The study has rediscovered one of the most bizarre and individual cases of traumatic brain injury in history: the case of patient M, who was wounded in the head in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War.
And he awoke to see the world in reverse, where Patient M’s people and things seemed to come from the other side to where they really were, something that extended to his hearing and touch as well.
The world could seem to patient M. both upside down and upside down: for example, he would be embarrassed by people working upside down on scaffolding.
Patient M was also able to read the time on his wristwatch from any angle. It’s a really strange set of symptoms, but there were others. This included non-object color vision, objects appearing in triplicate, and color blindness.
However, it was reported that patient M. took all this quite calmly.
Patient M. was studied for almost 50 years by the Spanish neuroscientist Justo Gonzalo, and his analysis led to a major shift in how we see the brain - far from the only case where a strange injury has helped scientists better understand the brain.
In the 1940s, Gonzalo suggested that the brain was not a collection of individual regions, but rather that its various functions were distributed in gradations throughout the organ, an idea that went against the conventional wisdom of the time.
Neuropsychologist Alberto García Molina of the Guttmann Institute in Spain told El Pais: “The brain looked like little boxes. When you change the box, there should be a noticeable deficit. For Dr. Gonzalo, the standard theories I didn’t explain the questions he asked.” I showed up with patient M, so he started to create his theory of brain dynamics, going beyond the mainstream view of how the brain works.”
Studying the patient M. and other patients with traumatic brain injuries, Gonzalo suggested that the consequences of brain damage depend on the size and location of the injury. He also showed that these damages do not impair certain functions, but rather affect the homeostasis of many functions - as was the case with patient M.
Gonzalo identified three syndromes: central (diseases of many sense organs), parasympathetic (similar to the central, but with unevenly distributed effects) and peripheral (affecting the brain pathways for certain sense organs).
It was groundbreaking work based on an incredible but not as well-known case as it should have been - and now Gonzalo’s daughter, Isabelle Gonzalo-Fonrodona, has been working with Garcia Molina on a new paper detailing a study involving patient M.
As the study says, individual case studies have taught us about brain function for hundreds of years, providing today a valuable alternative source of scientific data for meta-analyses and large clinical trials.
Ideas about Gonzalo’s brain similarity remain prominent as evidence that he was correct in his explanation of Patient M’s injuries and reversed vision.
The study is published in the journal Neurology.
Source: Science Alert
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