Individuals with autism spectrum disorders demonstrate a pattern of brain activity during face discrimination that is consistent with feature-based strategies that are more typical of nonface object perception.

Learning to read requires an awareness that spoken words can be decomposed into the phonologic constituents that the alphabetic characters represent. Such phonologic awareness is characteristically lacking in dyslexic readers who, therefore, have difficulty mapping the alphabetic characters onto the spoken word. To find the location and extent of the functional disruption in neural systems that underlies this impairment, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activation patterns in dyslexic and nonimpaired subjects as they performed tasks that made progressively greater demands on phonologic analysis. Brain activation patterns differed significantly between the groups with dyslexic readers showing relative underactivation in posterior regions (Wernicke's area, the angular gyrus, and striate cortex) and relative overactivation in an anterior region (inferior frontal gyrus). These results support a conclusion that the impairment in dyslexia is phonologic in nature and that these brain activation patterns may provide a neural signature for this impairment.Speech enables its users to create an indefinitely large number of words by combining and permuting a small number of phonologic segments, the consonants and vowels that serve as the natural constituents of the biologic specialization for language. An alphabetic transcription brings this same ability to readers but only as they connect its arbitrary characters (letters) to the phonologic segments they represent. Making that connection requires an awareness that all words, in fact, can be decomposed into phonologic segments. Thus, it is this awareness that allows the reader to connect the letter strings (the orthography) to the corresponding units of speech (phonologic constituents) that they represent. As numerous studies have shown, however, such awareness is largely missing in dyslexic children and adults (1-4). Not surprisingly, then, perhaps the most sensitive measure of the reading problem in dyslexia is inability to read phonologically legal nonsense words (5-7). As for why dyslexic readers should have exceptional difficulty developing phonologic awareness, there is support for the notion that the difficulty resides in the phonologic component of the larger specialization for language (8)(9)(10). If that component is imperfect, its representations will be less than ideally distinct and, therefore, harder to bring to conscious awareness.Previous efforts using functional imaging methods to examine brain organization in dyslexia have been inconclusive (11-17) largely, we think, because the experimental tasks tapped the several aspects of the reading process in somewhat unsystematic ways. Our aim therefore was to develop a set of hierarchically structured tasks that control the kind of language-relevant coding required, including especially the demand on phonologic analysis, and then to compare the performance and brain activation patterns (as measured by functional MRI) of dyslexic (DYS) and nonimpaired (NI) readers. Thus, procee...

Background: Disturbed interpersonal relations and emotional dysregulation are fundamental aspects of borderline personality disorder (BPD

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Background:The inability to inhibit unwanted behaviors and impulses produces functional debility in a broad range of neuropsychiatric disorders. A potentially important model of impulse control is volitional tic suppression in Tourette syndrome.

Converging evidence from neuroimaging studies of developmental dyslexia reveals dysfunction at posterior brain regions centered in and around the angular gyrus in the left hemisphere. We examined functional connectivity (covariance) between the angular gyrus and related occipital and temporal lobe sites, across a series of print tasks that systematically varied demands on phonological assembly. Results indicate that for dyslexic readers a disruption in functional connectivity in the language-dominant left hemisphere is confined to those tasks that make explicit demands on assembly. In contrast, on print tasks that do not require phonological assembly, functional connectivity is strong for both dyslexic and nonimpaired readers. The findings support the view that neurobiological anomalies in developmental dyslexia are largely confined to the phonological-processing domain. In addition, the findings suggest that right-hemisphere posterior regions serve a compensatory role in mediating phonological performance in dyslexic readers.

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Cocaine cues lead to abnormally high cingulate and low frontal lobe activation in cocaine addicts. Addicts also show more general abnormalities in affect-related brain activation.