. It's just that some reactions could trigger it.

Eg. Being very afraid of spiders, even when it's on the other side of the window.

> its not like parts of the neocortex are specially built for certain tasks.

Is this a proven fact?

I was under the impression that specific parts of the brain were built for certain tasks, but others can be repurposed.

From what little I know and read it appears that the brain's neural organization is fractal in nature. The same patterns are used and reused at different levels and in all regions.

For the neocortex yes, but there are other (older & deeper) parts of the brain that are definitely task specific. If you come to me without a basal ganglia or a hippocampus. I would be very very surprised if you were "normal".

It is definitely not true. One of the many trivial examples is that Betz cells only appear in motor cortex.

[citation needed]

Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence contains all the support you could need. He has a bunch of YouTube videos if you don't want to read the book.

Or "How Emotions are Made", by Feldman Barrett.

This article appears to take the rather surreal perspective that a "functional language network" in the brain must have been necessary in order to learn a second language, but not in order to learn a first one.

Yep. Seems like treating it as a sensation is the side effect of monolingual Anglo culture where learning more than a handful of words in a [non-English] second language is seen as a quirky intellectual pursuit, not something the majority of humans in the world do as part of their basic education or out of necessity, irrespective of their general cognitive ability and standard of education.

I remember there was a scandal about a Spanish Paralympic basketball side being stuffed with regular semipro basketballers that didn't actually have the kind of intellectual impairment. One of the two guys on the team that actually did have severe learning difficulties was quite capable of giving interviews to foreign media in his non-native English though about his difficult experience though.

Supposedly, when Roman von Ungern-Sternberg aka The Mad Baron [1] was executed, the autopsy found that the left hemisphere of his brain was severely atrophied.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_von_Ungern-Sternberg

Do we actually know that what was called left half then we would also call left today?

Yes, the word left 100 years ago means the same thing it does today. And the gross anatomy of the brain goes back beyond that.

The brain is a thing that can be rotated though ... But ok

The brain doesn't typically rotate inside the body - a person referred to as left handed today was the same as someone left handed 100 years ago... Got it? -- some of us are even old enough to know people alive in the 1920s and prior, but there are plenty of books to confirm this... the prevalence of right and left handedness didn't swap sometime recently.

The left brain is the side of the brain that is on the left side of the body. There was no reason to ever make it more complicated than that.

100 years ago is not that long ago - so the snark is more about the "how can we possibly know?!?!" tone - you can look it up - I think 1800s editions of Gray's anatomy are scanned online. Wikipedia still uses the fucking things from the 1910s because they're out of copyright - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain#/media/File:Gray65...

Thanks for entertaining my question. I was just checking my assumptions.

Well. She became bilingual with grace and aplomb.

Epic one... I was wondering myself. now it's effectiv :D

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