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Just how tough are our brains?

Brains being our centres of personality, vision, hearing, motor control, consciousness and, in short, everything that makes us functioning and human, there is a reason why they are encased in very hard bone. And why it is reasonable to assume that breaching that bone is catastrophic. But not always. Margret Wegner discovered this when, aged four, she tripped and fell on to a pencil she was holding — and it passed through her cheek into her brain. Last weekend, 55 yea rs and the odd headache later, she had it removed by surgeons in Berlin. Her experience isn’t unprecedented; earlier this year a 77-year-old Chinese woman, Jin Guangying, had a rusty bullet removed from her head. It had been there ever since a Japanese patrol had fired at her when she was 13.

A couple of years ago, Leonard Woronowicz, a retired Polish teacher, popped round to the hospital to get some headache pills. He had fallen in his kitchen a few days earlier, so doctors x-rayed him to see whether he had cracked his skull. They found a 12cm blade within it.

Are there empty areas of the brain in which foreign objects might find a berth? “No, I don’t think you can say that,” says Keyoumars Ashkan, a neurosurgeon at King’s College Hospital, in London. “There are areas that we don’t know the function of very well as yet.” What is true is that the brain can “feel for the rest of the body, but when it comes to itself, it has no sensation of pain. That’s why, for, example, I do a lot of awake operations. Once I’m inside the patient’s brain I can operate without causing pain to them.”

As for those who have spent decades harbouring alien objects, “there are lots of areas of the brain which are critical for everyday function, those that make you see, walk, talk, breathe, etc,” says Dr. Ashkan. But “there are also areas that are less eloquent, so the function is less clearly defined. If the injury was to those areas, the injury may well be compatible with a near-normal life.” — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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