Three-armed baby amputated

[asterroc]

In follow-up to this story, doctors chopped off one of the baby's arms. So now we have a normal-looking person with a dysfunctional left arm. Absolutely wonderful.

Comments

[sammka.livejournal.com]

It has nothing to do with feeling as much pain as an adult or remembering things, but rather to the structure of the brain itself. There is TONS of literature about adult amputees feeling phantom pain for years, or for their entire lives, after the amputation of the limb. That is because their brains are hard-wired to believe that the limb is there, and cannot be re-wired anymore.

Babies, on the other hand, have incredibly plastic brains. Which means that after the initial pain and healing process of the surgery, the baby will not be left with a whole section of his brain that is devoted to controlling that arm and that is constantly alarmed when it doesn't receive neural signals from the arm. The brain will simply rewire itself as if that third arm was never there.

There are tons of examples of things that can be done to babies and not to adults because of brain plasticity differences. For instance, in some cases, half of the entire brain of a baby has been removed for medical reasons, and the child has developed relatively normally. You cannot remove half an adult's brain and expect that adult to ever function normally. Also, scientists have found that 'swapping' the visual nerves and auditory nerves of baby ferrets has resulted in the baby ferrets that saw and heard just as well as any other ferret. Adult ferrets would be simply confused and unable to adapt.