Chapter 1 - Prospects in the Study of Aphasia: The Nature of the Symptom and its Relevance for Future Research

Abstract

This chapter describes the prospects in the study of aphasia, the nature of its symptom, and its relevance for future research. There are several problems in aphasia research and neuropsychology that can be termed “fundamental.” One of these is the nature of the image, for example, the verbal image of inner speech or the visual image of hallucination. The image is fundamental because the relation of the image to the perception goes to the heart of the transition from private to public space. The duration of the present is important for many reasons, not the least of which is that it spans instants of physical passage and is a fundamental obstacle to a naive mind-brain reduction. An even more fundamental problem is the origin of the error or symptom. It is fundamental because a symptom is a fragment of a behavior that points to a state of the brain. If the fragment points to a disrupted phase in the mind/brain state, behavior more generally is a symptom or expression of the brain state as a whole. Symptom is only pathological when it is deviant. As parcellation is the pattern of process in development and behavior, heterochrony is the rate or timing of this process. Heterochrony is the idea that in brain development or evolution, different organ systems can develop at different rates and that this difference in the timing of development can lead to shifts in evolutionary outcomes, including adaptations, errors, and severe aberrations. If the symptom refers to a segment of preliminary process, one strategy in treatment might be to concentrate efforts on the just prior phase or on constraining the damaged one so as to facilitate a traversal of the disrupted segment.