Neurology and Neuropsychiatry

Behavioral Neurology

Behavioral Neurology field emphases on pathological and clinical characteristics in neural developments associated with mental activity, subsuming cognitive functions, emotional states, and social behavior. Historically, the foremost importance of Behavioral Neurology has been to characterize the phenomenology and pathophysiology of intellectual disturbances in relation to brain dysfunction, clinical diagnosis, and treatment. Representative cognitive domains of interest include attention, memory, language, high-order perceptual processing, skilled motor activities, and "frontal" or "executive" cognitive functions. Behavioral Neurology incorporates three general types of clinical syndromes: 1) diffuse and multifocal brain disorders affecting cognition and behavior (e.g. delirium and dementia), 2) neurobehavioral syndromes associated with focal brain lesions (e.g. aphasia, amnesia, agnosia, apraxia), and 3) neuropsychiatric manifestations of neurological disorders (e.g. depression, mania, psychoses, anxiety, personality changes, or obsessive-compulsive disorders, which may accompany diseases such as epilepsy, cerebrovascular disease, traumatic brain injury, or multiple sclerosis).