As if school weren't hard enough this semester, I learned today that I have little choice other than to keep my currently perfect attendance record intact for my neurolinguistics class at the very least. You see, the esteemed Professor Emeritus who teaches the class surprised us all with another one of those lovely little five-minute exams he likes to drop at the beginning of some class periods. What made this one scarier than the previous ones was the fact that he issued it completely without warning, and only one class after another quiz. That, together with the fact that he is ruthless with regard to people missing tests by being all of five minutes late, means that not only can I not miss any days this semester, I cannot afford even to be a bit late to any classes. Wow. This after I made a living out of skipping ASIA 211 last semester.
The test itself wasn't a bed of roses, either. We were given five minutes to diagnose four cases of aphasia, complete with reasons for our answers. Yeah, I got them all, but there was at least some luck involved.
The other earthshattering event of the day was discovering that I am not yet done with the most gruesome breakfast table conversation I can remember at any point in my life. My friend Tamar decided to bring up a discussion of her friend who recently had brain surgery, getting a tumor and 1/3 of a lobe in the left hemisphere removed. The funny thing was that after the surgery, an image showed that her language faculties had, at some point, moved to the right side of her brain and established themselves there. This is what drew my interest, since that sort of thing doesn't tend to happen in 19-year-old people, though it is more likely in girls. After further inquiry, I was able to find out that the same friend had had another tumor removed at a much younger age, leaving me to believe that the shift occurred earlier in life and thus the results of the brain image weren't all that impressive (though the fact that her language ability seemed to increase after the surgery is still impressive). There is a slight (considerably less than one in twenty) chance that the shift was from birth, since a small percentage of left-handed individuals have language faculties in their right hemispheres, but I doubt that is the case here. The question is whether the second tumor had been benign or whether the first had caused the shift.
This all sounds innocent until I add that Tamar steered the discussion into more graphic terms, dealing mainly with the missing third of one of the left cortical lobes. It almost put me off my breakfast. Then, of course, I had to mention the case to my professor. He now wants to discuss the case in the future. Why oh why do the most disturbing topics tend to come up again and again, like reruns of Alf?