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Man’s Brain Rewired Itself

You read it correctly. The title of this story is “Man’s brain rewired itself, doctor’s contend”.

Terry Wallis, a 42 year old man, was in a car accident over twenty years ago that resulted in catastrophic brain damage. He was described as being in a minimally conscious state, or basically just this side of a coma.

Magically (or not, as the case may be), he awoke three years ago, and his brain has appeared to healed a nontrivial portion of the damage that was originally done. But the word “heal” here doesn’t really give the full impression of what has happened: Mr. Wallis’s brain has basically rewired itself.

“In essence, Terry’s brain may have been seeking out new pathways to reestablish functional connections to areas involved in speech and motor control — to compensate for those lost due to damage,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.

This isn’t the extent of Mr. Wallis’s recovery:

Within a week of his first utterance, Wallis began speaking in simple sentences. Once paralyzed from the neck down, he can now point with his left hand and move both legs.

Do you know how miraculous this is? Modern medicine affords us a lot in terms of knowledge of the human body to which previous generations didn’t have access. By some measure, we are making progress scientifically in many areas of artificial intelligence. But think about a brain, probably the single most complicated component of any living being, and then think about it being able to rewire itself after suffering catastrophic damage.

Mind boggling doesn’t even being to describe this (no pun intended). The doctors recognize this is 1 in 300 million type case, but the fact that it can happen at all is simply astounding.