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Neuropsychology

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The attempt to understand mental functions by correlating them with the activities of particular parts of the brain. The science might be said to have really begun with Paul Broca's classic paper showing how a particular form of aphasia was caused by damage to a particular region of the brain. For many years such lesion studies formed almost the sole probe available to neuropsychologists, and the ingenuity in some lesion studies is truly astounding. I recall having read someplace, but cannot now find the citation, that one of the things which made the early studies possible was the replacement, first in the American Civil War and then in the Franco-Prussian War, of muskets by rifled bullets, which left much smaller wounds --- the result being that, if a soldier survived a head wound, he was much more likely to have a specific disorder, rather than just being generally "cracked in his intellectuals" (as Patrick O'Brian's characters would say). Be that as it may, for many years the best

Neuropsychology Notebooks Neuropsychology Last update : 18 Jun 2026 10:24 First version : 9 March 1998 The attempt to understand mental functions by correlating them with the activities of particular parts of the brain. The science might be said to have really begun with Paul Broca's classic paper showing how a particular form of aphasia was caused by damage to a particular region of the brain. For many years such lesion studies formed almost the sole probe available to neuropsychologists, and the ingenuity in some lesion studies is truly astounding. I recall having read someplace, but cannot

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