ABSTRACT
The task I was assigned was “to comment on the chapters and to integrate them.” This has not proven to be an easy task! The challenge for me, and indeed for any reader, is to extract a message from each chapter and somehow to integrate this collage of facts and experiments into a meaningful gestalt. As in any gestalt, the details are not especially important and while some of the details may influence the gestalt (and there are details of individual chapters that I might take issue with), it is the overall story that is important. Thus, it is here that I shall focus. I must add, however, that many of the chapters are excellent reviews. Good examples are Singh’s and Grijalva et al.’s reviews of the effects of VMH and LH lesions, respectively, Ward’s review of the effects of visual cortex lesions in bushbabies, and Overmier’s review of the effects of forebrain lesions in teleosts. Grafman et al. probably had the most difficult task, that of looking at the effects of premorbid factors upon outcome of brain damage in humans. The variance in effects of similar brain damage in different people is a major puzzle and can often shake the confidence of the most unashamed localizationists. Indeed, it is in this chapter, and to some extent in Donovick and Burright’s chapter that we get a feeling for the problems of variance, an important issue that I will return to later.
