This means that the brain’s circuits are malleable, flexible, pliable… Under the influence of learning, they literally change shape, a bit like a face or… a buttock under a surgeon’s scalpel. plastic . In reality, each nerve cell, each “neuron” is a small independent animal. During the second trimester of pregnancy, in the fetal brain, neurons migrate, they literally swim or climb on top of each other to reach their final position. And then, their branches continue to wiggle constantly and, as they learn, grow or shrink.
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This plasticity allows the brain to adapt to unexpected situations
Exactly. I had the chance to study an extraordinary example when I met Nico, a young Spaniard in his twenties who is full of talent: a member of the Spanish fencing team, he is also an excellent painter. During a visit to the Musée d’Orsay, he made a superb copy of a Monet painting in a few hours. And he does all this with… just one hemisphere, just half a brain! Indeed, when he was very young, Nico suffered from severe epilepsy and to cure him, at the age of three, surgeons decided to remove practically his entire right hemisphere. Thus**, he did his entire schooling with only his left hemisphere – and this in no way prevented him from learning to read, write, paint, or get his baccalaureate.** When Nico came to the laboratory, at NeuroSpin, and we scanned him with our MRI, we observed that practically all the usual circuits were present, vision, language, calculation… they were simply all crammed into a single hemisphere, the left.
