A 24-year-old woman walked into a Chinese hospital with some relatively routine complaints. She said she had been feeling dizzy, and had been nauseous and vomiting for a month. But some of her problems were more peculiar: For more than 20 years, she said, she had been unable to walk steadily. "According to her mother, she was 4 years old before she could stand unassisted, and did not begin to walk unassisted until the age of 7," her doctors wrote, in the journalBrain.
"She never ran or jumped. Her speech was not intelligible until 6 years of age and she did not enter school." As an adult, her language was mostly normal, though her speech showed a "mild voice tremor with slurred pronunciation." At 24, she had "mild mental retardation," and was married with a daughter, living a relatively ordinary life. But when the doctors scanned her brain, they were stunned: Near the back of her brain,…
