Woman Missing Large Part of Brain Ranks 98th Percentile in Speech
A recent study sheds light on the remarkable case of a woman who grew up without a key part of her brain and was barely affected by it.
In the endless search to understand the workings of the human mind, scientists take special interest in cases of the most unique brains. The most recent and fascinating is that of a woman known as EG (to protect her privacy.)
Now in her fifties, EG first learned her brain was atypical in her twenties when she had it scanned for an unrelated reason. She was told then that she had been missing her left temporal lobe from infancy, which was most likely the result of an early stroke. This part of the brain is thought to be involved with language processing, which makes EG’s story so extraordinary.
Despite being repeatedly told by doctors that she should have major cognitive deficits and neurological issues, EG has a graduate degree, has enjoyed an impressive career, and speaks Russian as a second language.
Several years ago, EG met Dr. Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T. who studies language. Fedorenko was immediately fascinated by EG’s case and conducted a number of studies, the first of which was recently published in the journal Psychologia.
As part of the study, EG took a vocabulary test and scored in the 98th percentile. Brain imaging revealed that, in the absence of EG’s left temporal lobe, the task of language processing seems to have shifted over to her right hemisphere.
Ella Striem-Amit, a cognitive neuroscientist at Georgetown University told WIRED, “The remarkable thing about this patient and other such patients who were missing large chunks of their language system at birth, is how well they compensate.”
For EG, the study has been a welcome validation, after decades of being made to feel defective.
As she wrote in the published paper: “Please do not call my brain abnormal, my brain is atypical. If not for accidentally finding these differences, no one would pick me out of a crowd as likely to have these, or any other differences, that make me unique.”
Fedorenko’s team plans to conduct several more studies on EG and expects to come away with an even richer understanding of the brain’s seemingly limitless potential for flexibility and adaptation.
EG said she hopes, “it will also take some stigma away from atypical brains.”
Group Intention Experiments Shown to Have Measurable Healing Effect
In the field of research being done on intention and manifesting, Lynne Mctaggart is legendary. Her latest revolutionary experiments show the power of group intention to heal.
Mctaggart is a journalist and bestselling author, world-renowned for her groundbreaking work on consciousness and the power of intention. She is also the architect of “The Intention Experiment,” a global laboratory involving thousands of participants testing the power of group thoughts to heal the world.
Her research has repeatedly shown the profound effect thoughts have on reality.
“We’re all a batch of vibrating packets of energy so there’s nothing solid or stable about us (and) there’s nothing solid or stable about the world,” McTaggart said.
“In between different objects is a giant quantum energy field, we’re all in the field, and our subatomic particles make up the field. So, because we are energy, energy is changing at every moment at the subatomic level, nothing is an actual anything yet, it’s every possible state all at once. What they’ve found is what turns that potential of something into something real is an observer. So, our consciousness, our ability to observe, our ability to intend also makes us a creator.”
McTaggart’s intention experiments, running since 2007, are some of the first controlled explorations of the power of mass intention. In these experiments, she invites an audience to send a specific thought to affect a target, after which a team of scientists calculates the results to measure possible change.
“I’ve run 40 intention experiments — everything from trying to make plants grow faster, seeds grow faster, to purifying water, to lowering violence in war-torn areas or violent areas, to even healing someone with PTSD,” McTaggart said. “Of those 40, 35 have shown measurable, positive, mostly significant effects as measured by teams of scientists at different prestigious universities. So, we’ve got lots of evidence that thoughts are things that affect other things.”
Of particular significance to McTaggart are her peace experiments, which include the two she has now done on the 10th and 20th anniversaries of 9/11.
