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."

Comments

Well..

[cbiltcliffe]

How about Pinky's Concept Control Core? How come Pinky always gets treated badly?

Head Banging

[MECC]

That explains why banging the front of my head against a wall helps me think.

Semantic what?

[UbuntuDupe]

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:

***

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").

I think they've got it!

[ColdWetDog]

Semantic dementia that is. FTFA:

"People have been talking about how the brain encodes concepts for 150 years. We believe we have found it,"

What they supposedly found was WHERE the brain encodes semantic functioning. No mention of how. Maybe the Reuter's journalist took it out of context or just doesn't understand what fMRI (functional MRI - go look it up on Google) does. We've known for a long time that parts of the temoporal lobe have to do with language parsing.

Note to editors: Can we have something more detailed than an incorrect, mangled edit of a PR blurb? This says roughly nothing.

Now, I'm off to take my happy pills for the morning. Back later. Hope this all works out.