Scientists have found the region of the brain responsible for a person’s ability to deal with new problems by examining brain-damaged patients.
Researchers, led by experts from the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in
London, “mapped” the brains of 247 patients with damage caused by stroke or brain tumours.
Their information was compared with that from 81 people who had no brain damage.
Experts from the
UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and Department of Neuropsychology at the hospital, which is part of University College London Hospitals, said their study has identified the key brain regions that are essential for logical thinking and problem solving.
Researchers developed new tests to assess a person’s reasoning skills – their ability to comprehend, draw conclusions, and deal with new and novel problems.
These included a verbal analogical reasoning task – a type of puzzle where people are asked to find relationships between words to solve problems – and a deductive reasoning task – where people use pictures, shapes or numbers to figure out logical patterns and solve problems.
Performance in these tests was linked to “lesion-deficit mapping” – a tool used to identify brain areas which, when damaged, are associated with a specific deficit.
People with damage to the right frontal lobe had a much harder time on both tests compared with those with damage in other areas, making around 15% more mistakes than the other patients and healthy individuals.
Lead author Dr Joseph Mole, from the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and Department of Neuropsychology at University College London Hospitals, said: “Our study explores how the front right part of the brain helps people think and solve new problems.
“It also shows that our two new tests can help detect reasoning problems in individuals with brain damage, improving diagnosis and treatment.”
Senior author Professor Lisa Cipolotti said: “By combining a detailed cognitive investigation in a large sample of brain-damaged patients with advanced lesion mapping techniques, we have deepened our understanding of the complex and, so far, poorly understood, neural structures underlying human reasoning.
