Neuroscientists have long clashed over a critical question: Can the human brain compensate for the loss of a critical hub like the speech area? If so, how? Epilepsy surgery led by a team at the University of Iowa recently allowed researchers a close look at the live process in real time.

Two patients were having the front part of a temporal lobe — which decodes the meaning of language — removed so that surgeons could remove the deeper parts of the brain that were causing their debilitating seizures. The neurosurgery teams followed the usual procedure of asking these patients to do speech and language tasks in the operating room while electrodes were implanted. They would record data from parts of the brain near and far from the planned removal of the anterior temporal lobe. These recordings are done to try to limit the surgery’s impact on speech and language abilities.

But there was one difference: Instead of just removing the electrodes just before the surgery began, the teams either left them in place or replaced them in the same positions immediately afterward. That way, they cold get an early look at the brain’s response, both near to and far from the site of surgery.

So what did they find? The impact was widespread but the brain immediately began to compensate:

The rapid impact on the speech and language processing regions well removed from the surgical treatment site was surprising, but what was even more surprising was how the brain was working to compensate, albeit incompletely within this short timeframe,” says [Christopher] Petkov, who also holds an appointment at Newcastle University Medical School in the UK.

University of Iowa Health Care. “What happens when the brain loses a hub?.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 December 2023 The paper is open access.

The team judges that, in a sense, both sides are right. Specific brain hubs are necessary for normal brain processing but the brain naturally seeks to compensate for losses, almost immediately. The researchers see the immediate impact and rapid attempt to compensate as support for a brain theory proposed by Professor Karl Friston at University College London:

… any self-organizing system at equilibrium works towards orderliness by minimizing its free energy, a resistance of the universal tendency towards disorder. These neurobiological results following human brain hub disconnection were consistent with several predictions of this and related neurobiological theories, showing how the brain works to try to regain order after the loss of one of its hubs.

University of Iowa, “… loses a hub?”

Just why life, including brains, should have an inherent tendency to seek — and power to impose order in a universe with an inherent tendency to disorder is one of the great philosophical questions. But people coping with brain damage should be heartened by these results.

You may also wish to read: Woman missing her brain’s language lobe pens New York Times piece. Helen Santoro’s parents were told she would “never speak and would need to be institutionalized.” She became a science writer instead. Santoro discovered that she was one of a number of people who live normal lives despite the absence of significant parts of their brains.