Become a different person, instantly and irreversibly … This can happen as a result of a malfunction in the brain.
We are accustomed to imagine our personality as a tree that can only grow in a given direction. But it is more like a constructor created by our brain. It is worth removing just one detail – and our personality will change …
“I felt something explode on the left side of my head,” Alexander recalls. – Then again, but in the right. I lost consciousness and woke up only in the hospital. I looked out the window and saw numbers sprouting from the trees: 3, 6, 9. My head was full of rhymes, images, melodies … “
After the stroke, Alexander seemed to have been replaced. Friends don’t recognize him. Previously, he was not at all interested in art, but now he enthusiastically paints the walls and ceiling of his apartment. He speaks very emotionally and even chaotically, jumping from one topic to another. And before, friends and acquaintances described him as a closed and silent person. Alexander was lucky, because he survived. True, having lost … part of his own brain.
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- Mature age… of the brain
During the stroke, he mainly suffered frontal lobes of the cerebral hemispheres. This part of the brain regulates the most complex mental processes that determine our personality. For example, thanks to him we manage our behavior and emotions. Damage to the frontal lobes leads to the fact that a person ceases to control himself. He may lose the will to live, become irritable and capricious. Or, like Alexander, turn any statement into a stream of consciousness.
The frontal lobes determine not only our behavior, but also our thinking. They allow the brain to “sort out” new experiences, cutting off what does not fit into the usual picture of the world. Neuroscientists suggest that sudden bursts of creativity are caused by malfunctions in this area*. It seems that this is the mystery of the bizarre images that Alexander sees: his brain just forgot how to filter the information he received from the outside world.
Alexander’s case may seem incredible, because the brain injury barely affected his mental abilities. He lives a completely fulfilling life. In fact, there is no miracle here. The human brain is remarkably plastic. If there is damage in it, it creates new connections between neurons and uses the remaining areas to replace the lost ones. A vivid image for this mechanism was offered by neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor (Jill Bolte Taylor): “I imagine the brain as a children’s playground. You look at this playground and notice a group of children playing ball and another group climbing up the slide and horizontal bars. If you remove the slide, the children who played on it will not go anywhere, they will just mix with the rest and do something else.
* PLoS Biol, 2012, № 10(3).
** J.B. Taylor “My Stroke Transformed Me” (Astrel, 2011).