Brainstorming (heh, heh, heh)

[azurelunatic]

This is for a fictional situation.

I am attempting to come up with a bunch of neurological functions that are important, but not actually necessary to life, such that someone could get along without them without too much in the way of day to day medical intervention, but that they/those around them would have to make regular accommodations for the lack.

Bonus points for it being plausibly caused by having got in the way of some electricity.

I have some initial ideas, and I've opened a few tabs for wheatgoogling. Oh, my unfortunate characters.

Comments

[ghoti]

Something like lacking pain receptors?

[elf]

Prosopagnosia, a.k.a. face blindness, perhaps? (Various types of agnosia seem possible.)

[silveradept]

Lack of a conversational filter.
Working memory disruption such that someone only remembers what was being talked about thirty seconds to a minute after it was said.
A scrambled language interpretation center such that spoken words are not intelligible, but anything with a music note attached comes through loud and clear.
Occasional nerve overload, where moving at a run for a prolonged period of time causes temporary paralysis.

[pauamma]

Are you thinking sensorimotor, or cognitive?

[gominokouhai]

Johnny Mnemonic (film version, about which we do not speak) gave up his childhood memories so he could store two whole megabytes of hot RAM in the space. Abbutt the Vicker in Babylon 5 acted like a total weirdo in social situations but had data crystal ports in his head. There's presumably all sorts of things you can play with to do with retrograde amnesia. Anterograde would require more assistance from those around.

Nociception might be a good one.

I don't know how hard-SF you need this world to be, but how about cancelling the id?

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

I know that neurological hearing problems are a real bastard to live with. The inability to distinguish voices from background noise can be the worst, but there are a whole range of possible outcomes. Try looking up Auditory Processing Disorder.

[musyc]

Not necessarily a lack of function, but a disorganized one - Spoonerisms. A lot of chances for friends/family to automatically understand or translate and a lot of opportunity for unfriendlies to misunderstand.

Shopping for brain lesions

[siderea]

Broca's aphasia
Wernicke's aphasia
impairment of risk assessment through electricity to the inferior frontal gyrus

Here, just go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cerebral_cortex and click each link in turn. Since the history of neurology has been the history of "Hey, we had this patient who had this horrible thing happen to this one small part of their head, and then had these wacky symptoms but didn't die" (it is simply amazing how much of the brain we don't actually need to keep living [WARNING: pictures].) So, going randomly to "superior frontal gyrus" we find,

In 1998, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried, MD, PhD described a 16-year-old female patient (referred to as "patient AK") who laughed when her SFG was stimulated with electric current during treatment for epilepsy.[3] Electrical stimulation was applied to the cortical surface of AK's left frontal lobe while an attempt was made to locate the focus of her epileptic seizures (which were never accompanied by laughter).

Fried identified a 2 cm by 2 cm area on the left SFG where stimulation produced laughter consistently (over several trials). AK reported that the laughter was accompanied by a sensation of merriment or mirth. AK gave a different explanation for the laughter each time, attributing it to an (unfunny) external stimulus. Thus, laughter was attributed to the picture she was asked to name (saying "the horse is funny"), or to the sentence she was asked to read, or to persons present in the room ("you guys are just so funny... standing around").

Increasing the level of stimulation current increased the duration and intensity of laughter. For example, at low currents only a smile was present, while at higher currents a louder, contagious laughter was induced. The laughter was also accompanied by the stopping of all activities involving speech or hand movements.

Have fun!

[tim]

Lack of impulse control? Insensitivity to certain (fun and/or medical) drugs?

Insensitivity to pain, maybe? Like... that tends to require medical intervention since not feeling pain makes it easier to hurt yourself, but that's sort of indirect.

[aedifica]

Anything language-related, in varying degrees of seriousness. (I see siderea posted some examples already.) A minor one, though I don't know whether it could be plausibly caused by electricity, is difficulty coming up with the right word for something--which is a standard human thing to have happen, but it can happen a lot more often and be correspondingly that much more annoying to the person. [Edit: which is basically Broca's aphasia--I'd forgotten that until I followed siderea's link!]

[siderea]

Hence the immortal joke, "I have... I have the condition called... uh, it's on the tip of my tongue..." "Aphasia?" "THAT!"

[wibbble]

There's the Capgras delusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion

It featured in a comic I backed on Kickstarter: http://transrealitycomic.wordpress.com

[azurelunatic]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080515113311.htm
http://www.patient.co.uk/doctor/Electrical-Injuries-and-Lightning-Strikes.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy