University of Glasgow researchers used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to reveal how the girl’s brain had rewired itself in order to process information from the right and left visual fields in spite of her not having a whole brain. The right hemisphere in the girl’s brain failed to develop in the womb.

Normally, the left and right fields of vision are processed and mapped by opposite sides of the brain, but scans on the German girl showed that retinal nerve fibres that should go to the right hemisphere of the brain diverted to the left.

Further, the researchers found that within the visual cortex of the left hemisphere, which creates an internal map of the right field of vision, ‘islands’ had been formed within it to specifically deal with, and map out, the left visual field in the absence of the right hemisphere.

Yeah, it’s for real – she is missing half her brain from birth, but her optic nerve grew over to the other side of the brain, and the visual cortex created special regions to deal with sight from the other side of the head.

This is something our scientists wont be able to achieve for a while. On the other hand, she has quite a lot of space to pack in some neural hardware should she choose to augment herself later in life, when the technology is fully emergent.

Tags: hackers = tinkers, holy fuck, how crazy does that shit look?, wow

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 16:38.