[HN Gopher] How did a woman with a missing temporal lobe become ...
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       How did a woman with a missing temporal lobe become bilingual?
        
       Author : Hooke
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2022-07-01 19:47 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (journal.medizzy.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (journal.medizzy.com)
        
       | elliekelly wrote:
       | There was a great New Yorker article in 2018 about this woman and
       | the studies being done on her brain (and of other "hyper-
       | polyglots") at MIT:
       | https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/the-mystery-of...
        
       | callesgg wrote:
       | She basically never had a temporal lobe... its not like parts of
       | the neocortex are specially built for certain tasks.
       | 
       | Certain parts of the neocortex just happen to lie close to places
       | where certain information from sensor input happen to flow. As
       | such those said parts specialise in dealing with the information
       | that they happen to be provided with.
        
         | Teever wrote:
         | > its not like parts of the neocortex are specially built for
         | certain tasks.
         | 
         | Is this a proven fact?
         | 
         | I was under the impression that specific parts of the brain
         | were built for certain tasks, but others can be repurposed.
        
           | felipemnoa wrote:
           | From what little I know and read it appears that the brain's
           | neural organization is fractal in nature. The same patterns
           | are used and reused at different levels and in all regions.
        
           | callesgg wrote:
           | For the neocortex yes, but there are other (older & deeper)
           | parts of the brain that are definitely task specific. If you
           | come to me without a basal ganglia or a hippocampus. I would
           | be very very surprised if you were "normal".
        
         | pawsforthought wrote:
         | Right. There are enough cases of extreme neuroplasticity
         | following lobotomies, even hemispherectomies, that this case
         | doesn't seem too surprising. It _is_ still fascinating though,
         | that our brains are so malleable and self-reconfiguring.
        
           | mixologic wrote:
           | Makes me wonder if there is a part of the brain thats
           | actually responsible for reconfiguring/responding to abnormal
           | situations.
        
             | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
             | My understanding is that the answer is probably "all of
             | it"; the brain is built from self organizing pieces
             | (neurons, mostly)
        
         | aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
         | [citation needed]
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-03 23:00 UTC)