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The Brain That Remade Itself

Andrew Zaleski
OneZero
Published in
13 min readFeb 27, 2019

Credit: iLexx/Getty Images

II put my hand on a bishop and slide it several squares before moving it back. “Should I move a different piece instead?” I wonder to myself.

“You have to move that piece if you’ve touched it,” my opponent says, flashing a wry grin.

Fine. I move the bishop. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me now — I’m going to lose a game of chess to a 12-year-old.

My opponent is Tanner Collins, a seventh-grade student growing up in a Pittsburgh suburb. Besides playing chess, Collins likes building with Legos. One such set, a replica of Hogwarts Castle from the Harry Potter books, is displayed on a hutch in the dining room of his parents’ house. He points out to me a critical flaw in the design: The back of the castle isn’t closed off. “If you turn it around,” he says, “the whole side is open. That’s dumb.”

Tanner Collins, Credit: Courtesy of Nicole Collins

Though Collins is not dissimilar from many kids his age, there is something that makes him unlike most 12-year-olds in the United States, if not the world: He’s missing one-sixth of…

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OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

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It’s a moving story, and I would not want to minimize Collins’ achievements or happiness; but there is an aspect of this that is unsettling and misleading. We have known forever about the plasticity of brains, but what we are still lousy about is…

Mr. Zaleski refers to Collin’s missing portion of brain, as 1/6th, 15% 1/3d and “his now largely missing right side.” None of those quantities, whether by weight or volume, are equivalent. I hate to be picky about an otherwise interesting article…

“ The one exception is the loss of peripheral vision in his left eye. Though this means Collins will never legally be able to drive”
Good Lord… Seriously? There are hundreds of thousands of people like myself with complete lack of left eye vision who…