Angular gyrus
| Angular gyrus | |
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Drawing of a cast to illustrate the relations of the brain to the skull. (Angular gyrus labeled at upper left, in yellow section.)
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| Details | |
| Identifiers | |
| Latin | gyrus angularis |
| NeuroNames | hier-91 |
| NeuroLex ID | Angular Gyrus |
| Dorlands /Elsevier |
g_13/12405109 |
| TA | A14.1.09.124 |
| FMA | 61898 |
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Anatomical terms of neuroanatomy
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The angular gyrus is a region of the brain lying mainly in the anterolateral region of parietal lobe, that lies near the superior edge of the temporal lobe, and immediately posterior to the supramarginal gyrus. Its significance is in transferring visual information to Wernicke's area, in order to make meaning out of visually perceived words. It is also involved in a number of processes related to language, number processing and spatial cognition, memory retrieval, attention, and theory of mind. It is Brodmann area 39 of the human brain.
Left and right angular gyri are connected by the dorsal splenium and isthmus of the corpus callosum. Both gyri lie between the four lobes.
The angular gyrus is the part of the brain associated with complex language functions (i.e. reading, writing and interpretation of what is written). Lesion to this part of the brain shows symptoms of the Gerstmann syndrome: effects include finger tap agnosia, alexia (inability to read), acalculia (inability to use arithmetic operations), agraphia (inability to copy), and left-right confusion.
Geschwind proposed that written word is translated to internal monologue via the angular gyrus.
V. S. Ramachandran, and Edward Hubbard published a paper in 2003 in which they speculated that the angular gyrus is at least partially responsible for understanding metaphors. They stated:
There may be neurological disorders that disturb metaphor and synaesthesia.This has not been studied in detail but we have seen disturbances in the Bouba/Kiki effect (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001a) as well as with proverbs in patients with angular gyrus lesions. It would be interesting to see whether they have deficits in other types of synaesthetic metaphor, e.g. ‘sharp cheese’ or ‘loud shirt’. There are also hints that patients with right hemisphere lesions show problems with metaphor. It is possible that their deficits are mainly with spatial metaphors, such as ‘He stepped down as director’.
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