What happens if half the brain stops working

Then, he started convulsing in the back seat of the car. His dad, Eran, called and an ambulance rushed Ozzy to the local hospital, where he was treated for a large seizure. Spelbrink says. A solution had to be found. He had a hard time dressing himself. His teacher would call to say he spent the whole day lying on the floor. Think of it as flipping the circuit breaker in a section of your house. When the connection between the healthy and unhealthy halves of the brain is severed, seizures cannot spread.

Instead, they empowered us to make the decision. Hemispherotomy is often confused with its cousin, hemispherectomy. The first disconnects tracts between the two sides of the brain or makes small holes in the brain to disengage damaged parts, while the second, hemispherectomy, removes damaged brain tissue.

What finally tipped the scale on an impossible decision for Stefanie and Eran was the worry of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy SUDEP. Grant says. Because Ozzy had a stroke before birth that essentially destroyed the left side of his brain, the right side took over all functions early on, making him the perfect candidate for a hemispherotomy.

This meant that functions like speech, memory, and vision were now performed by his healthy right side. Doctors ran several tests, including a functional MRI , which maps important brain functions, to confirm it. Ozzy is bilingual, so the team tested him for both English and German, and they saw that his brain was exclusively lighting up in the right hemisphere. It took several hours for Dr.

The cerebellum is most famous for controlling precise movements, but other areas of the brain such as the basal ganglia and the motor cortex are also intimately involved in moving our bodies. Asking what unique thing each area does may be the wrong question, when they are all contributing to the same thing. Memory is another example of an essential biological function which seems to be supported by multiple brain systems. If you bump into someone you've met once before, you might remember that they have a reputation for being nice, remember a specific incident of them being nice, or just retrieve a vague positive feeling about them — all forms of memory which tell you to trust this person, and all supported by different brain areas doing the same job in a slightly different way.

Edelman and his colleague, Joseph Gally, called degeneracy a "ubiquitous biological property It explains both why unusual brain conditions are not as catastrophic as they might be, and also why scientists find the brain so confounding to try and understand. If you have an everyday psychological phenomenon you'd like to see written about in these columns please get in touch tomstafford or ideas idiolect.

Neurohacks Brain. Can you live a normal life with half a brain? Share using Email. By Tom Stafford 18th December A few extreme cases show that people can be missing large chunks of their brains with no significant ill-effect — why? Tom Stafford explains what it tells us about the true nature of our grey matter. It also causes vision loss on one side of the visual field.

As a result, younger brains are more likely to shift some neurological functions from one side to the other. For example, language function typically develops on the left side of the brain. Although hemispherectomy tends to be more effective in younger patients, many parents are hesitant to choose surgery.

Bingaman hopes that studies on hemispherectomy may help increase understanding of brain plasticity and the potential benefits of epilepsy surgery. The actor reportedly died in his sleep after having a seizure.

Epilepsy is a chronic brain disorder that results in recurring seizures. It is the…. Researchers have increasingly scrutinized the reputation of e-cigarettes as a safer alternative to traditional smoking.

In , European researchers…. Learn more about types of seizures, causes and symptoms, and how you can help someone having…. Epilepsy is a nervous system disorder that causes seizures. Absence seizures, also called petit mal seizures, are brief and may not have noticeable…. Benign Rolandic epilepsy is the most common type of childhood epilepsy. What's more, the authors found that connectivity — and thus communication — between parts of different networks are actually stronger in patients who had a hemisphere removed.

In this way, it seems the brain is able to compensate for the loss of brain structure, the authors said. Many of these patients were high functioning, with intact language skills. There are many other cases in the literature that document the brain's amazing ability to adapt to an unexpected situation. For example, a young boy had a third of his right hemisphere removed, which included the part of the brain responsible for sight. But a few years after his surgery, neuroscientists found that the left side of his brain started taking on the missing left side's visual tasks, and he could still see just fine, according to a previous Live Science report.