Where the brain appreciates the moral of a story

Abstract

To identify the distributed brain regions used for appreciating the grammatical, semantic and thematic aspects of a story, regional cerebral blood flow was measured with positron emission tomography in nine normal volunteers during the reading of Aesop's fables. In four conditions, subjects had to monitor the fables for font changes, grammatical errors, a semantic feature associated with a fable character, and the moral of the fable. Both right and left prefrontal cortices were consistently, but selectively, activated across the grammatical, semantic, and moral conditions. In particular, appreciating the moral of a story required activating a distributed set of brain regions in the right hemisphere which included the temporal and prefrontal cortices. These findings emphasize that story processing engages a widely distributed network of brain regions, a subset of which become preferentially active during the processing of a specific aspect of the text

Cognitive modules utilized for narrative comprehension in children: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…Subjects with unilateral right-hemisphere damage have shown impairments in abstracting information from narrative passages (Benowitz et al, 1990;Moya et al, 1986). Right temporal and prefrontal regions were recruited when subjects were asked to appreciate the moral of an Aesop's fable (Nichelli et al, 1995). Bilateral activation was also detected in an earlier study (Huettner et al, 1989) investigating the reading of controlled narrative text.…”

Theory of Mind disruption and recruitment of the right hemisphere during narrative comprehension in autism

“…Combined, these two regions play a key role in discourse processing. This network has been found to be activated in Theory of Mind tasks (Castelli et al, 2002;Gallagher & Frith, 2003;Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001;Martin & Weisberg, 2003;Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, Bramati, & Grafman, 2002), as well as discourse comprehension tasks (Bottini et al, 1994;Eviatar & Just, 2006;Ferstl & von Cramon, 2001Ferstl, Rinck, & von Cramon, 2005;Nichelli et al, 1995;Xu, Kemeny, Park, Frattali, & Braun, 2005). Mason and Just (2006) attribute activation in this network to Protagonist monitoring.…”

Neuroimaging Studies of Language Production and Comprehension

“…George et al 1994Robertson et al 2000). The second type is concerned with the processing of specific aspects of discourse, such as apprehending the moral or theme of a text (e.g., Nichelli et al 1995). Each is discussed in turn.…”