14 DAY TRIAL // For as long as she can remember, Cole Cohen of Portland, Oregon, has been having trouble telling the time, remembering things, and basically getting around or interacting with others.
She now knows why, unlike regular people, she has to make an extra effort to function: she has a hole whose size is comparable to that of a lemon in her brain, in the parietal lobe.
As revealed in the MRI image available below, this hole in the young woman's brain is shaped like a lopsided heart. Cole Cohen's neurologist was as shocked to learn about it as the woman herself.
Cole Cohen was at long last diagnosed at the age of 26
In her recently published memoir, “Head Case: My Brain and Other Wonders,” Cole Cohen writes that, when she was young, doctors wrongly diagnosed her with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and even prescribed her medication.
Later on, in her 20s, she had some behavioral issues and was prescribed drugs developed to treat anxiety, insomnia, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Even so, she never felt right.
It wasn't until the age of 26 that the young woman learned that the reason she was having trouble concentrating and remembering things was that her brain's anatomy was seriously off.
“We are all staring dumbly at the image on the screen until Dr. Volt [her neurologist] begins to speak. ‘So, this is your brain... and this’ - he points with a pencil to the black spot - ‘is a hole,’” Cole Cohen remembers the moment she was handed her diagnosis.
In some other brain region, the hole could have killed her
Apparently, it was a stroke of luck that this hole filled with fluid formed in young Cole Cohen's parietal lobe and not in some other region of her brain, DM explains.
The neurologist who diagnosed the woman's condition says that, if in the adjacent frontal lobe, the hole would have left Cole Cohen seriously disabled. It might have even killed her.
Instead, the abnormality only affected the woman's perception of space and her ability to process numbers. It's unclear whether the hole also had a direct effect on her behavioral problems.
Having graduated from the California Institute of the Arts, Cole Cohen now lives alone in Santa Barbara. She is working closely with a therapist to teach her brain to overcome the abnormality and swiftly react to stimuli.
