A History of Neuropsychology. Группа авторов

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A History of Neuropsychology - Группа авторов Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience

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When one tells the patient to write, he holds the pen or pencil quite awkwardly … and if sometimes he wishes to write spontaneously, to dictation or copy, he always writes [only] his name. [34].

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      His spoken language is very correct, even carefully selected; he always uses appropriate terms and shows no trace of paraphasia. … The patient understands perfectly all that one says to him. … Writing spontaneously and to dictation is perfectly preserved. … Spontaneously, the patient writes as well as he speaks. In comparing the many writing specimens that I had him write, one notices no mistakes, no spelling error, no transposition of letters. … Writing to dictation is executed equally easily and fluently, but reading what the patient has written is absolutely impossible. Here it is indeed a question of a case of absolutely pure word blindness. The patient recognizes not a letter, not a word except, however, his name.” [35].

      The second stroke caused slurred speech and right-sided weakness. Although he soon regained his strength, his speech contained naming errors, and he could not write (Fig. 4d). He died soon after the second stroke, and the autopsy showed 2 lesions (Fig. 3b). Dejerine summarized the case as follows (pp 83–84; translation from [3]):

      During the first phase, which lasted 4 years, the patient presented the purest clinical picture that one can imagine of … pure word blindness without any alteration in spontaneous writing or [writing] to dictation. During the second phase, which lasted only 10 days, complete agraphia with paraphasia came to complicate word blindness. In this second phase, the clinical picture then corresponded to … word blindness with marked alteration of writing. To these two clinical phases correspond, as the autopsy shows, two anatomically distinct lesions in the left hemisphere: one old, occupying the occipital lobe and more particularly the convolutions at the occipital point, the base of the cuneus, as well as those of the lingual and fusiform lobules.… The other lesion of a recent date occupies the angular gyrus and inferior parietal lobule, that is to say the region that we are accustomed to see lesioned in the case of word blindness with writing difficulties. It perfectly explains symptoms observed during the last days of this patient’s life. [35].

      The key consequence of the first stroke was to interrupt tracts coursing from visual cortex in the occipital lobes to the left angular gyrus. For Dejerine, the left angular gyrus was a center interposed between visual cortex and the auditory center for words (Wernicke’s area) in the temporal lobe, wherein “the visual image of letters simultaneously arouses the auditory image and the articulatory image” (p 87) [35]. The auditory word center was linked to the frontal lobe center for motor articulation (Broca’s area). Angular gyrus destruction led to both alexia and agraphia. Dejerine suggested that letters of a specific word evoked meaning through connections between the left angular gyrus and other parts of a left hemisphere “language zone.”

      Deconstruction

      Wernicke zone lesions affected not just language but all aspects of intelligence dependent on didactic learning [37]. Alexia and agraphia did not exist apart from aphasia. Like Broca’s area, the angular gyrus had no special role: “One cannot recognize in the [angular gyrus] the role of the center for visual images of words” (p 500) [37].

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