Auditory based neuropsychology in neurosurgery

In this article, an account is given on the author's experience with auditory based neuropsychology in a clinical, neurosurgical setting. The patients that were included in the studies are patients with traumatic or vascular brain lesions, patients undergoing brain surgery to alleviate symptoms of Parkinson's disease, or patients harbouring an intracranial arachnoid cyst affecting the temporal or the frontal lobe. The aims of these investigations were to collect information about the location of cognitive processes in the human brain, or to disclose dyscognition in patients with an arachnoid cyst. All the patients were tested with the DL technique. In addition, the cyst patients were subjected to a number of non-auditory, standard neuropsychological tests, such as Benton Visual Retention Test, Street Gestalt Test, Stroop Test and Trails Test A and B. The neuropsychological tests revealed that arachnoid cysts in general cause dyscognition that also includes auditory processes, and more importantly, that these cognition deficits normalise after surgical removal of the cyst. These observations constitute strong evidence in favour of surgical decompression. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.