Customer Reviews

Half a Brain is Enough: The Story of Nico (Cambridge Studies in Cognitive and Perceptual Development)

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This is a fascinating contribution to understanding human brain functioning. Nico undergoes a hemispherectomy (removal of his right hemisphere) due to extreme epilepsy.
What follows is the amazing journey of Nico, through kinder garden, schooling, and socialization. Nico conveys the image of which the author so profoundly believes, that his left hemisphere isn't damaged, it's a brain it itself.
By reading this book, you'll realize that Nico has nearly no deficits resulting from his hemispherectomy. His left visual field is absent (due to the left eye normally transmitting information to the right - in this case absent - hemisphere. He also suffers from minor physical disability in his right limbs. Nonetheless, Nico performs or outperforms his peers when it comes to reasoning and intelligence, with the only deficit being in drawing.
It would do injustice to the author if it weren't mentioned about how he strongly believes in technology improving education for both the general public and especially handicapped children. By using a laptop Nico was able to further his verbal and spatial education regardless of his drawing and handwriting deficit.
Antonio M. Battro deserves credit and reading for this extremely concise and informative authoritative introduction to hemispherectomy & brain research in general.

Battro's insightful, inspirational, and sensitive study of a young boy whose functional hemispherectomy has left him with only a functioning left side of his brain is a challenge to many preconceptions regarding the limitations of the human brain and its adaptability. The successful adaptations made by the subject of the book, Nico, with the aid of computer technology to succeed in a regular academic environment will call into question standard lesion analysis in projecting the capabilities and potential of others who have undergone this surgery.

Half A Brain Is Enough is a provocative story about a young eight year old boy named Nico, who at the age of three years old, had half of his brain functionally and anatomically removed. What follows is a remarkable boy's journey through healing, learning, and development.

Nico suffered from severe and intractable epilepsy, which began at age two. His seizures were devastating and constant, filled with loss of consciousness, fear, and concern over his young developing brain and body. A decision was made to perform a critical brain surgery to excise his entire right hemisphere. Hemispherectomies are only performed on the very young due to the plastic nature of the brain, with the hope that the brain, and the person, can fully recover from the drastic surgery. Antonio Battro M.D., a clinical physician and cognitive psychologist that has pioneered the `neuroeducation' field, first received Nico at five years of age, and this book documents the next three years. Battro maps Nico's "neuroeducation" with warmth and compassion in a book that is partially a case history and partially a study of neuronal development. Half A Brain Is Enough is filled with intricate details about Nico's abilities, as well as the use of technology in education. Throughout the book it is evident that Battro is "delighted with Nico's progress and grateful for the opportunity to help him and learn with him."

Nico entered a traditional school with his peers, and for the most part, kept up with the normal pace of his classes. At the age of writing (eight years old), Nico had progressed in each year of school at the pace of his classmates, including some higher rankings in verbal and language skills. Battro regularly measured Nico using various Jean Piaget "Piagetian" cognitive developmental tests, and reviewed his school performance compared to his peers. In many senses, Nico appears to be an average boy in school; he enjoys music, has memorized several songs in Spanish, his native tongue, and in English. He performs quite well in verbal tasks (orally and written) and mathematics, but struggles with most tasks associated with handwriting and drawing. Around the age of six, a computer was introduced as an "informational prostheses", which shot Nico's drawing and handwriting, via typing, skills to levels as high as anyone in his class. By the age of eight he had discovered the virtues computer programming and e-mail, including sending a message to one of Battro's research colleagues at Harvard! Nico suffers from left hemianopia, he cannot see his left visual field, due to his lack of right hemisphere. In a normal brain the left eye transfers a large portion of information to the right hemisphere via the optic nerve, tract and radiations to the right primary visual cortex in the right occipital lobe. Consequently, Nico is forced to constantly move his eyes or head to derive binocular depth perception or focus on a target.

Battro attributes Nico's intellectual capabilities to "compensatory analysis" of the brain i.e. the brain's properties of plasticity. The brain was hemispherectomized at such an early age that, in Battro's view, it functionally transformed and rebuilt the half brain into a whole brain. The left hemisphere assumed the functions of both hemispheres, leaving the question, is Nico's brain simply more efficient? However, is there subsequently a worry of adequate neural space and "neural crowding" in the remaining hemisphere? Gifted brains are (partially) categorized as using the same amount of energy, in the form of glucose, to perform greater mental tasks than an average brain. In this case, would Nico's brain be considered gifted? Can a half-brained child achieve a gifted level of intelligence? Battro poses many similar questions and constantly suggests neurological studies and the need to monitor and quantify hemispherectomized individuals from childhood to adulthood. Many of his questions are currently unanswerable, but he looks to future discoveries and innovations in science to answer these unknowns.

Battro sometimes comes across as too much of a `cheerleader' for Nico, boasting of his mental or academic achievements. The reader may question the accomplishments of the boy, as Battro definitely writes from a friend-perspective of Nico, and very few ill statements. However, the data presented supports Nico's positive development, and on paper Nico has made the advancements and accomplishments expected of his age, but the reader must be exploratory. This book is not written to be overly difficult to understand technically or conceptually, but a basic comprehension of neuroscience is useful.

Finally, Battro reminds us that "we are prone to providing linear solutions to non-linear problems". Despite having half a brain quantitatively, Nico has not performed in `half' a manner. We should recall that "...brainpower cannot be identified with a neuron count," and Nico is no exception. This book provides a unique look at the growth of a half-brained child during critical times from Battro's encounters from five years old through eight years old.