THE HUMAN FRONTAL LOBES FUNCTIONS AND DISORDERS: Third Edition

This is the third edition of The Human Frontal Lobes, a long journey for a medical book that was first published in 1999. Imbued with passion for this subject by our mentor, D. Frank Benson, we were particularly excited for the first edition to tell the stories emerging in regard to frontal lobe anatomy, frontal– subcortical circuits, frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and psychiatric disorders with prominent frontal lobe symptomatology. Although the role of the left frontal lobe in language was already accepted, in the 1990s it was becoming evident that the right frontal lobe has distinctive functions related to the modulation of behavior—a finding that helped distinguish disorders affecting the nondominant versus the dominant hemisphere. Simultaneously, scholarly efforts to understand the structures that linked the basal ganglia and thalamus to the frontal lobes, along with clinical observations regarding the cognitive and behavioral disturbances associated with dysfunction in these structures, made it important to consider the frontal lobes along with their subcortical connections