The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex "Frontal Lobe" tasks: a latent variable analysis.

Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

: The concept of attention as central to human performance extends back to the start of experimental psychology, yet even a few years ago, it would not have been possible to outline in even a preliminary form a functional anatomy of the human attentional system. New developments in neuroscience have opened the study of higher cognition to physiological analysis, and have revealed a system of anatomical areas that appear to be basic to the selection of information for focal (conscious) processing. The importance of attention is its unique role in connecting the mental level of description of processes used in cognitive science with the anatomical level common in neuroscience. Sperry describes the central role that mental concepts play in understanding brain function. As is the case for sensory and motor systems of the brain, our knowledge of the anatomy of attention is incomplete. Nevertheless, we can now begin to identify some principles of organization that allow attention to function as a unified system for the control of mental processing. Although many of our points are still speculative and controversial, we believe they constitute a basis for more detailed studies of attention from a cognitive-neuroscience viewpoint. Perhaps even more important for furthering future studies, multiple methods of mental chronometry, brain lesions, electrophysiology, and several types of neuro-imaging have converged on common findings.

/pdf/the-attention-system-of-the-human-brain-w797wllpat.pdf

The Attention System of the Human Brain

The emerging field of emotion regulation studies how individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. This review takes an evolutionary perspective and characterizes emotion in terms of response tendencies. Emotion regulation is denned and distinguished from coping, mood regulation, defense, and affect regulation. In the increasingly specialized discipline of psychology, the field of emotion regulation cuts across traditional boundaries and provides common ground. According to a process model of emotion regulation, emotion may be regulated at five points in the emotion generative process: (a) selection of the situation, (b) modification of the situation, (c) deployment of attention, (d) change of cognitions, and (e) modulation of responses. The field of emotion regulation promises new insights into age-old questions about how people manage their emotions.

http://www.elaborer.org/cours/A13/lectures/Gross1998.pdf

The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review.

VISUAL–SPATIAL attention is an essential brain function that enables us to select and preferentially process high priority information in the visual fields1,2. Several brain areas have been shown to participate in the control of spatial attention in humans3–5, but little is known about the underlying selection mechanisms. Non-invasive scalp recordings of event-related potentials (e.r.ps) in humans have shown that attended visual stimuli are preferentially selected as early as 80–90 ms after stimulus onset6,7, but current e.r.p. methods do not permit a precise localization of the participating cortical areas. In this study we combined neuroimaging (positron emission tomography) with e.r.p. recording in order to describe both the cortical anatomy and time course of attentional selection processes. Together these methods showed that visual inputs from attended locations receive enhanced processing in the extrastriate cortex (fusiform gyrus) at 80–130 ms after stimulus onset. These findings reinforce early selection models of attention8–10.

Combined spatial and temporal imaging of brain activity during visual selective attention in humans.

The Bisected Brain

Society must respond to the growing demand for cognitive enhancement. That response must start by rejecting the idea that 'enhancement' is a dirty word, argue Henry Greely and colleagues.

/pdf/towards-responsible-use-of-cognitive-enhancing-drugs-by-the-yfr3q74rht.pdf

Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy

1 ? The Split Brain and the Integrated Mind.- 2 ? The Nature of Interhemispheric Communication.- 3 ? Cerebral Lateralization and Hemisphere Specialization: Facts and Theory.- 4 ? Brain and Language.- 5 ? Brain and Intelligence.- 6 ? Brain, Imagery, and Memory.- 7 ? On the Mechanisms of Mind.- Author Index.

The Integrated Mind

[Introduction] Until a few years ago, prevailing views regarding the syndrome of the corpus callosum in man were based very largely on the studies of Akelaitis and his co-workers (Akelaitis et al. 1942; Akelaitis 1944). Using a wide variety of tests Akelaitis examined a series of more than two dozen patients with partial and complete surgical sections of the corpus callosum and anterior commissure and was unable to find any consistent neurological or psychological dysfunctions that could be reliably attributed to the commissural sections. Symptoms such as unilateral astereognosis, alexia, agraphia, ideo-motor apraxia (Sweet 1941), as well as apathy, amnesia, personality changes and related effects, that earlier had been ascribed to callosal lesions (Alpers and Grant 1931) seemed accordingly to be more properly explained in terms of the extracallosal cerebral damage that commonly accompanies lesions in the commissures. These Akelaitis reports in combination with confirmatory observations on absence of symptoms after callosum section in animals established the general doctrine of the 1940's and 1950's in which it was believed that behavioral deficits seen in connection with callosal lesions are best ascribed to associated brain damage (Bremer et al. 1956). Meanwhile, the discrepancy between the enormous size and strategic position of the corpus callosum on the one hand and the observed lack of any important functional disturbance following its complete surgical section on the other remained during this period one of the more puzzling enigmas of neurology.

Michael S. Gazzaniga

Papers

Combined spatial and temporal imaging of brain activity during visual selective attention in humans.

The Bisected Brain

Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy

The Integrated Mind

Interhemispheric relationships: the neocortical commissures; syndromes of hemisphere disconnection