• Question: Why is everyone's brain structure different and how does a person's brain structure affect them either in a positive way or a negative way?

    Asked by anon-188819 to Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 14 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 14 Nov 2018: last edited 14 Nov 2018 9:57 pm

      Hi Al23, this is a great question and could be answered in a lot of different ways, so I am going to pick one! Changes in brain structure can have different effects on you depending on what stage of life you are at. Children’s brains are a lot more ‘plastic’ than those of adults and are surprisingly malleable. To give you an example of what I am talking about there was once a French man who went to the doctor’s complaining of ‘weakness’ in his leg. Eventually he got his brain scanned, and it turned out his head was more or less hollow! His entire brain was squished around the inside of his skull. This man had a family, job and could still function normally as a person. Here is a picture of what that scan looked like: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors/ The brain on the left is his! It turns out when he was a baby he had ‘water on the brain’, a build up of fluid that did this. As this happened when he was so young his brain adapted, it is really remarkable. If that happened to him suddenly as an adult he would be dead. The point I am trying to make here is that structure (the way the brain looks) is not always everything, and that at certain points in your life it can display huge amounts of what psychologists call ‘neural plasticity’. Brain function that is associated with one region can be transferred to another under certain circumstances. The brain is a really remarkable organ!

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 15 Nov 2018:

      Hi AL23,

      Alex made some great points here. Generally, like muffins, our brains will develop to be organised a little different. However there are some general principles in the way the brain is organised, with the location of an area between other neighbour areas playing the most important role in determining its function. For this reason, for complex visual skills like reading, or recognition of objects or even emotions, the responsible areas actually do NOT change, even if the person doesn’t have the right experience. Here is a video about the work of a good collaborator of ours, Amir Amedi, who was one of the first persons to show that if you find a way to go around the fact that blind can’t use their eyes, you can still make them “see” ..just with sounds – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s44KxJ6tU8Y&t=7s.

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