Girl with half a brain becomes fluent in two languages

Scruff

bloody 'ell. was astounded when i read this :
Girl with half a brain becomes fluent in two languages

A girl of seven who had half her brain removed, including its speech centre, has astonished doctors by becoming fluent in two languages.

Her doctor said her recovery highlighted the flexibility of the brain, even after the most traumatic surgery.

The remaining half of Busra's brain has compensated for the missing speech centre
Busra was diagnosed with Rasmussen syndrome, a rare, progressive disorder that affects just one side of the brain, at the age of three.

Surgeons at Utrecht University Hospital in Holland decided that the left hemisphere, which included the speech centre, had to be removed. The gap was filled with marrow fluid during the hemispherectomy.

Earlier this year, Dr Johannes Borgstein, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Rotterdam Hospital was treating Busra for tonsillitis.

"She was fairly well and we had decided not to take out her tonsils but realised that she had this enormous case file," he said.

"We generally have just seven minutes for each patient but I thought I had to take a look through it. The word hemispheric kept occurring and we then came across an MRI brain scan and that is when we saw that there was only half of her brain left.

"Apart from a slightly awkward handshake the first impression was unremarkable. Fluently bilingual, she had been arguing with her little sister in perfectly-constructed Dutch, then turned to answer her mother in Turkish."

Dr Borgstein said Busra's sight was impaired but that she could hear perfectly with both ears, the right side of her brain having compensated completely for the lack of the left side.

"It was amazing. I had to tell my students to forget all the neurophysiological theory they were learning," he said. "If this little girl could achieve so much with only half a brain what could we not do with a complete one?" Children will often recover well from a hemispherectomy up until the age of 10. If the operation is carried out before the age of eight, they will usually recover language.

po0k

Yeah, saw that.
Makes alot of sense thogh, and is prety obvious when one thinks about it.
Being organic the brain must be able to grow and adapt. If it's given the time to do that before the body matures past the primary growth stage why shouldn't it be able to compensate?