This is an ABC podcast.

Hi, Lynne Malcolm with you, continuing our season of favourite All In The Mind programs from my time as host.

Today, in an episode from 2016, we delve into the structure that links the two

sides of our brain and hear what happens when that structure lets us down. I often get told,

well, you know, you look fine, you act fine and you fit into the norms so you mustn't have any challenges.

That's often frustrating because I have a lot of challenges that people don't see.

So just casual social situations are very, very awkward and recognising social cues,

very high anxiety. A lot of the characteristics with corpus

colossal conditions are similar to autism. I think a lot of it is often from society's reactions

and, yeah, expectations. Abby Kinnebara is 25 years old and she has a rare brain disorder,

a partial agenesis of the corpus callosum,

which means that the middle part of this brain structure is missing.

Today we hear how disorders of the corpus callosum affect people's lives

and what this structure is teaching us about brain plasticity.

Professor Linda Richards, deputy director of the Queensland Brain Institute,

specialises in corpus callosal research.

The corpus callosum is the largest fibre tract in the brain, so it's the connections

between nerve cells in the two hemispheres of the brain. So it's really the conduit between

the two sides of the brain, and it allows that information transfer from one hemisphere to another.

So the corpus callosum is required for any

functions that the brain has that need to be integrated between the two sides of the body,

if you like. And so the information that comes into the brain needs to be integrated. And the

...