FRONTAL LOBE OF PRIMATES

Abstract

Recent studies on the functions of the cerebral hemispheres are of immediate importance to clinical medicine for the light they have shed on certain neurologic problems of general practice, such as the prognosis and interpretation of the symptoms in vascular hemiplegia, the basis of the gastro-intestinal and other vegetative disturbances accompanying lesions of the brain and the character of the mental impairment following the destruction of specific cortical areas. It is the purpose of this paper, and of the others presented at this symposium, to give a brief résumé of these studies and to point out the clinical implications. At present few serious investigators deny the existence of cerebral localization, and a small number still insist on the sharp localization of specific functions in given portions of the brain. The central nervous system has come rather to be looked on as a highly integrated mechanism each cell of which has