Originally posted by MischeviousElf
Then make assumptions about long term affects not before.

So much is misunderstood on this topic for example:

Check this out:

Doctors attending a 39-year-old Chinese woman complaining of feeling weak found she had just half a brain!

Moreover, the woman from Wuhan city (eastern China) bears a completely normal life and only visited the hospital when she felt weak and stiff.

But she really misses the left hemisphere of her brain. "On the MRI scans we were surprised to see that she only has grey matter on the right side. Our usual understanding is that the left brain controls language. But this patient has no problem communicating with people.",

said Zhang Linhong, director of Neural Rehabilitation Department at the local hospital, told ANANOVA.

Source

Only one hemisphere present and normal!

This is not the only case to, there are many that may surprise you:

This case comes after in July 2007 a French team discovered a 44-year-old male patient with an unusually tiny brain: just a quarter of the normal size. Still, the man had an entirely normal life.

The man was a married man, father of two children and worked as a civil servant. He went to the hospital after he felt mild weakness in his left leg. While a child, the man has had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away hydrocephalus (water in the brain) and the shunt was removed when he was 14 years old.

The man scored 75 at IQ tests, below the average score of 100 but not classifying him as mentally retarded or disabled. The whole brain was reduced, frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes, on both left and right hemispheres. These areas control motion, sensibility, language, vision, audition, and emotional and cognitive functions. It seems that the brain's plasticity adapted to some damage. The Chinese case just comes to reinforce this idea.

!!!!
Drop your labels and preconceptions against Brain injury all please!

There also was a Case though I can’t find the source I read about years ago. In Victorian London an Autopsy was carried out on an extremely successful Lawyer, he was a high flyer, had his own practise was feared by rivals for his legal ability and knowledge.

He had the entire Right hemisphere of his brain missing since birth. Again married with Kids, infact he was known as the best debater in the local chambers of commerce!

Brain injury, obviously depending on the specific case, is no different to any other injury, some people like me with very serious fractures to their legs are fine afterwards, and some never walk again.

But just because it’s an injury to the brain does not mean that it can’t heal like all injuries, again it specific for each person but not all encompassing.

And not in relation to actual trauma or injury but progressive damage to the brain look at this and be astounded:

Dr. John Lorber, a British neurologist who published a controversial paper

"Is Your Brain Really Necessary?"

back in 1980. Dr. Lorber's work centered on hydrocephalism, where abnormal amounts of fluid cause damage to the brain - sometimes actually replacing the tissue.

One case he presented, for example, involved a young man with an IQ of 126 who had achieved a first-class honors degree in mathematics (a difficult accomplishment indeed) and lived a normal life in spite of the fact that his brain was less than 1/10 normal size.

His cranium was filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid, leaving a layer of brain tissue near the skull only about 4/100 of an inch thick.

Among those whose craniums were 95% filled with cerebrospinal fluid, half had IQs above 100

Source


And further back on truly massive head injuries and recovery:

Ahad Israfil is a gunshot victim from Dayton, Ohio, famous for his remarkable recovery from an injury that led to the loss of almost half his brain (one cerebral hemisphere).

In 1987, aged 14, Ahad was shot in the head at work when his employer accidentally knocked a fire-arm to the floor. Despite the severity of his injuries, he survived the trip to hospital and underwent a 5 hour operation. As he regained consciousness, doctors were amazed when he attempted to speak

The injury destroyed brain tissue and one half of his skull, but the skin of his scalp survived and collapsed inwards when the underlying tissue was removed. As a result, after the hole in his head had been filled in with a silicone block, the flap of skin was pulled over and hair regrew, giving him a fairly normal appearance.

Although he now uses a wheelchair, he has regained most of his faculties and has successfully obtained a degree."

Source

Originally posted by Xcalibur254
Left Brain/Right Brain Myth

This is another one we've all heard. It basically claims that a person's personality is dependent on which side of their brain is dominant, the left or the right. Once again though this is mainly perpetuated by pop psychologists. This myth most likely stems from split-brain surgeries performed in the 1960s to treat severe epilepsy.

While certain parts of the brain seem to specialized for things like language, they also work with the rest of the brain to produce the desired effect. In the end, no side of the brain is really dominant over the others.

In most people it may appear that the left side is dominant, but this is mainly due to its role in language. Furthermore, the side language is mainly produced on appears to do with handedness, not anything pertaining to personality. (Corballis, 1999).

