Cortical Language Circuit

The present research used fMRI to longitudinally investigate the impact of learning new vocabulary on the activation pattern of the language control network by measuring BOLD signal changes during picture naming tasks with familiar pre-existing native words (old words) and new vocabulary. Nineteen healthy participants successfully learned new synonyms for already known Spanish words, and they performed a picture naming task using the old words and the new words immediately after learning and two weeks after learning...

Lexical access is commonly studied using bare picture naming, which is visually guided, but in real-life conversation, lexical access is more commonly contextually guided. In this fMRI study, we examined the underlying functional neuroanatomy of contextually and visually guided lexical access, and its consistency across sessions. We employed a context-driven picture naming task with fifteen healthy speakers reading incomplete sentences (word-by-word) and subsequently naming the picture depicting the final word...

BACKGROUND: Brain structural and functional alterations have been reported in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients; however, these findings were inconsistent across studies due to several limitations, including small sample sizes, different inclusion/exclusion criteria, varied demographic characteristics and symptom dimensions, comorbidity, and medication status. Prominent and replicable neuroimaging biomarkers remain to be discovered. METHODS: This study explored the gray matter structure, neural activity, and white matter microstructure differences in 40 drug-naïve OCD patients and 57 matched healthy controls using ultrahigh field 7...

BACKGROUND: Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) phenotypes are classically associated with distinctive cortical atrophy patterns and regional hypometabolism. However, the spectrum of cognitive and behavioral manifestations in FTD arises from multisynaptic network dysfunction. The thalamus is a key hub of several corticobasal and corticocortical circuits. The main circuits relayed via the thalamic nuclei include the dorsolateral prefrontal circuit, the anterior cingulate circuit, and the orbitofrontal circuit...

BACKGROUND: Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) reduces anxiety symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to identify changes in functional connectivity in the brain after CBT for anxiety in patients with PD. METHODS: Thirty-five patients with PD and clinically significant anxiety were randomized over two groups: CBT plus clinical monitoring (10 CBT sessions) or clinical monitoring only (CMO)...

INTRODUCTION: Post-stroke aphasia (PSA) is a language disorder caused by left hemisphere stroke. Electroacupuncture (EA) is a minimally invasive therapeutic option for PSA treatment. Tongli (HT5) and Xuanzhong (GB39), two important language-associated acupoints, are frequently used in the rehabilitation of patients with PSA. Preliminary evidence indicated functional activation in distributed cortical areas upon HT5 and GB39 stimulation. However, research on the modulation of dynamic and static functional connectivity (FC) in the brain by EA in PSA is lacking...

It is proposed that consciousness is different from awareness. Consciousness can be thought of as a dualistic, embodied, and embedded cognitive process, whereas awareness is a nondual and nonlocal process. Nonlocal awareness is the ever-present, ever-fresh, and an affective self-awareness that can be aware of itself as well as of the ongoing subject-object duality, and cognitive conscious contents. This nonlocal awareness is our default mode state. Although very few of us are aware of it due to our habitual mental preoccupation and mind-wandering...

The primary somatosensory cortex (S1) of mammals is critically important in the perception of touch and related sensorimotor behaviors. In 2015, the Blue Brain Project (BBP) developed a groundbreaking rat S1 microcircuit simulation with over 31,000 neurons with 207 morpho-electrical neuron types, and 37 million synapses, incorporating anatomical and physiological information from a wide range of experimental studies. We have implemented this highly detailed and complex S1 model in NetPyNE, using the data available in the Neocortical Microcircuit Collaboration Portal...

Understanding language semantically related to actions activates the motor cortex. This activation is sensitive to semantic information such as the body part used to perform the action (e.g. arm-/leg-related action words). Additionally, motor movements of the hands/feet can have a causal effect on memory maintenance of action words, suggesting that the involvement of motor systems extends to working memory. This study examined brain correlates of verbal memory load for action-related words using event-related fMRI...

Aphemia is a rare and special type of speech disorder, and the mechanisms underlying the occurrence and recovery remain unclear. Here, we present a clinical case of poor spontaneous recovery of aphemia, with the anterior segment of the left arcuate fasciculus server damaged and the posterior segment intact, as detected by diffusion tensor imaging. Aphemia could be caused by the disruption of the cortical and subcortical language circuits. In particular, our data support the view that damage to the anterior segment of the left arcuate fasciculus may result in poor spontaneous recovery from speech production deficits and that an intact posterior segment seems to be crucial for supporting residual language comprehension ability in patients with post-stroke aphasia...

