Brain surgery sparing chess skills by giving patient chess tasks during surgery!

A team of surgeons recently succeeded in removing a 45-year-old patient’s highly invasive brain tumor, a glioblastoma, while also sparing areas linked to his chess-playing skills! The patient had asked the surgeon to develop an approach that would not damage the patient’s chess rating. Four months post-surgery, the patient was somewhat slower with some complex tasks during a chess test, but generally played well. He later reported that he had maintained his coveted chess-playing rating.

How they did it: The surgeons probed for important tissue to conserve by applying a mild electrical jolt to block signals in specific locations while the patient was awake. During each application, they asked the patient to evaluate possible moves in a display of a chess board. The surgeons indentified a spot in the patient’s supramarginal gyrus—an area linked to language, memory and other processing rules—that was involved in his ability to determine if a piece’s next move in a game-in-progress was permissible. The team is writing up a similar brain surgery success in conserving computer programming skills.

The new work goes further than past efforts by not simply “throwing tasks” at a patient, such as playing the violin or singing. “Breaking down tasks into functions (visual search, rule retrieval and checkmating) is essential to understand what exactly electrical stimulation does during surgery.

source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/

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