- The neurosurgeon in the Canary Islands, Jesús Martin-Fernández, has found the following way to eliminate brain tumors and not harm the linguistic skills of the multilingual: the intervention with the patient awake and the observation of the areas of each tongue in the brain. He has published his work in the scientific journal Brain Sciences.
The mean mapping during the intervention in multilingual patients: What do we know and where are we going? In Article 6, the following group of neurosurgeons performing surgical interventions are mentioned in their proposal: Jesús Martin-Fernández, Alejandro Fernández Coello and Andreu Gabarrós. This group removes brain tumors while they're awake and bases their research on the cases they've seen in their experience.
Always discovering stimuli of brain areas by performing tests
It's still a fuzzy field how multilingual brains manage diverse languages and whether each language is at the core of the brain. As you've seen, each language occupies a different place in each person's brain, and there are some areas of the brain where there are several languages.
The interventions performed while the patient is awake involve the performance of language-related tests, while providing an electrical stimulus that causes a kind of "virtual injury" in a specific area of the brain. Therefore, if at that moment the patient is misunderstood in that language, they deduct that for that language this brain space is essential.