Mind Hacks looks at a number of unusual cases, such as a woman missing a cerebellum and a man who had a tapeworm eat its way through his brain over four years, and asks what these kinds of cases are telling us about what we do — and don’t — know about the human brain.
Why you can live a normal life with half a brain (Mind Hacks, December 29, 2014)
It’s not so surprising for anyone who has knowledge about mouse knockout lines. There’s a good reason why these days people prefer to make conditional knockouts (mice in which a specific gene is deleted in adulthood upon application of a drug) rather than constitutive knockouts – in development organisms can compensate for a lot of mutations which are disastrous when they occur all of a sudden after development. Living organisms are unbelievably plastic and can compensate for a lot of deficits.
