A woman volunteered to be a research subject and published a paper under the pseudonym EG: She can live a normal life without a part of her brain and is proficient in two languages ​​– yqqlm

She lived to be 25 years old to discover her ownLeft brain missing.

What should have been the left temporal lobe is now only fluid, and the brainstem is incomplete.

But her life doesn’t seem to suffer in any way, not only is it done normallyGraduate Studieseven proficienttwo languagesnative speakers English and Russian.

For the average right-handed person, the left temporal lobe is responsible forlanguage understandingThe main brain areas of function.Also right-handed, her language ability was not impaired, and she was still in the language IQ test.in the top 2%.

In this way, she lived into her 50s with a damaged brain. Many doctors she has met in her life have told her over and over again that this situation is simply unreasonable.

One of the doctors was even annoyed by her peculiarity, telling her that you were supposed to have epilepsy from time to time, or that you didn’t have more than 5th grade vocabulary. There is a feeling of “the medical theory that you have studied for so many years, how come you are invalid”.

This attitude of the doctors also often upset her.

Finally, she took the initiative to contact in 2016 MIT’s brain science team, volunteered to be a research subject.

One is trying to figure out what’s going on with me, and at the same time being happy to contribute to science.

Now,First paper about her finally published onlineand will be published in the SCI journal Neuropsychologia (Neuropsychology).

In order to protect privacy, she used the pseudonym in the paper EG.

Uncover more secrets of brain language function

Normally, full language proficiency requiresTwo brain regions cooperate to complete.

Wernicke’s area in the temporal lobeWernicke District (Wernicke’s Area) and the frontalBroca District (Broca’s Area).

Scientific research on the two brain regions has made a lot of progress, but little is known about how the two brain regions are connected and how they cooperate.

Since Wernicke’s area in the temporal lobe develops earlier, one hypothesis is: Is Wernicke’s area a prerequisite for the development of Broca’s area?

In humans, language areas mature between the ages of 1-3, but fMRI scans of infant brains are difficult. The emergence of EG is an excellent opportunity to study this hypothesis.

The experimental process is not complicated, prepare some normal English sentences, and some sentences that can be spelled out but not composed of real words.

For example this:

The EG and other brain-intact participants were asked to read the sentences silently, and their brain activity was measured.

It was found that the frontal lobe of EG was significantly higher than that of the two control groups.No response to verbal stimuli, normal responses to other tasks such as arithmetic.

▲ Control group CG1: native language is English, CG2: native language is not English

According to the experimental results of EG, it can be preliminarily concluded that the temporal lobe language area is a necessary condition for the appearance of the frontal lobe language area.

also confirmed again,One and a half human brains are enough to support full language ability.

My sister is missing the right temporal lobe and can live a normal life

Behind this paper, there are more mysteries in EG to be solved. For example, why is her language ability above average? The part of her left frontal lobe that does not produce language ability is now being used by what ability?

In addition, EG has a sister who is similar to herlost the right temporal lobe but can live a normal life, is this congenital brain defect related to genes?

Now, EG and her sister, including brain-intact parents and other siblings, are involved in a follow-up research program. The next step of the MIT team will be to studyHow the missing brain area affected her hearing.

Historically, many important discoveries in brain science were made because of some special cases.

For example, the legendary Phineas Gage, who was accidentally pierced through his head by an iron rod while working on the railway, is still alive but has a changed personality. As a result, scientists have discovered the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in emotion production and control.

This volunteer under the pseudonym EG may also become an important figure in the history of science.

Finally, some netizens said after reading the story:

Paper address:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0028393222000434