modularity psycholinguistics

Phineas Gage's accident Phineas Gage became one of the first lesion case studies in 1848 when an explosion drove a large iron rod completely through his head, destroying one or both of his frontal lobes. He recovered with no apparent sensory, motor, or gross cognitive deficits, but with behaviour so altered that friends described him as “no longer being Gage," suggesting that the damaged areas are involved in "higher functions" such as personality

Brain regions for nouns and verbs (B): the regions specifically associated with the processing of verbs (C): abstract words

Fig. 1 The areas of activation have been rendered on to the lateral surfaces of the cortex of the brain used by SPM 96 to illustrate the distribution of the major sites of activation (P < 0.001). (A) The areas activated when all lexical conditions pooled together are compared with the letter string baseline. Within these areas, the commonalities (i.e. regions equally activated by all stimuli, irrespective of word class or concreteness) (B), the regions specifically associated with the processing of verbs (C) or abstract words (D) are shown (see text for details