It is urgent and important to legalise universal blood transfusion by immune adoption.
It is better to crush a gland instead of an oak.
May 262010
Feb 042009
Thank you Elisha for your question the other night, here is a summary of my response.
A human being cannot function to ‘full capacity’ with the corpus callosum severed, let alone an entire hemisphere removed. This said, more than 60 epileptic children have undergone an operation formerly known as a hemispherectomy, and survived. So depending on your definition of ‘function’ the answer could be both yes and no.
From your initial question, it seems apparent that your understanding of function connotes an indifference in the individual. This would not be the case, as found by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry. Their studies demonstrated that a human being definitely can function with only half a brain, but the functionality would be limited in both cognitive response and relative action.
In summary, a human cannot function to full capacity with only one hemisphere of the brain, but could live with relative difficulties.