His brain remade itself!

Andrew Zaleski reports in One Zero about "The Brain that Remade Itself."

Doctors removed one-sixth of this child’s brain — and what was left did something incredible.

...Today, Collins is a critical puzzle piece in an ongoing study of how the human brain can change. That’s because his brain has done something remarkable: The left side has assumed all the responsibilities and tasks of his now largely missing right side.

“We’re looking at the entire remapping of the function of one hemisphere onto the other,” says Marlene Behrmann, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has been examining Collins’ brain for more than five years.

...The fact that the brain has a malleable capacity to change itself isn’t new. What’s less understood is how exactly the brain does it. That’s where Behrmann’s study of Collins comes in. Her research question is twofold: To what extent can the remaining structures of Collins’ brain take over the functions of the part of his brain that was removed? And can science describe how the brain carries out these changes, all the way down to the cellular level?

...Before Collins’ surgery to remove the tumor, doctors opened up his head and placed electrodes on the surface of his brain and inside his visual cortex. For seven days, Collins lay in a hospital bed as the electrodes mapped his brain’s electrical activity, creating what was essentially a schematic diagram showing doctors where the seizures were originating and which brain areas needed to be cut out.

Read more here.