Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
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A patient with a severe organic schizophreniform illness is described in whom the bizarre psychotic features were related to a non-dominant parietal lobe lesion. This case is a severe and unusual form of the neuro-psychiatric disorder, somatoparaphrenia. The relationship of this condition to other disorders of parietal lobe function is discussed.
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One hundred subjects (50 men, 50 women), of whom 80 had suffered a unilateral cerebrovascular accident (40 left, 40 right), were tested on the WAIS. In the case of left hemisphere damage the male patients showed lower Verbal than Performance Scale IQ scores; for the right brain damaged men Performance Scale scores were Lower than their scores on the Verbal Scale. Women with unilateral brain damage showed no such reliable discrepancies between their Verbal and Performance Scale scores. This difference in the patterning of WAIS IQs in male and female stroke patients persisted even after the scores of those few patients with any significant degree of expressive aphasia had been excluded from consideration.
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During an investigation designed to explore the effects of brain lesions on musical ability in professional musicians, the Seashore Scale was used to discover whether focal damage was associated with specific impairment of any of the basic elements of musical talent. In order to obtain adequate control of the experimental group it was necessary to study a comparable group of professional musicians. ⋯ This unexpected finding sheds doubt on Seashore's assumptions about the requirements for high musical talent. It also raises questions on the use of the Seashore battery in certain areas of psychological research.
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This paper presents electroencephalographic evidence of bilateral independent temporal lobe spiking during an episode of transient global amnesia. The amnesia occurred during a period of hypotension secondary to sinus bradycardia. The amnesia recurred in absence of bradycardia and hypotension. The temporal lobe spiking leads credence to the thought that transient global amnesia occurs as the result of seizure activity.
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Groups of Korsakoff, alcoholic and non-alcoholic subjects were given picture-recognition memory (patterns and objects) and verbal learning tasks. Korsakoff subjects were impaired relative to the two control groups on verbal learning and object-picture memory; on pattern memory Korsakoff and alcoholic subjects were comparable but both were inferior to non-alcoholics. These findings gave some support to the idea (Butters and Cermak, 1976) that visuo-spatial functions (represented here by pattern memory) are impaired through chronic alcoholism whilst the development of Korsakoff's syndrome induces an additional impairment in semantic processing of information (represented here by verbal learning and object-picture memory).