A traditional method of localizing brain functions has been to identify shared areas of brain damage in individuals who have a particular deficit. The rationale of this 'lesion overlap' approach is straightforward: if the individuals can no longer perform the function, the area of brain damaged in most of these individuals must have been responsible for that function. However, the reciprocal as...

BACKGROUND Upper limb apraxia is a common disorder associated with stroke that can reduce patients' independence levels in activities of daily living and increase levels of disability. Traditional rehabilitation programs designed to promote the recovery of upper limb function have mainly focused on restorative or compensatory approaches. However, no previous studies have been completed that eva...

Corticobasal syndrome (CBS) is the clinical presentation of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare neurodegenerative disorder, with features of both cerebral and basal ganglia involvement. Visual disturbance is uncommonly a predominant symptom but when present can be markedly debilitating. Visual findings primarily manifest as oculomotor apraxia, but significant cognitive impairment may result...

A healthy 68-year-old woman presented with 2 years of recurrent episodes of right ptosis, constantly present after waking from sleep (figure 1). Clinical examination, brain MRI, EMG, and polysomnography were unremarkable (figure 2). In particular, there was no cranial nerve impairment. Few cases of idiopathic ptosis on awakening have been described, and they have been attributed to eyelid openi...

Although positive effects of rhythm cueing on motor control in neurologic disorders are known, no studies have yet focused on patients suffering from impaired programming of complex actions. One patient suffering from ideomotor apraxia (a potentially ideal experimental paradigm to test the effect of rhythm on high-level motor control) underwent two rehabilitation training sets differing only fo...

BACKGROUND A frontostriatal pattern of cognitive decline, consisting of a frontal lobe-like syndrome without genuine cortical defects such as amnesia, apraxia, aphasia, or agnosia, is well established in basal ganglial diseases. Recent pathological investigations, however, have again noted cortical damage in progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), suggesting that cortical defects could be present...