Spatial hyperschematia without spatial neglect after insulo-thalamic disconnection.

Different spatial representations are not stored as a single multipurpose map in the brain. Right brain-damaged patients can show a distortion, a compression of peripersonal and extrapersonal space. Here we report the case of a patient with a right insulo-thalamic disconnection without spatial neglect.

Pain in severe dementia: self-assessment or observational scales?

Objectives: To assess the performance of self-assessment scales in severely demented hospitalized patients and to compare it with observational data.

Design: Prospective clinical study.

Setting: Geriatrics hospital and a geriatric psychiatry service.

Reality confusion in spontaneous confabulation.

A woman produced spontaneous confabulations after rupture of an anterior communicating artery aneurysm. She confused currently irrelevant with currently relevant information in implicit memory; confabulations about people concerned only new acquaintances; false reality could be induced by an intensive 5-minute discussion; and in a recognition task, she confused false repetitions in another modality with real item repetitions. The findings support the theory that the defect causing spontaneous confabulation precedes conscious memory processing.