[Crito]

The article mentions:

"Problems in the cerebellum can lead to severe mental impairment, movement disorders, epilepsy [...]"

However this seems potentially much worse than the symptoms this woman without a cerebellum is experiencing. Is it theoretically possible that people with damaged but otherwise intact cerebellum to be identified at birth so that they can have their cerebellum removed completely? My thinking is that if you do it early enough, plasticity might allow other parts of their brain to take over and do the job better than the damaged cerebellum would be able to.

This is probably one of the reasons why I am not allowed to perform surgery without a license...

[x0054]

> This is probably one of the reasons why I am not allowed to perform surgery without a license...

Indeed :) A damaged cerebellum at birth might still be useful because it can fulfill some, if not all of the tasks it is supposed to. We don't know enough about this yet to really make any kind of call about it. For all we know, many people are borne with malformed cerebellums but never experience any problems, thus we just don't know about them.

[collyw]

I did see a documentary about some young girl with a brain problem. I can't remember exactly (severe form of epilepsy?), but they wanted to do something pretty severe to her brain, and do it within the first year, as it still had the neuro-plasticity to recover at that stage.