I was born at a New York City hospital in the dark.
The doctors rushed me to the intensive care unit after six bouts of stopped breathing. The medical intern put his finger into my mouth to see if I could suck. I didn't do very well. They put my body into a brain scanning device.
There was a big hole on the left side. The left temporal lobes is a part of the brain that is involved in a wide variety of behaviors, from memory to the recognition of emotions.
My mother remembers waking up in the middle of the night to a neurologist, a doctor and a nurse standing at the foot of her bed. They told me that I had a brain bleed in her uterus.
They told her she would need to be in a mental hospital. The neurologist brought her arms up to her chest and contorted her wrists to show how she would be disabled.
My parents used to wonder what my life would look like when I was young. They wanted to find out more about the effects of strokes on the brain.
I surprised the experts when I met all of the typical milestones of my age. I excelled in academics and sports. The language skills the doctors were most worried about when I was born turned out to be my passion.
My case is not new. Thousands of people are living normal lives despite missing parts of their brains. Over time, our networks of cells have been able to change. How?
My childhood was filled with researchers following me around. My brain was scanned several times a year, and I was tasked with various puzzles, word searches and picture recognition tests. The researchers gave me a sticker at the end of each day of testing and I kept it in a container next to my bed.
Researchers wanted to know how my brain would respond when I was tired. I used to stay up all night with my mom and watch movies. When I stumbled into the clinic the next day, scientists would put electrical wires on my head. As long wires fell from my head, I was allowed to fall asleep and not know that the researchers were looking for brain waves.
The scientists realized that I wasn't like the other kids in the study and didn't have any deficits over time. The cluttered Manhattan office of Dr. Ruth Nass where my dad and I met was where I first met my father. I was asked if I had had a stroke. She said that I couldn't be in the study because of my brain differences.
I didn't care. The beginning of high school, cross-country practice, and crushes were some of the things that happened in my life. I had learned a lot about neuroscience, so I became obsessed with it. I wrote to Dr. Nass when I was 17 and asked if I could work in her lab. She said she would.
She said she could show me my study files. We entered a room filled with stacks of plastic bins, each filled with a different type of paper. She quietly read the folder while grabbing it. She said that you were the worst participant because you were fine. All of my data was thrown away.
Many studies on perinatal strokes were published by Dr. Nass and her colleagues after she died. Babies with strokes have a higher risk of attention and behavioral problems than the general population. Children recruited from Southern California and New York City suffered from muscle weakness and seizures on one side of their bodies. I had damaged or missing areas in my left hemisphere. I'm pretty sure that one of those points was mine.
Imajored in neuroscience at college. I worked in a lab studying concussions for two years after graduation. I watched as other peoples' brains appeared on a computer screen.
I didn't pay much attention to my brain until this spring, when I read a story about a woman just like me.
The left hemisphere of the brain has been the center of language and comprehension for more than a century.
Dr. Dax proposed this idea in 1836 because he noticed that patients who had injuries to the left side of their brain could no longer speak. A young man had lost his ability to speak and could only say one word. Following the patient's death, a brain biopsy revealed a large abnormality in the left hemisphere.
Several patients that Dr. Carl Wernicke saw in the early 1870s were able to speak, but their utterances were not understandable. One of these patients had a stroke in the back of her temporal lobe, and Dr. Wernicke concluded that this section of the brain needed to be a second center for language.
Our understanding of language has been further improved by modern brain scans. There are two brain regions that are activated when a person reads or hears something. The language network has been called a "language network" by some researchers.
Language processing is not limited to specific brain regions according to other scientists.
The head of the Language, Action and Brain Lab at University College London believes that language is spread throughout the brain.
The part of the brain associated with meaning can be activated by written words. The words "telephone", "kick" and "garlic" all have the same effect on an area related to hearing, smell and movement.
The areas of the brain that are traditionally attributed to language have more than one function. It depends on what other parts of the brain they are talking to and when.
An anonymous woman from Connecticut was described in an article as having no idea she had a left temporal lobes until she underwent a brain Scan as an adult. She was part of a research project led by Evelina Fedorenko at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I offered to be part of Dr. Fedorenko's research when I wrote an email to her in April. I booked an airplane ticket from my home in Colorado to Boston after she replied four and a half hours later.
She told me that there are eight people in the project. Four of us had presumed strokes that resulted in damage to the left hemisphere. Two participants have benign cysts in their right or left hemispheres, one had a stroke in the right hemisphere, and one had brain tissue removed from the left hemisphere because of a Tumor.
A graduate student in Dr. Fedorenko's lab is running a study on the brain.
If you lose brain regions as a baby, the networks in the brain can be rearranged in a way that makes sense.
On a hot day in July, I arrived at the lab. The bed slid into the M.R.I. machine with a cagelike device over my head. Ms. Kean put a mirror on the headpiece so I could see the back of the machine. I remembered all the times I had fallen asleep inside as a kid, lulled to sleep by the machine's loud noises.
Words were flashed on the screen and a voice read them aloud, with random sentences such as, "Just the barest suggestion of a heel is found on teenage pumps." The words were replaced by a bunch of letters that made the soundsincomprehensible.
I saw a piece of my brain for the first time after the scans, as I crowded around a computer screen with researchers. I was shocked that my brain could have moved around this large hole, which was behind my left temple.
The left temporal and frontal lobes in a typical person's brain are activated when I hear and read sentences.
According to a case study published in the journal Neuroscience, the brain of the Connecticut patient was able to adapt by changing sides.
It was my brain that surprised everyone again.
The scans showed that I still use my left hemisphere to process sentences.
I had thought that the language system in the left hemisphere would migrate to the right hemisphere. Dr. Fedorenko spoke. Science is cool like this. Cool discoveries are often a result of surprise.
According to Dr. Fedorenko, the reason for the discovery is that the left hemisphere is where the language system is located.
Dr. Fedorenko hopes to recruit more people with unusual brains to participate in the study over the next few years.
When I was a child, I was in a study about the other kids who had suffered strokes and were left disabled. My brain evolved around its missing part, while theirs struggled to do so. I don't understand why I wasn't born with the problems. I wonder why my left side gave me the words and phrases that have enriched my life.
I am thankful to have been involved in this study and to be a research participant again.
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