braggin'

My lab and boss got mentioned in the July 3rd New Yorker! I was reading it last night and I freaked when I read it. It's in an article on hemispherectomy, when they remove an entire hemisphere of the brain to help people with severe seizure disorder. We don't have anything to do with that, but we do investigate brain area plasticity and reorganization, which is why young people can recover from this surgery. Here's the quote, with my bosses name abbreviated so no one can google it, read the article for yourself here.

In another experiment, LK, a professor of psychology at the University of California, removed large pieces of the brains of newborn marsupials. Once the marsupials became adult, she examined the brains again and found that they had organized themselves in such a way that the visual, auditory, and other somatosensory areas were all in the same relative positions that they would occupy in a normal brain, but they were smaller, commensurate with the total space available.