This is an amazing story:
The experts were baffled by the 10-year-old girl who was born missing the right side of her brain, whose job it is to map the left field of vision.
[...]
Scans on the girl showed that the retinal nerve fibres carrying visual information from the back of the eye which should have gone to the right hemisphere of the brain diverted to the left.
Dr Lars Muckli, of the university’s Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, working with German colleagues from Frankfurt, said: “The brain has amazing plasticity but we were quite astonished to see just how well the single hemisphere of the brain in this girl has adapted to compensate for the missing half.
“Despite lacking one hemisphere, the girl has normal psychological function and is perfectly capable of living a normal and fulfilling life. She is witty, charming and intelligent.”
(Source)
Neuroplasticity (wiki) is surely one of the premier scientific discoveries of our generation, and stories like these continually floor me.
