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Scientists Identify Brain's Concept Control Core
Van Cutter Romney writes "Scientists have identified the part of the brain which matches words to objects. While scanning brains from people who suffer from Semantic Dementia they have found that the front end of the temporal lobe seems to be crucial to conceptual application. A better understanding on how this part of the brain works can help develop therapies to counteract Semantic Dementia — the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer's disease."
It would have been nice for a link to describe what Semantic Dementia is so we could get some background info. At least link to wikipedia's article about it. Unfortunately, it's very sparse, but does reveal what I wanted to know:
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Signs and Symptoms
SD patients often present with the complaint of word-finding difficulties. On further questioning, patients often appear to have lost the meaning of certain words (e.g. asking "What is a fish?"). As the disease progresses, behavioural and personality changes are often seen similar to those seen in frontotemporal dementia although cases have been described of 'pure' semantic dementia with few late behavioural symptoms.
Neuropsychology
Patients perform poorly on tests of semantic knowledge. Published tests include both verbal and non-verbal tasks e.g. The Warrington concrete and abstract word synonym test (Warrington EK, McKenna P, Orpwood L. Single word comprehension: a concrete and abstract word synonym test. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation 1998; 8: 143-154.) and The Pyramids and Palm Trees task (Howard and Patterson, 1992)
Testing will also reveal deficits in picture naming (with semantic errors being made e.g. "dog" for a picture of a hippopotamus) and category fluency (e.g. "Please list as many animals as you can in one minute").
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
cause i can
Pinky: Gee, Brain, what are we going to do tonight?
Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky: try to take over the world!
Classic
in terms of those suffering from Alzheimer's Disease.
A lot of the people we used to think were suffering from dementia actually are suffering side effects from drug interactions.
And the tests used to determine words vary - some are as simple as the Letter S (tell me all the words you can that start with the letter S), some involve giving you three words to remember, having you do a puzzle (like saying the letters of the word WORLD backwards), and then seeing how many of those words you correctly recall.
There's also a test, the Boston Naming Test, which involves recognizing pictures and giving the word for the picture - however, it's culturally biased towards Boston, and doesn't work so well with other populations.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Note that they were not talking about an fMRI study.This was an anatomical MRI study. The idea is they looked at patients who have difficulty matching words to the objects they represent and correlated their deficit with what regions of the brain appear to be degenerating in the patients. Your point is very well taken about fMRI - it is more likely to tell you where something is happening than to tell you why.
it does if you get BBC America.. they were showing it every Saturday in the afternoon.. don't know if they still do it on a regular basis, but you can catch it if you look for it...
Plus, there are several PBS stations across the US that show it on Saturday nights next to Fawlty Towers and the Vicar of Dibley, etc....
Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from Mediocre Minds - A. Einstein
Imagine that the dictionary in your brain comes in three volumes, and every word you know appears in each volume. Volume 1 only contains the pronunciation of the word. Volume 2 only contains its part of speech. And Volume 3 only contains the definition.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.