1/2. Utilisation behaviour consequent to bilateral SMA softening.The case of patient CU, who presented with severe utilisation behaviour, eventually unaccompanied by psychometric signs of frontal involvement, is reported. He suffered from a bilateral stroke within the territory of the anterior cerebral artery. His arterial system was characterised by a unique variant, whereby the right anterior cerebral artery was missing and three trunks originated from the left anterior cerebral artery, each bifurcating into right and left branches. An occlusion of the middle trunk immediately before its partition gave rise to a symmetrical bilateral parasagittal lesion that damaged the supplementary motor areas (medial part of Brodmann's area 6), sparing the lateral regions including the premotor cortices, the corpus callosum and the gyri cinguli. The hypothesis is put forward that utilisation behaviour should be conceived as a double anarchic hand, and its interpretation should rest on the damaged balance between the premotor cortices, responsive to environmental triggers, and the supplementary motor areas, which modulate actions and inhibit them. The imbalance due to the lesion would result in the patients being left at the mercy of environmental stimuli, unable to inhibit inappropriate actions. This intra-frontal hypothesis accounts for the data presented and those from the literature better than the previously held fronto-parietal equipoise.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = behaviour (Clic here for more details about this article) |
2/2. The impact of extensive medial frontal lobe damage on 'theory of mind' and cognition.The ability of humans to predict and explain other people's behaviour by attributing to them independent mental states, such as desires and beliefs, is considered to be due to our ability to construct a 'theory of mind'. Recently, several neuroimaging studies have implicated the medial frontal lobes as playing a critical role in a dedicated 'mentalizing' or 'theory of mind' network in human brains. Here, we report a patient, G.T., who suffered an exceptionally rare form of stroke-bilateral anterior cerebral artery infarction, without rupture or the complications associated with anterior communicating artery aneurysms. Detailed high-resolution neuroanatomical investigations revealed extensive damage to the medial frontal lobes bilaterally, including regions identified to be critical for 'theory of mind' by functional neuroimaging of healthy human subjects. For the first time in such a patient, we carried out a thorough assessment of her cognitive profile including, critically, an experimental investigation of her performance on a range of tests of 'theory of mind'. G.T. had a dysexecutive syndrome characterized by impairments in planning and memory, as well as a tendency to confabulate. Importantly, however, she did not have any significant impairment on tasks probing her ability to construct a 'theory of mind', demonstrating that the extensive medial frontal regions destroyed by her stroke are not necessary for this function. These findings have important implications for the functional anatomy of 'theory of mind', as well as our understanding of medial frontal function. Possible reasons for the discrepancies between our results and neuroimaging studies are discussed. We conclude that our findings urge caution against using functional imaging as the sole method of establishing cognitive neuroanatomy.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.16666666666667keywords = behaviour (Clic here for more details about this article) |