I belive i witnessed evolution in progress

a reply to: HolydarknessVA

It wasn't until recently that the part of the brain we thought contained our consciousness was found to be incorrect.
A man who lost 90% of his brain - including the area that scientists presumed housed our consciousness, lives a pretty normal life, and has proved, science was wrong.

The whole story

It's a pretty remarkable tale in that it shows how little we actually do know about the human mind.

Considering, this is what science thinks the brain is broken into:



Now compare that to this mans brain...and keep in mind, we lives a normal life, with a job and family:



There's a lot of empty space in there.

Maybe, but either way your sisters life is amazing. I'm happy things turned out well for her and your family!

-Alee

a reply to: HolydarknessVA

That's called plasticity, not evolution.

www.iflscience.com...
and when i was young i hiched around the country ( cleaned a persons barn in CA there daughter was around 7 totaly normal in every way ( but had had some kind of accedent at 4 and half her brain was destroyed and yet she was normal as you or I .
My sons girl has a daughter ( prime baby ( born at 6 months just over a pound at birth she is 4 and about at teh leave her mother would be at that age ( in otehr words moms no genius lol but if you like red necks you would like her down toe arth easy to understand hard to pick a fight with .Not that i ever try lol but have seen people arnt and rave and she just looks like ?? whats all te fuss about lol .
anyway the linked storie is much much stranger as this person has almost NO brain except the olamagata .
and yet is normal even science is stumped on him .

that actually gives hope to a lot of people, I'm glad she's doing well and can live a normal life, that a lot of us take for granted.

a reply to: HolydarknessVA

That isn't really evolution. Things don't evolve while you are alive. They evolve over generations. What it is is a HUGE testament to the fortitude of the human brain and a clear indicator that we still don't understand nearly enough about it.

originally posted by: HolydarknessVA

originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: HolydarknessVA

Because most of the brain is storage space for a life time of memories, (imo).

Some people suffer encephalitis at birth reducing there brain size, yet lead normal lives.

She is missing most of the left side of her brain which controls all out motor skills and a majority of how we function

The left/right brain ideology is actually an outdated concept and the brain can develop skills in either side for any activity.
Left Brain vs. Right: It's a Myth, Research Finds

There is a misconception that everything to do with being analytical is confined to one side of the brain, and everything to do with being creative is confined to the opposite side, Anderson said. In fact, it is the connections among all brain regions that enable humans to engage in both creativity and analytical thinking.

"It is not the case that the left hemisphere is associated with logic or reasoning more than the right," Anderson told LiveScience. "Also, creativity is no more processed in the right hemisphere than the left."

Anderson's team examined brain scans of participants ages 7 to 29 while they were resting. They looked at activity in 7,000 brain regions, and examined neural connections within and between these regions. Although they saw pockets of heavy neural traffic in certain key regions, on average, both sides of the brain were essentially equal in their neural networks and connectivity.

"We just don't see patterns where the whole left-brain network is more connected, or the whole right-brain network is more connected in some people," said Jared Nielsen, a graduate student and first author on the new study.

The myth of people being either "left-brained" or "right-brained" might have arisen from the Nobel Prize-winning research of Roger Sperry, which was done in the 1960s. Sperry studied patients with epilepsy, who were treated with a surgical procedure that cut the brain along a structure called the corpus callosum. Because the corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain, the left and right sides of these patients' brains could no longer communicate.

Sperry and other researchers, through a series of clever studies, determined which parts, or sides, of the brain were involved in language, math, drawing and other functions in these patients. But then popular-level psychology enthusiasts ran with this idea, creating the notion that personalities and other human attributes are determined by having one side of the brain dominate the other.

The neuroscience community never bought into this notion, Anderson said, and now we have evidence from more than 1,000 brain scans showing absolutely no signs of left or right dominance.