AO3

• damage to areas of the brain has been linked to mental disorders
• neurosurgery is a last resort method for treating some mental disorders targeting specific areas of the brain which may be involved
• cingulotomy involves isolating a region called the cingulate gyrus which has been implicated in OCD
• Dougherty et al reported on 44 people with OCD who had undergone a cingulotomy. at post surgical follow up about 30% had met the criteria for successful response to the surgery
• evidence from brain scans supports the idea that many everyday brain functions are localised
• peterson et al used brain scans to demonstrate how wernicke’s area was active during a listening task and broca’s area was active during a reading task
• a review of long term memory studies by buckner and petersen revealed that semantic and episodic memories reside in different parts of the prefrontal cortex
• however language may not be localised just to broca’s areas: Dick and Tremblay found that only 2% of modern researchers think that language in the brain is completely controlled by them
• advanced in brain imaging techniques such as fMRI mean that neural processes can be studied with more clarity. it seems that language function is distributed more holistically than first thought
• language streams have been identified across the cortex including brain regions in the right hemisphere