For patients with serious brain tumors or severe epilepsy it can be a last solution to get rid of the whole of one side of the brain.
It takes about eight hours to carry out such an operation, and it is not without risks.
But the new study shows that the remaining hemisphere of the brain is exceptionally good to get out – in fact so good that the patients can behave anything near ‘normal’.
It writes The New York Times, according to Science.dk.
Often conducts the operation on children as researchers so far believe that it will achieve the best effect. And many of the children can subsequently walk, talk, solve and perform everyday tasks. the
Read more on Science.dk: Aaargh! What happens in the brain when we become stressed?
Dorit Kliemann, neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, is first author of the study, and she explains to The New York Times, that the remaining hemisphere of the brain is so good to get out, because it strengthens the connections back.
So the links simply ‘pick up’ and continue to work, as the lack of and past the sick part of the brain before had done.
When the researchers first met the patients, it was not immediately noticing that they were missing one side of the brain. But when the patients were examined in an MRI scanner, you could see it black on white.
We looked at scanning images and thought that these brains should not be able to function. If you take other systems, where several parts are dependent on each other, as, for example, a heart, and divide it in two, then it will indeed not work, explains Ralph Adolphs, co-author of the study.
The new study is published in the scientific journal Cell Reports.
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