Half-a-Brain Plasticity

Do you fully appreciate the brain’s amazing plasticity? Researchers at the University of Glasgow studied the brain of a ten-year-old girl who had been born with the entire right hemisphere missing. The fMRI studies (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) showed that her brain had rewired its retinal nerve fibers in order to process information from the right and left visual fields in spite of her not having a whole brain. Lead researcher Dr Lars Muckli of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in the Department of Psychology, said: “The brain has amazing plasticity but we were quite astonished to see just how well the single hemisphere of the brain in this girl has adapted to compensate for the missing half." (http://www.physorg.com/news167324813.html)