Kong Jian, Wang Chunmao, Kwong Kenneth, Vangel Mark, Chua Elizabeth, Gollub Randy
Psychiatry Department, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, USA.
Brain Res Cogn Brain Res. 2005 Mar;22(3):397-405. doi: 10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.09.011. Epub 2004 Oct 28.
Recent functional neuroimaging studies have begun to clarify how the human brain performs the everyday activities that require mental calculation. We used fMRI to test the hypotheses that there are specific neural networks dedicated to performing an arithmetic operation (e.g. + or -) and to performing processes that support more complex calculations. We found that the right inferior parietal lobule, left precuneus and left superior parietal gyrus are relatively specific for performing subtraction; and bilateral medial frontal/cingulate cortex are relatively specific for supporting arithmetic procedure complexity. We also found that greater difficulty level was associated with activation in a brain network including left inferior intraparietal sulcus, left inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral cingulate. Our results suggest that the network activated by the simplest calculation serves as a common basis, to which more regions are recruited for more difficult problems or different arithmetic operations.
近期的功能性神经影像学研究已开始阐明人类大脑是如何执行那些需要心算的日常活动的。我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来检验以下假设：存在专门用于执行算术运算（例如加法或减法）以及支持更复杂计算过程的特定神经网络。我们发现，右侧顶下小叶、左侧楔前叶和左侧顶上回在执行减法运算时具有相对特异性；双侧内侧额叶/扣带回皮质在支持算术程序复杂性方面具有相对特异性。我们还发现，难度级别越高，与包括左侧顶内沟、左侧额下回和双侧扣带回在内的脑网络激活相关。我们的结果表明，由最简单计算激活的网络作为一个共同基础，对于更难的问题或不同的算术运算，会有更多区域被招募进来。
