Year: 2022
Type: letter
Abstract: In their Letter to the Editor (doi:10.1093/brain/awac482), Dr Mesulam and colleagues provided their opinion on our recent paper in Brain entitled ‘The Wernicke conundrum revisited: evidence from connectome-based lesion-symptom mapping’. We are thankful for the opportunity here to address these points. Dr Mesulam and colleagues did not object to the empirical data and analyses that we reported. However, they expressed objections to the logic of our approach, incorrectly claimed that the motivation for our manuscript was to ‘to discredit’ their work, and accuse us of battling a ‘straw man of our own erection’. We strongly disagree with these characterizations. Mesulam et al.’s work radically and incisively reconsiders the basic neuroanatomy of language. For almost 200 years, it has been canon that the posterior temporal lobe supports core aspects of language comprehension, based in large part on post-stroke Wernicke’s aphasia. Mesulam et al.1 in 2015 presented data from primary progressive aphasia (PPA) that appear to flatly contradict this received wisdom. The double disconnection hypothesis, the main explanation offered in that paper to explain the apparent discrepancy between PPA and stroke-based aphasia, is succinctly articulated and testable with current neuroimaging methods incorporating both lesion information and degree of white matter connectivity. Therefore, we considered it highly relevant and important to the field to directly address and test this new theory of post-stroke comprehension deficits in aphasia. Naturally, expanding existing knowledge by rigorously testing new hypotheses is a central tenet of scientific progress.
Source: Brain
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4312115233