What Has Four Legs . . .

A woman's trouble naming animals helps show how the brain works

Neurologists and psychologists learned long ago that brain injuries can be a powerful tool for investigating how human thought and memory are organized. A case study by two Johns Hopkins researchers, reported in Nature, is but the latest example. A 70-year-old retired librarian who suffered such an injury developed a remarkable symptom: she lost the ability to name animals, though % she could still name other living things, such as plants, and inanimate objects. Nor could she assign physical attributes to animals -- she could not, for example, answer the question "What color is an elephant?" Yet she could answer nonphysical...

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