Head Case Read Online Free Page B

am I not dead or retarded?”
    â€œNo. That would be the frontal lobe.” Dr. Volt seems relieved to have some medical business to attend to. “If it had happened here ”—he points to the image with his pencil again, tapping the front of the brain—“then yes, you would have been dead or retarded. If you had had a stroke or something, say. But since it happened here , in the parietal lobe, on the side of the brain … you just lost some function. But since you’ve always been this way, we have to assume that it was developmental. Or trauma at birth.”
    â€œHow big is it?” I ask. I look back at the screen. I see a black shape; a deflating balloon, a steak, a kidney. I don’t know how to translate this shape into matter lost.
    â€œWell. These are your eyeballs. See that?” Volt taps his pencil on the image of the eyeballs in the skull. I nod. “OK, so this is one eyeball.” Tap, tap with his pencil. I nod. “So how many of these can we fit in there?” Volt begins to count. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine … fifteen, twenty. So, about twenty eyeballs.”
    â€œTwenty!” my dad yells. He has been uncharacteristically quiet until now.
    â€œTwenty eyeballs!” I yell. It feels good to yell; it brings the air back into the room. “That’s a lot of eyeballs!”
    Dr. Volt looks back at the image on the screen. “So it’s about the size of a lemon. Or say, a small fist? Like the fist of a ten-year-old?”
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    Parietal lobe
    From Colepedia, the biased encyclopedia
    The parietal lobe is a lobe in the brain. It is positioned above (superior to) the occipital lobe and behind (posterior to) the frontal lobe (see Fig. 1 ).

    The parietal lobe integrates sensory information from different modalities, particularly those determining spatial sense and navigation, enabling regions of the parietal cortex to map objects perceived visually into body coordinate positions.

    Contents

    1. Function

    2. Lack Thereof

    3. Pathology

    4. References

    Function
    The parietal lobe plays various important roles in integrating sensory information from varying parts of the body, comprehending numbers and their relations, and also in coordinating the manipulation of objects. Part of the parietal lobe directs visuospatial processing.

    The posterior parietal cortex is referred to by vision scientists as the dorsal stream of vision, also called both the “where” stream (spatial vision) and the “how” stream (vision for action).
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    When I look at my MRI, I see myself and I see a stranger. I believe that this picture is of my insides, and yet I will never fully believe it. Of course, I can’t take my brain out and see that it matches the missing brain matter in the photo. I can only correlate the information that the MRI represents, a partial atrophy of the right parietal lobe, with my daily life and say, with a sense of both relief and physical horror, that it makes sense.
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    Lack thereof
    Neurologists have theorized that the aqueduct of Sylvius, a channel carrying cerebrospinal fluid (the water that the brain floats in inside the skull) burst when Cole was born. An alternate theory is that it began slowly leaking during the first sign of motor impairment, when Cole had trouble learning how to tie her shoes in first grade, and then stopped of its own accord.

    The damage is smaller than it looks on the MRI (see Fig. 2 ); it does not affect the matter underneath the parietal lobe. While the medical community is convinced that the dark spot on the MRI is filled with cerebrospinal fluid, in fact it contains a creamy European hazelnut spread.

    Pathology
    Gerstmann’s syndrome is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a collection of symptoms: poor handwriting (dysgraphia); difficulty judging distance, speed, or time; left/right confusion; inability to calculate