A 45-year-old Spanish computer programmer, whose name has not been released and is listed only as “AB,” made a special request to the medical team tasked with removing the tumor he discovered he had in his brain.
The patient, who is a keen chess player, appealed to surgeons to perform the operation but without risking losing his advanced chess skills. chess. This appeal served as a challenge for surgeons and led them to map his brain to determine which areas he uses to play the ancient game. AB received a chess Elo rating of 1,950, which refers to the level of counters, experts and top players.
AB reported headaches without cognitive impairment and was diagnosed with invasive glioblastoma. He was told he would need surgery to cut it out. His only request. According to an article that was published In the “Cortex” review, the patient had only one request, the desire to maintain his chess skills post-operatively.
A few weeks before the operation, Andreu Gabbaros, head of neurosurgery at Bellvitge University Hospital in Spain, accepted the challenge of writing a protocol to preserve a patient’s ability to play chess while having a tumor removed. “We had a little bit of time to prepare everything,” said Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona who agreed to try to find a way to fulfill AB’s request.
The method and the result
Gabbaros performed a type of scan known as electrical stimulation mapping. Scans taken while the patient discussed chess moves revealed the areas functional for involvement in the game, finding that some of them were close to the “left parietal lobe lesion” that doctors would try to remove.
During the operation, AB was kept awake after a piece of his skull was removed to expose his left parietal lobe. He was given questions and tasks while an electrode was applied to parts of his brain to inhibit activity in those areas.
Doctors found that when activity was limited to the supramarginal area of the gyrus, AB was no longer able to identify chess moves, marking it as a key area to preserve. After the operation, AB experienced language and motor difficulties due to a complication caused by bleeding in the brain, making it impossible for him to test his chess skills a week after the procedure.
When the tests were performed four months later, AB was still playing chess, but his responses were slightly slower on some of the more complex tasks. The study concluded: “We have developed a protocol to preserve as much as possible the chess-playing ability in a patient diagnosed with a brain tumor in the left parietal region. The patient maintained his chess performance after surgery, which was demonstrated through our experimental work and by the maintenance of his self-reported professional chess Elo score of 1,950.
The surgery had consequences, however, with the study finding that AB was left with “slight impairment in attention, working memory, mental flexibility and verbal comprehension.”
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