The article highlights basic neuropsychological concepts of linguistic functioning, developmental and evolutional problems of language capacity and the cooperation of hemispheres in man. While the right hemisphere gathers impressions of the notions of things, the left hemisphere forms and uses abstract concepts. Primates can learn to communicate via symbols. Dyslexic children often have problems with ways of teaching that mainly use abstractions. Finally, the specific supply of concepts in both hemispheres is in part responsible for the very personality of a given individual.
This paper is devoted to illustrating how process neuropsychology and neurolinguistics, based on microgenetic theory androoted in process thought, can help to explain the often baffling symptomatology of brain damage. Our purpose is to present an overview of this difficult and complex subject matter for readers, with particular emphasis on its creative potential. The essence of microgenetic theory in neuropsychology is an account of the phases in brain process through which successive mind/brain states arise and perish over the duration of the psychological present, measured in milliseconds. According to the theory, mental states are rhythmically generated out of a “core” in the anatomically deepest and phylogenetically oldest parts of the central nervous system, over phases to the outermost and youngest regions of the brain, the neocortex. The clinical applications are only one aspect of the creative potential of microgenetic theory. Indeed, the elegance of the theory consists in the way in which it can be extended into a number of different fields of endeavor, providing a kind of “unified field theory” for the explanation of often rather diverse phenomena. This provides an opportunity for neuropsychology and neurolinguistics to resume the interdisciplinary discourse they were founded to conduct.
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