Surgeons Can Destroy Brain Tissue Without Observable Side Effects, Neurosurgeon Claims

What was said

"You can actually traverse parts of the brain without having any adverse effects on patients' function, at least that you can test. But you can also destroy small parts of the brain. We're talking 3 or 4 millimeters in size. These little ablations can be really helpful for patients, but have no obvious side effects that we can tell, perhaps after a short recovery from surgery."

Dr. Halpern revealed that neurosurgeons can safely ablate small regions of brain tissue—3-4 millimeters in size—with apparently no detectable functional consequences. He compared certain brain regions to an appendix, suggesting some areas may be safe to destroy entirely. This challenges common assumptions about brain tissue being uniformly critical and raises questions about brain redundancy.