by Scientists have found that the brain region is responsible for a person’s ability to cope with new problems and at the same time examine patients with brain damage.
Researchers, led by experts from the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, “mapped” the brain of 247 patients with damage caused by strokes or tumors and compared them with 81 people who had no brain damage.
Experts of the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and Department of Neuropsychology in the hospital, which is part of the hospitals of the University College London, said their study had identified the most important brain regions that are essential for logical thinking and problem solving.
The researchers then developed new tests to evaluate a person’s argumentation skills – their ability to understand conclusions and to cope with new and new problems.
The tests include a verbal analogous argument task – a kind of puzzle in which people are asked to find relationships between words to solve problems – and deductive argumentation task – in which people use images, shapes or numbers to find out logical patterns and solve problems.
The performance in these tests was linked to “lesion deficit mapping” a tool for identifying brain areas, which, if they are damaged, are associated with a certain deficit.
People with damage to the right frontal lobe had much more difficult in both tests than with damage in other areas and made around 15 percent more mistakes than the other patients and healthy people.
The leading author Dr. Joseph Mole from the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and Department of Neuropsychology at the University College London Hospital said: “Our study examines how the right part of the brain helps to think and solve new problems.
“It also shows that our two new tests can help recognize argumentation problems in people with brain damage, to improve diagnosis and treatment.”
Senior author Professor Lisa Cipolotti said: “By combining a detailed cognitive examination in a large sample of patients with brain shops with advanced lesion mapping techniques, we have our understanding of the complex and previously only poorly understood neuronal structures on which human thinking is based.
“Our results show a close connection between the right frontal brain network, which is involved in the argumentation, and the right frontal brain network, which is essential for liquid intelligence – our ability to solve problems without prior experience.
“This indicates that a general area of the brain plays a decisive role in both argumentation and liquid intelligence.”
In the journal Brain, the authors, their study said that the right frontal network of the brain for “aspects” of analog argumentation and deductive thinking was “critical”.
The researchers said that the two new tests can help identify cognitive impairments that would otherwise remain undetected.
“So far, only a very small number of clinical tests have been shown that are able to recognize the dysfunction of the right frontal lob,” they wrote.
After further validation, the tests on the NHS could be made available, which the experts say that they require the unattended need for tools that are designed for a dysfunction of the right frontal app.
