A boy who had a part of his brain removed to cure his epilepsy came out of the operation more intelligent than before.
The boy, from Pennsylvania, developed epilepsy at age four due to a tumor in the right half of his brain, according to a report in scientific journal Cell Reports.
When he was six doctors removed a third of the right hemisphere, expecting it to play havoc with his sight. The part that needed to come out housed the occipital lobe, which processes visual information, and most of his temporal lobe, which does the same for sound and speaking.
While it would remove the cause of his epilepsy, doctors feared he'd have trouble with basic things like recognising faces and objects - tasks handled by the right hemisphere of the brain.
Three years later, the only problem the boy has is that he can't see anything on his left-hand side. Everything else is functioning normally - the left hemisphere rewiring itself to take over.
"We saw a kind of jostling in the left hemisphere between regions engaged in word and face recognition, which resolved and settled into a new organisation," co-author Marlene Behrmann of Carnegie Mellon University told New Scientist.
It's believed the boy's young age played a part - his brain was still developing, so was able to adapt to the radical change.
Tests taken before and after the surgery showed the boy's IQ actually rose - from 116 to 118.
New Scientist reports the boy wants to be a neurologist when he grows up.
Earlier this year, an elderly Irish man was found to be missing his frontal lobe - with no signs of confusion, facial weakness, visual or speech disturbance.
Newshub.
