In Virginia lives an extraordinary woman by the name of Michelle Mack. What's so amazing about her? She has half a brain. Now all of you who have or haven't taken Biology, it usually takes one whole brain (100% physically of a brain) to survive...doesn't it? Apparently, Mack only has the right hemisphere of her brain.
Despite this "little" handicap, she still manages to do her household chores and maintain a steady job managing data for the church (I bet some full brained people can't even manage data). However, she does need some help and lives with her mom, which is granted since she is missing half of the most important organ in the body.
Now diving into the scientific aspect of this finding, Mack's right hemisphere has adapted to the situation by taking it upon itself to do some vital jobs of the left hemisphere, like speaking and reading. However, this caused the right hemisphere to lose some of its capacity as well, due to the extra jobs. Apparently, a lesion in Mack's brain at the time around her birth caused 95% of her left hemisphere to be missing.
Besides just keeping her alive, her rewiring also has allowed her to have an affinity towards remembering specific dates, which comes in handy with her church job. She specifically requested this article on CNN to be published to send out the message that she is normal. This definitely, goes under one of those inspirational stories and maybe "Ripley's Believe it or Not".
-Henry Zhang
9 comments:
wow i did not know that was actually possible. It must take a lot of will power to go through each day living like that. i'm glad she sees herself as being normal and wants others to treat her that way.
Yep. This is called plasticity (;. Normally only children have undifferentiated brains that are able to take over the other functions. A woman? That's a bit different.
WOW i would of never imagined this to be possible! this is crazy! i wonder how long she has been like that but i am glad she of her personality and actions..i think that it really awesome.
A fascinating case.
I'm still left wondering what capabilities specifically and to what extent are missing as a result of the "rewiring".
"'Michelle has fairly normal language abilities, certainly basic language abilities, she can construct a sentence, she can understand instructions, she can find words when she's talking, but actually she has some trouble in some aspects of visual-spatial processing,' said Grafman."
Hmm, so if she was pouring a cup of tea, she wouldn't know how much and when it would be filled? Not too bad considering some people develop a similar problem as they get older.
And like Talia said, it's quite amazing for a person to live like that. At least someone is using her entire brain, by entire brain, I mean what remains after her lesion.
Yea, I don't really know the full detail of visual-spatial processing, but with half a brain and managing data is still pretty good. This is a pretty rare case so I doubt there is a huge extent of available research on this.
-Henry Zhang
I think it's most impressive that she is managing data considering your right brain is most associated with creativity and the left with analytical thinking. She must also be left-handed, which also makes me wonder how much functionality she has in her right side.
This is truly amazing. How is this even possible? Having that much will power to get through each day knowing that you are at an extreme disadvantage is extraordinary.
This woman is amazing. I feel like giving her a prize. She is my hero.
cool story to hear and read about. I too feel very surprised to hear about something like this. I initially thought that with half a brain, you are just literally brain dead, but to hear about this woman, and the things she is capable of doing, I guess I thought wrong.
Sebastian Escobar
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