I just wanted to share this with you because it is so remarkable. Everyone knows that infants can often handle quite serious brain damage, as the remaining part of the brain can learn to compensate for the injured part. But this?
“Woman in her twenties discovers that she was born without a cerebellum”
Wow. Just . . . wow. I would never have thought this was possible.
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The most extreme cases I’ve heard of are childhood hemispherectomies resulting in complete normality, as for example
Actually, I think this missing cerebellum is MORE extreme even than that. After all, you have two frontal lobes, too temporal lobes, etc. I can see one hemisphere compensating for the functions of the missing hemisphere. But the cerebellum is a unique part of the brain that takes care of all kinds of old “reptile” functions, especially those related to body awareness (proprioception) and movement. I’m amazed that other, evolutionarily distinct parts of the brain can take on those functions.