Neuroscience owes much to scientists studying the brains of people with horribly injured cortices. One such case is the case of “Patient M”, who began seeing the world in an upside down way after being shot in the head during the Spanish Civil War.
Until this case, neurologists believed that the brain consisted of distinct regions separated by sharp boundaries with little or no overlap. However, Patient M’s crushed injured brain opposed the idea, prompting a doctor named Justo Gonzalo Rodríguez-Leal to develop a new theory of brain dynamics.
The Spanish Civil War was a brutal struggle that gripped the country from 1936 to 1939, culminating in the Nationalists’ victory over the Republicans and the establishment of a dictatorship under Francisco Franco. Fighting for the Republicans, Patient M was 25 years old when he was shot in the head on a battlefield in Valencia, Levante, in May 1938.
Awakening from a coma two weeks later, the wounded soldier reported that he had no vision in his left eye and only a slight glint in his right eye. The man, who had two knotty holes in his skull where the bullet went in and out, recovered without surgery or any special care, causing the doctors to be surprised.
While observing Patient M over the next 50 years, Rodriguez-Leal described a highly confusing set of symptoms. For example, in addition to seeing everything in threes, the man also saw colors “separated” from objects.
Justo Gonzalo Rodriguez-LealOne of the most interesting findings, however, was that Patient M saw everything as if it had been turned upside down. Rodríguez-Leal highlighted the situation in his book Cerebral Dynamics, explaining that the war veteran “found his abnormalities strange when he saw, for example, men working upside down on a pier.”
Hearing and touch are also reversed
This sensory reversal also applied to the patient’s senses of hearing and touch, and the patient’s brain felt as if this information was coming from the other direction. Despite this severe illness, the patient was able to continue with his life with very few problems. Rodríguez-Leal attributes this to the involuntary development of coping strategies, such as selective attention to intense stimuli.
The bullet appeared to have affected the left parieto-occipital region of Patient M’s brain, the doctor said in a statement to Cerebral Dynamics. Observing the consequences of this injury, Rodríguez-Leal suggested that the brain may not have been divided into different regions, contrary to popular belief.
Based on the way the wound obscures the victim’s senses, he suggested that neurological functions could be organized into gradients spanning the entire cortex, with distinct regions separated by gradual transitions.
Rodríguez-Leal’s daughter, Isabel Gonzalo, stated in an interview with El Pais that Patient M, whose identity was never revealed, lived a long and healthy life, passing away in the late 1990s. Despite surviving 60 years in his inverted world, the ex-soldier apparently was largely undisturbed by his idiosyncrasy.
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