We applied near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings during cortical stimulation to a temporal lobe epilepsy patient who underwent subdural electrode implantation. Using NIRS, changes in blood concentrations of oxyhemoglobin (HbO[subscript 2]) and deoxyhemoglobin (HbR) during cortical stimulation of the left…

Before performing neurosurgery, an exhaustive presurgical assessment is required, usually including an investigation of language cerebral lateralization. Among the available procedures, the intracarotid amobarbital test (IAT) was formerly the most widely used. However, this procedure has many limitations: it is invasive and potentially traumatic,…

Processing and/or hemispheric differences in the neural bases of word recognition were examined in patients with long-standing, medically-intractable epilepsy localized to the left (N = 18) or right (N = 7) temporal lobe. Participants were asked to read words that varied in the frequency of their spelling-to-sound correspondences. For the right…

Hemispherectomy (disconnection or removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) is a rare surgical procedure used for the relief of drug-resistant epilepsy in children. After hemispherectomy, contralateral hemiplegia persists whereas gross expressive and receptive language functions can be remarkably spared. Motor speech deficits have rarely been…

Speech-related fMRI activation was examined in six hemispherectomy patients (three left LX, three right RX, four with congenital and two with late-acquired hemiplegia) operated in childhood for the relief of drug-resistant epilepsy. Although the temporal and sensorimotor pattern of activation was similar to that found in neurologically intact…

This study investigates the compensatory impact of cognitive aids on left and right temporal lobe epileptic patients suffering from verbal memory disorders, who were candidates for surgery. Cognitive aids are defined in the levels-of-processing framework and deal with the depth of encoding, the elaboration of information, and the use of retrieval…

Shift of the cortical mechanisms of language from the usually dominant left to the non-dominant right hemisphere has been demonstrated in the presence of large brain lesions. Here, we report a similar phenomenon in a patient with a cavernoma over the anterolateral superior temporal gyrus associated with epilepsy. Language mapping was performed by…

This study investigates the role of the temporal lobes in levels-of-processing tasks (phonetic and semantic encoding) according to the nature of recall tasks (free and cued recall). These tasks were administered to 48 patients with unilateral temporal epilepsy (right ''RTLE''=24; left ''LTLE''=24) and a normal group (n=24). The results indicated…