Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Neurology

Vocabulary flashcards summarizing key neuropsychiatric terms, structures, circuits, disorders, and clinical phenomena highlighted throughout the lecture notes.

Neuropsychiatry

Psychiatric subspecialty focused on psychological and behavioral manifestations of brain disease.

Organic mental syndrome

Mental or behavioral disturbance caused by identifiable acquired brain pathology such as epilepsy, TBI, or dementia.

Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology

Neurologic subspecialty allied to neuropsychiatry that studies cognitive phenomena in brain-diseased patients.

Lateralization

Functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres (e.g., left for language, right for visuospatial).

Broca area

Left pars opercularis of inferior frontal gyrus; key to speech production.

Planum temporale

Posterior Sylvian infolded cortex, larger on left; part of language network.

Insular cortex

Region regulating autonomic output; right insula—sympathetic drive, left—parasympathetic.

Aprosodia

Impaired production or comprehension of emotional prosody, typically after right hemisphere damage.

Fronto-subcortical circuit

Closed loop linking prefrontal cortex, striatum, globus pallidus/SNr, thalamus, and back to cortex.

Dorsolateral prefrontal loop

Circuit mediating executive functions; damage yields working-memory and problem-solving deficits.

Orbitofrontal loop

Fronto-subcortical circuit governing impulse control, social judgment, emotion; lesions cause disinhibition.

Anterior cingulate loop

Circuit involving ventral striatum; damage produces apathy, abulia, akinetic mutism.

Executive cognitive impairment

Loss of planning, set-shifting, working memory due to dorsolateral prefrontal or circuit lesions.

Disinhibition

Impulsive, socially inappropriate behavior classically following orbitofrontal damage.

Abulia

Marked reduction in spontaneous initiation of thoughts or actions.

Apathy

Loss of motivation and affect with preserved consciousness; common after medial frontal injury.

Cingulotomy

Surgical interruption of cingulum to treat severe OCD by decreasing excessive attention.

Papez circuit

Hippocampus → fornix → mammillary body → anterior thalamus → cingulate gyrus → hippocampus loop.

Limbic system

Interconnected hippocampus, amygdala, septal nuclei, piriform cortex, etc., modulating emotion & memory.

Amygdala

Limbic nucleus crucial for emotion processing and a common seizure focus.

Hippocampus

Medial temporal structure essential for explicit (declarative) memory formation.

Limbic epilepsy

Seizure disorder arising from amygdala/hippocampus; most common adult epilepsy.

Voluminous mental state

Rich experiential auras (déjà vu, micro/macropsia) typical of limbic seizures.

Cerebellar cognitive-affective syndrome

Executive, visuospatial, language and mood deficits after cerebellar (especially vermian) lesions.

Cortical dysplasia

Developmental malformation from aberrant neuronal migration; often causes intractable epilepsy.

Blindsight

Above-chance localization of visual stimuli despite cortical blindness from V1 damage.

Dorsal vs. Ventral visual streams

‘Where’ pathway (parietal) for spatial localization vs ‘What’ pathway (temporal) for identification.

Optic ataxia

Misreaching under visual guidance from dorsal stream (parietal) lesions.

Visual agnosia

Failure to recognize objects despite intact vision; due to ventral occipitotemporal damage.

Central auditory disorder

Language-specific or environmental-sound agnosia from bilateral superior temporal lesions.

White matter tracts

Long fiber bundles providing cortico-cortical and cortico-subcortical connectivity.

Arcuate fasciculus

Major intrahemispheric tract linking frontal language areas with temporal/parietal cortex.

Uncinate fasciculus

Fiber pathway connecting orbitofrontal cortex with anterior temporal regions.

Cingulum

Medial white-matter tract beneath cingulate gyrus linking frontal, parietal and parahippocampal areas.

U-fibers

Short juxtacortical fibers interconnecting adjacent gyri; usually spared in Binswanger disease.

Subcortical dementia

Slowed processing, executive failure from widespread white-matter or basal ganglia disease.

Corpus callosum

Largest commissure joining hemispheres; splenial lesions cause alexia without agraphia.

Anterior disconnection syndrome

Left-hand apraxia & tactile anomia after anterior callosal infarct.

Alexia without agraphia

Inability to read with preserved writing from left occipital plus splenial lesion.

Default Mode Network (DMN)

Medial frontal–posterior cingulate–angular gyrus circuit active at rest and degenerated in Alzheimer disease.

Salience Network

Anterior cingulate–insula centered network detecting behaviorally relevant stimuli; atrophied in bvFTD.

Central Executive Network

Dorsolateral prefrontal–parietal network supporting goal-directed cognition.

Lesion network mapping

Technique connecting disparate lesions via common functional networks to explain similar symptoms.

Modularity

Concept that specialized, partially independent neural processors handle specific information domains.

Selectively distributed processing

Brain organization in which functions arise from sparsely overlapping, task-specific networks.

Working memory

Short-term maintenance/manipulation of information; depends on dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Hemineglect

Failure to attend to contralesional hemispace, usually left neglect after right parietal damage.

Simultanagnosia

Inability to perceive multiple items in a visual scene; part of Balint syndrome.

Amnestic syndrome

Profound anterograde + variable retrograde amnesia from bilateral hippocampal or thalamic injury.

Recognition vs Recall memory

Cued identification often spared when free retrieval is impaired in frontal but not hippocampal lesions.

Executive cognitive dysfunction

Initiation, planning, set-shifting and monitoring failures from frontal-subcortical damage.

Utilization behavior

Automatic grasping/using of objects due to severe frontal dysfunction.

Pathologic laughing and crying

Stereotyped emotional outbursts incongruent with mood from pseudobulbar disinhibition.

Emotionalism

Excessive, labile tearfulness usually following neurologic injury; patient’s feelings are congruent.

Klüver–Bucy syndrome

Bilateral amygdala lesions causing hyperorality, hypersexuality, docility and hypermetamorphosis.

Vascular depression

Late-onset depressive syndrome with white-matter disease, psychomotor slowing, poor antidepressant response.

Forced normalization

Emergence of psychosis when seizures are controlled or EEG normalizes in epilepsy.

Alien hand phenomenon

Unwilled, seemingly purposeful limb movements with loss of agency after callosal or medial frontal damage.

Functional (conversion) disorder

Neurologic-like symptoms incompatible with recognized disease, rooted in psychological mechanisms.

Hoover sign

In conversion paresis, weak hip extension improves when contralateral hip flexes, revealing intact strength.