Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

Boing Boing  posted a story today about half a brain from this week's New Yorker . In an interesting article by Christine Kenneally you see inside hemispherectomy, which is thought of as "the most radical procedure in neurosurgery."

The operation removes an entire side of the hemisphere as a treatment for cancer or uncontrollable seizures. Interestingly…  if the operation takes place when a person is young, the remaining hemisphere does double duty and the child often develops normally.

Boing Boing quoted from the New Yorker:

“Many children who have had hemispherectomies at Johns Hopkins are in high school, and one, a college student, is on the dean’s list. The families of these children can barely believe the transformation, and not so long ago neurologists and neurosurgeons found it hard to believe as well. I asked (neurosurgeon George) Jallo if he remembered his first hemispherectomy. “Yes and no,” he said. “I don’t remember the patient. It was more of a ‘Wow.’ I was a resident in training and I assisted in one of the operations. I didn’t realize you could take out that much brain tissue and have someone be so functional and useful in society. What amazes me is that, if someone all of a sudden strokes out half of the brain, more likely than not they are not going to survive. Yet a lot of these people develop their seizures when they’re very young, or in utero, and when you take out half of their brain in one sitting it’s as if they weren’t touched.”

Read about the wide variety of responses to recovery from those who live with half a brain at the New Yorker. What does this tell you about the brain hidden or unused capabilities…?