Neuropsychology

Network Disconnection Mapper

Five regions, six pathways, four tasks. Break any one thing and see which tasks notice - including the ones that fail while every region is intact.

Simulated — a conceptual diagram, not an anatomical atlas

Learning objective

By the end you should be able to explain how damage to a connection produces a deficit far from the lesion.

About 15 minutes. Nothing you do here is saved or sent anywhere.

This diagram is a toy

Five boxes and six lines. No real brain has five regions, no real pathway carries one thing, and nothing here is positioned anatomically. Treat it as a cartoon of an argument, not as a map.

  1. Answer the opening question.
  2. Load a case. The four task outcomes above the controls change with it, and nothing has to be configured first.
  3. Open Change the network yourself to damage a region or cut a pathway - one at a time to begin with - and watch the same four outcomes.
  4. Find two different single failures that produce exactly the same profile. There are several.

First, a judgement

A fictional person understands everything said to them and names pictures without difficulty. Asked to repeat a spoken word back, they cannot - and the difficulty is worst for unfamiliar words.

Where would you look for the damage?

Challenge - how many causes fit?

A fictional person cannot name pictures, cannot repeat spoken words and cannot say what you are describing. They point to the right picture every time you name one.

Tick every single failure that would produce exactly this profile.

What this demonstrates

Cutting a pathway between two intact regions produces the same task failures as damaging one of them, which is why a deficit localises a disruption rather than a function. The same profile can arise several ways, and networks usually degrade before they stop. Localisation and network accounts are not rivals: a region still does something, and what it does depends on what it is connected to.