I've Got Half a Mind...
If you think you’ve had a bad day at work spare a thought for 14 year old Ahad Israfil. In 1987 his boss knocked a gun to the ground, shooting Ahad in the head and blowing his brains out. A bad day at work certainly, but remarkably, not a terminal day at work. Though he lost the entire right hemisphere of his brain, Ahad survived and recovered well enough to earn an honours degree at his local college not to mention appearing in several TV documentaries. Photo: Meo / Pexels Ahad was the unwitting recipient of an instant hemispherectomy. A surgical procedure where one hemisphere of the brain is surgically removed and the resulting space filled with silicone. This is not to be confused with a callosotomy. That slightly less drastic procedure just cuts the corpus callossum – the bundle of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. This results in both halves of the brain perceiving, thinking and sometimes acting independently as they respond differently to information rec...