At 37, Michelle Mack is like a lot of high-functioning people with special needs. She lives at home with her parents, but she works in data entry, pays rent every month, and is fairly independent given her difficulties with anger control, abstract concepts, and sense of direction/spatial issues. Michelle was literally born with only half a brain, and her neurologist, Dr. Jordan Grafman, Cognitive Neuroscience chief at the National Institutes of Health, says the right side of her brain rewired itself to take over all the things controlled by the left side.
Basically, the fact that Michelle can read, write, and mostly take care of herself is a complete miracle. Given how much she has overcome, she’s destined to be in medical textbooks for years. Just how much of her brain is missing? Here’s how Dr. Grafman describes the damage to Michelle’s mind:
“There’s some very deep structures remaining, but the surface of her brain, the cortex is 95 percent gone and some of the deeper structures, structures that control movement, are missing. These are all structures that are important for movement, behavior, cognition.”
The human brain is an amazingly complex organ, isn’t it? Just the way it filters out stimuli is impressive, but knowing that it can recover from such extensive damage is staggering.
Tags: medical miracles, woman born with half a brain, brain rewires itself, Michelle Mack, unusual health, the human body, neurology, Dr. Jordan Grafman
