How would you react if the doctor told you that your brain is missing a very important section? It turned out that one Chinese girl for 24 years had no idea about such an important deficiency in her body.
Chinese doctors were shocked to see the missing cerebellum in the brain scans of one of the patients. A 24-year-old girl came to the clinic with complaints of severe nausea and vomiting. The results of the survey surprised even experienced specialists, who were sure that they had seen everything in their lives.
The cerebellum, also called the "small brain", is responsible for the coordination of movements, regulation of balance and muscle tone, therefore it is a vital part of the brain for humans. The cerebellum is located behind the medulla oblongata and the pons varoli, under the occipital lobes of the cerebral hemispheres. Despite the fact that the cerebellum is associated with the cerebral cortex, its activity is not controlled by human consciousness.
As it turned out, this girl began to walk only at the age of four, and over the next 20 years she did not learn to walk steadily enough, since she did not have enough balance for this, for which the cerebellum was to be responsible. Nevertheless, she adapted to such a lack of her body and did not even attach any importance to the lack of a sense of balance.
"CT and MRI studies did not reveal even the slightest remnants of cerebellar tissue, which confirms its initial and complete absence," the doctors wrote in their report to the journal Brain.
People with cerebellar injuries, as a rule, experience serious difficulties with coordination and movements, so the doctors were surprised that the girl, in the complete absence of this part of the brain, only experienced mild problems with balance and some dysfunction. Researchers are convinced that in childhood, the patient's brain adapted to its functional deficiency as flexibly as possible and compensated for one another as soon as it could, which directly affected the speech apparatus.
"When a person is born with an abnormality or loses part of their brain at an early age, the rest of the brain tries to compensate for the loss at the expense of other parts of it."
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This is not the first time that a person has been found to have a lack of a cerebellum. There were eight similar situations in the history of medicine, but mostly such shortcomings were found in newborn children, most of whom could not survive. And a Chinese girl lived without a part of her brain for 24 years before doctors explained to her why she suffered from imbalance all her life.