Nemo121
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Joined: 2/6/2004
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Re: brain damage - aka ABI - aquired brain injury
Plasticity is a feature of the brain but it is dependent on:
a) age - the younger the more plastic,
b) extent of injury - the less the injury the easier to compensate
c) rapidity of injury - the slower the injury and less catastrophic in nature the more plasticity occurs in which other elements of the brain take over portions of the function of the damaged portion of the brain
d) rehab - for plasticity to occur you need to practice whatever it is you seek to recover. With practice more is recovered then without practice although this is a bit shaded by practice also allowing existing neurons to "do more with less" without plasticity becoming involved.
e) the area damaged. A pontine CVA rarely, if ever, has much recovery, grey and white matter infarcts in the temporo-parietal regions have a better prognosis although even then some significant deficits will still remain. E.g You might recover your hearing but you might still go psychotic.
witpqs,
Believe it or not what you saw above was relatively mild. I've seen brains ( post-mortem ) with holes the size of golf balls throughout. Once treated an Eastern European man who had undiagnosed cerebral TB which essentially ate away his entire frontal lobe - where your executive functioning and personality are based - and, over the course of 4 days, turned from an adult 30some year old male into the equivalent of a 3 or 4 year old with no power of speech, no ability to toilet himself etc. The CT Brain showed the replacement of the frontal lobes with a ball of pus. Pretty horrific thing to see. Even worse when I had to break it to his wife and kid. Wife had no english, it was an emergency so I had to use the 10 year old kid to translate for me. Pretty sure he'll be traumatised for life "Tell your mother your father's brain has been eaten and he WILL die. " *sigh*
Basically if you can actually see a lesion on the brain with the naked eye in a post-mortem shot like that then you can be pretty sure it wasn't a mild injury. It isn't a perfect rule of thumb but it is pretty good.
Also, if you are looking to determine whether or not something will impact intellect then look at the outer portion of the brain, the 0.5cm closest to the surface. That's where "grey matter" lies. If you find damage there then you are losing stuff which is very hard to replace as that stuff is what "thinks" and decides on actions and movements. As you go deeper you get into white matter which is, essentially, lots of pipelines carrying the data from the grey matter to the spine where it can get transmitted. If you've got damage in the white matter and you can reroute the signals ( not easy but possible ) then you've got no loss of function. If they grey matter is FUBAR then plasticity comes into play but, really, I wouldn't be hopeful.
Interestingly a particular stroke in a particular portion of the white matter where all the motor pipelines pass throughleads to locked in syndrome. All your intellect is preserved, your sensation is preserved, you just can't move a muscle. *shudder*. That's real voluntary euthanasia territory for me.
< Message edited by Nemo121 -- 10/10/2010 4:09:54 PM >
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Well, that's that settled then.
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RE: Chesty....not Puller - 
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