This paper makes a lot of sense. As a doc, I've seen literally several hundred patients with portions of their brain removed or damaged, some of them very extensive (>20% of the brain). Yet many are completely asymptomatic, and many others regain full function and memory with time and physical therapy. It's led me to conclude that the function of the brain isn't tied 1:1 to the structure of the brain as we had all been taught.
Couldn't it be that the brain has an extremely good redundancy setup? Memories stored in several parts of the brain, and recoverable if a part gets damaged?
There are many people who did have permanent memory loss from various TBI (traumatic brain injury), especially gunshot wounds, and many who recovered theirs slowly.
Kind of like restoring data from an archive, or rebuilding a RAID array, as an analogy.
As five-year survival rate has been improved during cancer patients, we have seen more and more patients with multiple brain tumors. Recently we got awarded a NIH grant on a multi brain tumor SRS treatment platform. This might not be directly related with surgery of removal portion of the brain, but definitely SRS will act just like surgery (but with radiation).
This month we are actually asked by NIH to have an interview program to talk with people who are interested in SRS, so in case you are interested in our project, you could schedule a 20-mins quick meeting with me at your convenience:
I think it's also interesting to figure out what exactly is memory. I don't know anything about medical research but my gut feeling is that memory is more of a "feeling" than concrete snapshots such as computer memory.
