ABSTRACT
Throughout much of the twentieth century, clinicians and neuroscientists have recognized that behavior involves a complex, multilevel, and integrated neuronal activation and that lesions which produce behavioral abnormalities are no more than regions that contribute to, or form part of, this integrated network leading to behavior. In spite of the recognition of this complexity of behavior, attempts to associate brain regions with particular behaviors have been very useful because they have allowed us to localize brain damage based on behavioral symptoms and to identify brain areas which are in some way related to specific behaviors. For example, Broca’s aphasia has clearly been shown to be associated with frontal dominant hemisphere injury (Benson & Geschwind, 1971), and we therefore have attributed an expressive language function to this posterior inferior region of the frontal cortex. Thus, although these kinds of brain-behavior relationships are clearly oversimplifications, clinicians and researchers have found it useful to our understanding of brain-behavior relationships to examine clinical-pathological correlations in patients with brain injury.
