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Entries in carnegie mellon university's center for cognitive brain imaging (1)

Tuesday
Feb052013

"New research reveals exactly how the human brain adapts to injury"

The brain is an amazing human mechanism, as proven by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. They’ve discovered, through a combination of neural imaging methods, that when an area of the brain is injured, other areas will band together to perform the task once assigned to the damaged area.

Researchers temporarily disabled the subjects’ Wernicke area –the area of the brain that plays a large part in forming sentences—and watched what happened. They noticed that the areas which helped the Wernicke area with its task were also impaired. However, they also noticed that the areas closest to and directly across from the affected area stepped up to help form sentences. A section of the frontal lobe, also, took charge “recruiting” areas with the same functions as the impaired Wernicke area.

This capacity for the brain to fix itself to the best of its ability shows just how amazing the human body is and gives hope to those who sustain these traumatic injuries that their bodies aren’t just giving up.

Check out the below article on MedicalXpress to learn more!

“New research reveals exactly how the human brain adapts to injury”