/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6790508
>They take out huge chunks after making sure that they don't play a role in the patients ability to count, which kind of seems like a weird metric for deciding the usefulness of brain tissue.
I had a professor talk about this during my cortical neuroanatomy course. When brain surgeons talk about "clinically silent" areas, what they really mean is that the resulting loss of function either takes awhile to show up or is difficult to detect (ex: cutting the corpus callosum causes functional deficits that only show up when depriving a hemisphere of information that the other one has access to, which is a rare situation outside of a laboratory). So essentially you're always going to get fucked up after brain surgery, the only questions are in what ways and whether you'll even notice.

Which brings up something I've always wondered about. If you're having brain surgery and you lose some function or otherwise incurred some permanent mental dysfunction, would you even recognize it as externally induced, or would you think it was a conscious choice? As an absurd illustrative example, let's say you love ice cream before the surgery, but I destroy the part of your brain that makes you like ice cream so now you hate it and I don't tell you that that's what happened (like I said, absurd). Would you realize that the only reason you don't like ice cream anymore is due to brain damage, or would you be thinking "you know, I never realized it before, but ice cream is actually really disgusting"? Just from experiences with psychotropics, I'd imagine it would be the latter, but even then if I told you what happened, would you recognize your new feelings on ice cream as foreign, or would you still perceive them to be your own true feelings? It's a thought that occurs to me every time I lesion brain areas in my rats.

Pic related, one of my rats who's about to find it much harder to develop habits.