Neuroscience owe much to the brainpower of thegruesomely hurt , whosecrushed corticeshave enabled doctors to study the workings of the head under conditions that could never be ethically revivify in laboratory experiment . One such case is that of Patient M , who start experiencing the world back - to - front after being shot in the caput during the Spanish Civil War .
Until this point , neurologist believed thebrainto be made up of trenchant regions that were divide by sharp boundaries with fiddling to no intersection . However , Patient M ’s mangled sensory apparatus challenge this idea and allowed a doc called Justo Gonzalo Rodríguez - Leal to devise a new theory of brain dynamics .
The Spanish Civil War was a savage conflict that plunge the country from 1936 to 1939 , ending with the Nationalist victory over the Republicans and leave in the establishment of a authoritarianism under Francisco Franco . Fighting on the side of the Republicans , Patient M was 25 year quondam when he was shoot in the headland on a battlefield in Levante , Valencia , in May 1938 .
After waking from a coma two weeks later on , the stricken soldier reported no vision in his left eye and only a faint glimmer in the right . cavort two gnarled hole in his skull where thebullethad entered and departed , the humanity confounded Doctor of the Church by find his health without requiring surgery or any type of special precaution .
Observing Patient M over the next five decades , Rodríguez - Leal described a number of extremely perplexing symptoms . For case , in accession to realise everything multiplied by three , the humankind alsoperceived colors“unstuck ” from objects .
Most unusual of all , though , Patient M saw everything as though it had been invert . Highlighting the type in his account book , Cerebral Dynamics , Rodríguez - Leal bring out how the war stager “ found his abnormalities unknown when , for lesson , he encounter men working upside down on a scaffold . ”
This sensory summerset - flopping extended to the patient ’s sense of auditory sensation and touch , both of which were action by his brain as if originating from the diametric side of his body . Despite this severe discombobulation , the man was able to go about his life with small problem – something Rodríguez - Leal attribute to the unconscious development of coping strategies , such as selective attention to intense stimuli .
InCerebral Dynamics , the MD explains that the fastball appears to have affect the left over parieto - occipital region of Patient M ’s brain . observe the effect of this wound , Rodríguez - Leal postulated that the brain might not be divided into clear-cut regions after all .
Based on the way in which the wound appeared to puddle the dupe ’s senses , he paint a picture that neurological role might be organise into gradients that spread across the total lens cortex , with dissimilar region separated by gradual transitions .
In an interview withEl Pais , Rodríguez - Leal ’s daughter Isabel Gonzalo explains that Patient M – whose identity has never been break – live a long and healthy life , passing away in the late 1990s . Despite surviving for 60 years in his back - to - front world , the former soldier was plainly mostly untroubled by his rummy condition .
More importantly , Patient M ’s backwards brain avail to turn the field of neuroscience on its school principal .
[ H / T : El Pais ]
