ABOVE: LIU ET AL., CELL REPORTS, 2018
About three years ago, a six-year-old boy in Pittsburgh underwent surgery to remove a large part of the right side of his brain. Identified publicly as “U.D.” by doctors, the boy suffered from epilepsy, and drugs were not helping to control his seizures. His doctors and his parents decided that taking out U.D.’s right occipital and posterior temporal lobes would be the best way to improve his quality of life. But the medical team was not certain how the surgery would affect the boy’s ability to recognize visual images and printed words, which are normally processed by regions within these parts of the brain.
This uncertainty stemmed from neuro-scientists not having a clear understanding of how the brain’s visual system reorganizes itself after trauma caused by disease, injury, or surgery. “There is a general and ubiquitous question that people who are interested in ...
