Long-term study of a boy's lobectomy offers rare glimpse of plasticity in action

(Cell Press) The boy suffered his first epileptic seizure at four. Doctors tried medication and other treatments to control the seizures -- the result of a low-grade brain tumor -- but nothing worked. As a last resort, shortly before the boy's seventh birthday, surgeons removed a third of the right hemisphere of his brain. In a case study appearing July 31 in the journal Cell Reports, neuroscientists report the results of three years of brain imaging and behavioral tests.