CREDIT LINECREDIT LINEBehrmann says, he had to move his eyes
or head to bring an object into his right
visual field, where it would be processed
by the left hemisphere.
“The study is very carefully done and
took advantage of a very unique opportu-
nity,” writes Isabel Gauthier, a cognitive
neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University
who studies object perception and was not
involved in the work, in an email to The
Scientist. “The authors certainly got a lot
of information out of this one patient, and
studies that follow patients over time like
this are pretty rare.” However, she notes,
the data indicate that although U.D. had
regained normal face recognition abilities
a year after surgery, brain activity in the
left hemisphere associated with recogniz-
ing faces didn’t appear until about a year
and seven months after surgery. Based on
this observation, “it’s unclear what part of
his brain he was using for face recogni-
tion before the resection,” Gauthier says.
That resection had no effect on his abilityto recognize faces, she adds, might mean
that face recognition was in fact being
processed, both before and after surgery,
in an area outside of the large part that
was removed.
If U. D .’s brain had rewired itself even
prior to the surgery, Gauthier notes thatit may not have been the procedure but
the epilepsy itself that drove this neuro-
nal plasticity—a form of reorganization thatVIAFLO ASSIST PLUSVOYAGER Adjustable Tip Spacing Pipette
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MISSING PIECE: An MRI scan of U.D.’s brain
after surgery shows the removal of the right
occipital and posterior temporal lobes.LIU ET AL.,CELL REPORTS,^2018