The mechanical mind

Always interesting to discover how mechanical the brain and mind really are.

Consider the real-life “Patient 3534”, a woman who had a brain tumour removed at the age of 70, leaving damage to the front of both sides of her brain. According to her husband, who’d known her for 58 years, before her surgery she had a “stern” personality, was highly irritable and grumpy. After the brain surgery, he said that she was “happier, more outgoing, and more talkative than ever before”.

A team, led by psychologist Marcie King at the University of Iowa, found that out of 97 previously healthy patients who had suffered permanent damage to a specific area of their brains, 22 of them showed positive personality changes afterwards. Of the remainder, 54 had negative personality changes and the rest showed no change at all. These observations were based on asking a relative or close friend to rate 26 aspects of their personality before and after the injury.

King and her colleagues scanned the brains of all of the patients. They found that those who showed personality improvements were more likely than the others to have experienced damage to the most frontal regions of the brain, the bilateral frontal polar region, which is important for taking other people’s perspective and decision making.

Also, while the personality changes for some patients were seen as positive, this shouldn’t be taken to downplay the seriousness of brain injury. Complete recovery from severe brain injury is extremely rare, and even when a patient appears fine on the surface, they may experience lasting hidden challenges, such as difficulty learning new information. Brain injury can also leave a person more vulnerable to further conditions like dementia.

And while a positive personality change may seem welcome, remember that our personalities reflect the essence of who we are – it’s likely to be unsettling for patients and their friends and families to adjust to a personal transformation, even a positive one. That said, that a positive personality change is possible, shows that the story of what can happen after brain injury is more complex and surprising than many of us realised.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180108-when-personality-changes-from-bad-to-good