Schizophrenia is a serious neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by the presence of positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, and disorganization of thought and language), negative symptoms (abulia, alogia, and affective flattening), and cognitive impairment (attention deficit, impaired declarative memory, and deficits in social cognition). Dopaminergic hyperactivity seems to explain the positive symptoms, but it does not completely clarify the appearance of negative and cognitive clinical manifestations...

Phonemic and semantic fluency are neuropsychological tests widely used to assess patients' language and executive abilities and are highly sensitive tests in detecting language deficits in glioma patients. However, the networks that are involved in these tasks could be distinct and suggesting either a frontal (phonemic) or temporal (semantic) involvement. 42 right-handed patients (26 male, mean age = 52.5 years, SD=±13.3) were included in this retrospective study. Patients underwent awake (54...

Natural language is often seen as the single factor that explains the cognitive singularity of the human species. Instead, we propose that humans possess multiple internal languages of thought, akin to computer languages, which encode and compress structures in various domains (mathematics, music, shape…). These languages rely on cortical circuits distinct from classical language areas. Each is characterized by: (i) the discretization of a domain using a small set of symbols, and (ii) their recursive composition into mental programs that encode nested repetitions with variations...

The mammalian cerebral cortex represents one of the most recent and astonishing inventions of nature, responsible of a large diversity of functions that range from sensory processing to high-order cognitive abilities, such as logical reasoning or language. Decades of dedicated study have contributed to our current understanding of this structure, both at structural and functional levels. A key feature of the neocortex is its outstanding richness in cell diversity, composed by multiple types of long-range projecting neurons and locally connecting interneurons...

In recent years, there have been significant advances in understanding the neuronal influence on the biology of solid tumors such as prostate, pancreatic, gastric, and brain cancers. An increasing amount of experimental evidence across multiple tumor types strongly suggests the existence of bidirectional crosstalk between cancer cells and the neural microenvironment. However, unlike cancers affecting many solid organs, brain tumors, namely gliomas, can synaptically integrate into neural circuits and thus can exert a greater potential to induce dynamic remodeling of functional circuits resulting in long-lasting behavioral changes...

BACKGROUND: Pediatric postoperative cerebellar mutism syndrome (CMS) is a rare but well-known complication of medulloblastoma (Mb) resection with devastating effects on expressive language, mobility, cognition, and emotional regulation that diminishes quality of life for many Mb survivors. The specific anatomical and neuronal basis of CMS remains obscure. We address this issue by identifying patterns of surgical damage and secondary axonal degeneration in Mb survivors with CMS. METHODS: Children with Mb deemed high-risk for CMS based on intraventricular location of the tumor had T1 images analyzed for location(s) of surgical damage using a specially developed algorithm...

Although the language-related fiber pathways in the human brain, such as the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) and arcuate fasciculus (AF), are already well-known, understanding more sophisticated cortical regions connected by the fiber tracts is essential to scrutinize the structural connectivity of language circuits. With the regions of interest that were selected based on the Brainnetome atlas, the fiber orientation distribution estimation method for tractography was used to produce further elaborate connectivity information...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Rett syndrome (RTT) and Angelman Syndrome (AS) are neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) that share several clinical characteristics, including displays of repetitive movements, developmental delays, language deficits, intellectual disability, and increased susceptibility to epilepsy. While several reviews address the biological basis of non-seizure-related ASD phenotypes, here, I highlight some shared biological mechanisms that may contribute to increased seizure susceptibility...

Single case cognitive neuropsychological investigations involve the precise characterization of cognitive impairment at the level of an individual participant. This deep data precision affords a more fine-grained understanding of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of complex tasks, and continues to provide unique insights that inform theory in cognitive neuroscience. Here, we present a single case study of an individual, F.R., who suffered a stroke that led to chronic reading and writing problems that include an impairment to the orthographic working memory system proposed to be involved in both written language production and comprehension...

Visual processing of emotional stimuli has been shown to engage complex cortical and subcortical networks, but it is still unclear how it affects sensorimotor integration processes. To fill this gap, here, we used a TMS protocol named short-latency afferent inhibition (SAI), capturing sensorimotor interactions, while healthy participants were observing emotional body language (EBL) and International Affective Picture System (IAPS) stimuli. Participants were presented with emotional (fear- and happiness-related) or non-emotional (neutral) EBL and IAPS stimuli while SAI was tested at 120 ms and 300 ms after pictures presentation...