This experiment examined the ability of EEG activity and neuropsychological testing to predict both antisocial personality disorder (ASP) and retrospective self-ratings of early childhood problem behaviors (CPB). Regression analyses found that increased frontal left-hemisphere EEG activation was associated with a decreased likelihood of the diagnosis of ASP or CPB. An association was also found between several motor tests of the Luria-Nebraska and Porteus Maze Test scores and CPB/ASP. The current findings suggest that ASP and CPB are associated with variations in frontal lobe functioning. They further suggest that disturbances in prefrontal functioning may be a common biological ground that links ASP, substance abuse, and biological mechanisms of reinforcement. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Over the last ten years the basic knowledge of brain structure and function has vastly expanded, and its incorporation into the developmental sciences is now allowing for more complex and heuristic models of human infancy. In a continuation of this effort, in this two-part work I integrate current interdisciplinary data from attachment studies on dyadic affective communications, neuroscience on the early developing right brain, psychophysiology on stress systems, and psychiatry on psychopathogenesis to provide a deeper understanding of the psychoneurobiological mechanisms that underlie infant mental health. In this article I detail the neurobiology of a secure attachment, an exemplar of adaptive infant mental health, and focus upon the primary caregiver's psychobiological regulation of the infant's maturing limbic system, the brain areas specialized for adapting to a rapidly changing environment. The infant's early developing right hemisphere has deep connections into the limbic and autonomic nervous systems and is dominant for the human stress response, and in this manner the attachment relationship facilitates the expansion of the child's coping capcities. This model suggests that adaptive infant mental health can be fundamentally defined as the earliest expression of flexible strategies for coping with the novelty and stress that is inherent in human interactions. ....cotd

Originally posted by Xcalibur254
Myth 3: The Mozart Effect
We've all heard that if you want to make your baby a genius, or that if you listen to Mozart while studying you'll do better on your test. Once again this is rooted in pseudoscience.

The Suggestive Accelerative Learning and Teaching Method uses aspects of suggestion and unusual styles of presenting material to accelerate classroom learning. The essence of this technique is the use of a combination of physical relaxation exercises, mental concentration and suggestive principles to strengthen a person's ego and expand his memory capabilities, and the use of relaxing music while material to be learned is presented dynamically. In experiments, students showed improved attitude, faster learning and better retention with this method. Elements of this learning procedure were first integrated by Dr. George Lozanov of Bulgaria. Three phases of this method are described

nip> At this point in the story a musician by the name of Dan Campbell enters the picture. Without doing any research Campbell has asserted that classical music is pretty much a panacea. It can make you smarter while also making you healthier. Pretty much any benefit you have heard Mozart bestows upon a person was created by Campbell. In fact, not only does Campbell have no scientific evidence to back his claims, the original study has also been unable to be replicated (Pietschnig, Voracek, & Formann, 2010).

Originally posted by Xcalibur254
Myth 4: Subliminal Advertising
nip>
While this may seem like an iron clad endorsement for the existence of subliminal advertising, there is one slight problem. Vicary lied about his results. Subsequent studies that have attempted to replicate Vicary's claim have all failed to produce significant results (Moore, 2008)

Originally posted by Xcalibur254
reply to post by MischeviousElf

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For the first myth, the examples you are bringing up are cases where these people are born with half a brain. During development and the early years of a child's life the brain is very plastic. This means that the remaining hemisphere is able to take on many of the roles of the missing hemisphere. This has been known for a long time. However, if you were to take their current brain and choose a random spot and lesion it, it would cause noticeable to cognitive functioning.

As for the second myth, you are also telling me things I already know. Just because there are "centers" in the brain doesn't mean that these areas control all aspects of that behavior. Take vision for example. I could remove your occipital lobe, which is the center for vision, or I could simply make a small lesion in your somatosensory cortex and also cause you to go blind. The brain processes things in parallel, the only reason there are "centers" is because it helps with efficiency. It does not matter where a neuron is located that determines a person's personality, but how their neuron's are connected.

As for your problem with the Mozart Effect myth. The information you have provided is not supporting the Mozart Effect, it is simply showing that people who are relaxed learn better, which is true. There are so many variables in that learning method that you cannot point to one part of it being what is causing an increase in learning. If the Mozart Effect were real it would have been detected in one of the thousands of studies that have sought to recreate it. All that has been found is that increased arousal may correspond to an increase in spatial-reasoning. So, as long as a song is up-beat, in a major mode, and something the person enjoys you may find an effect, but it is not the Mozart Effect.

Your argument for the final myth is just flat out weak. It is not controlled at all and there are many confounding variables. This could easily lead to skewed results. furthermore, the fact that it's a show means they could have simply edited it to show what they wanted. Like the Mozart Effect, Subliminal Messages are one of those things that have been studied ad infinitum and no one has been able to produce significant results showing it exists. The very fact that its entire existence is based off of a faulty study should prove conclusively enough that it does not exist.

Are "chemical imbalances" real? Psychiatrist David Kaiser commented on psychiatry’s promotion of such imbalances to the public in the December, 1996 Psychiatric Times. "Unfortunately what I also see these days are the casualties of this new biologic psychiatry, as patients often come to me with many years of past treatment. Patients having been diagnosed with "chemical imbalances" despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and that there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like."

Additionally, Kaiser points out that "modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness. This does not stop psychiatry from making essentially unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety disorders, alcoholism, and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin, and that it is only a matter of time until all this is proven".

Kaiser is not alone in his opinion. Psychiatrist Loren Mosher resigned from the APA after 35 years of membership stating that "what we are dealing with here is fashion, politics, and money. This level of intellectual/scientific dishonesty is just too egregious for me to continue to support by my membership". (www.antidepressantsfacts.com...)