Abstract
We examined depth-EEG recordings of nine verbal automatisms and five aura experiences in a female patient, who was a candidate for the temporal lobectomy because of intractable temporal lobe epilepsy. As a result, we found that hippocampal recruiting theta activity in nondominant hemisphere is essential to the manifestion of verbal automatism and additional hippocampal theta activity in dominant hemisphere often precipitates the advent of the verbal automatism.
It was noteworthy that the patient remained conscious while she issued her stereotyped utterance in one verbal automatism. She had an impression that it was not forced to say, but that it slipped from her lips. This probably indicated that verbal automatism could not be regarded as a kind of involuntary movement but as a spontaneous response to a specific experience evoked through excitation of a wide range of neuronal structure with non-dominant hippocampal formation as a core structure.
