"The Woman With a Hole in Her Brain"

The article that we were tasked with reading, "The Woman With a Hole in Her Brain", is about a recent discovery of a woman in China who has lived without a cerebellum in her brain for 24 years, and only suffered from minor complications and defects as a result. Instead of having a cerebellum as she should at the near the base of her head, cerebral spinal fluid had filled in the gap, and she became one of 9 people to have been miraculously able to survive a entirely without their cerebellum, and to adulthood nevertheless. The uniqueness of this discovery only further shows how adaptable the brain is; despite missing over 50% of the neurons a normal person would from her lack of a cerebellum, she has still managed to survive to the age of 24 and live to tell the tale. The cerebellum is often credited with controlling voluntary movement and balance, which may explain her unsteady grasp on walking and the dizziness and nausea that sent her to the hospital, but the comparable negligence of these problems only proves how elastic the brain can be when taking over for a missing part. This relates to the transfer of functions of another organ in our body, the spleen, which when damaged or removed, can easily pass the baton of salvaging, storing, and repurposing blood to red bone marrow or the liver.

If one's parietal lobe was missing instead of their cerebellum, there would obviously be very different symptoms than the ones that the woman described in the article had. The parietal lobe of our cerebral cortex is in charge of sensations felt by the body, and controls the reactions that we have to our environment. Inside the parietal zone, there is a vital part of our brain called the somatosensory cortex, which receives sensory input from the sensory nerves located all across the body, and on the other side of it, the motor cortex outputs motor nerves to control actions taken in response to the sensory input. I highly doubt a person would be able to survive, or at least die extremely early into their lifetime, without a parietal lobe, because without the neurons of the somatosensory cortex, no sense of touch would be able to protect us from the dangers of the outside world, and the possibility of one's motor cortex(that controls how our body reacts) being damaged would also be extremely high. People without a parietal lobe would be unable to process physical feeling whatsoever, and that is something that most likely cannot be replaced or take over by one of there other lobes or parts of the brain.