I think (I'm no neuro-*) that one of the things that make the brain so hard to understand is that a lot of the things that a brain is capable of doing could very well be just a side effect or emergent behavior, instead of something that's actually "architectured" (if that even means something..) or designed to do that.

Maybe that applies here and so only the emergent behavior was disrupted instead of actually a "piece" of the system?