A new investigation has brought out of oblivion the strange case of "patient M": a young soldier who was wounded during the Spanish Civil War and literally turned the world upside down.
The young man was 25 years old when in the spring of 1938 on the battlefield, a bullet, most likely a shot from the Francoist side, pierced his head. Although he did not kill him.
When he regained consciousness two weeks later, that Republican soldier had undergone an astonishing change: under certain conditions he saw the world upside down.
The soldier was treated in a military hospital by the doctor named Justo Gonzalo, then 28 years old, who would eventually become one of the eminent medical specialists in brain functions.
Gonzalo found that the projectile had partially destroyed the convolutions of his cerebral cortex in the left parietooccipital region. The wounded, however, miraculously survived without the need for special operations or care.
The unusual case allowed Gonzalo, who was born in Barcelona in 1910, to delve into and study the functioning of the human brain. I thought I could give him a lot of information. Something he ended up checking.
The doctor and patient M, as Gonzalo called him, survived the war and continued to see each other for almost half a century, until the death of the renowned neurologist in 1986.
Now, the researcher's daughter, Isabel, has dusted off her father's archives — boxes with hundreds of documents and photographs — to rediscover that case with neuropsychologist Alberto García Molina.
According to the newspaper El País, Gonzalo was a disruptive in his field at a time when the scientific community was divided between those who saw the brain as a whole and those who drew rigid borders between brain regions.
Gonzalo postulated an intermediate hypothesis with patient M as the cornerstone: the theory of brain dynamics, according to which the organ has its functions distributed in gradients, with gradual transitions.
The patient's ability to adapt was astounding, as described by the doctor in his book Brain Dynamics, published between 1945 and 1950. M "had been surprised by his abnormalities, for example, seeing men working upside down on a scaffold."
"In general, it turns out that the disturbances happen for the wounded themselves completely or almost unnoticed and, even then, when they are discovered, they do not seem to worry, rather they consider them as something temporary that does not affect or compromise their daily lives," the doctor was surprised. M himself downplayed his symptoms: "These are things that sometimes get in my sight."
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