If we regard the time of animals as the period of cyclic events such as cardiac cycles, the speed of time is proportional to the energy consumption rate per body weight. Such time, which I call the metabolic time, tells us that it varies between animals and during growth and ageing, and that animals can manipulate time. It even leads us to the imagination that animals “create” time with the use of energy. Such cyclic times of animals seem to derive from the strategy with which animals “aim” to continue their lives “perpetually” through the periodic renewal of the body. The analogy of the metabolic time is applicable to the speed of the modern social life that is accelerating with the use of cars and computers. Because such machines consume large amount of energy the social time also becomes faster by energy consumption. The social time is the environment in which we live in and thus I call it the time environment. It is getting faster and faster. It seems to have exceeded the limit our body and mind can follow, which situation I call “the destruction of time environment”, that might cause the dysfunctioning of the higher brain activities.

  Einstein denied the notion that in science gathering new facts automatically lead to create new concept. When one develops a new theory, he stressed, one need to dare jump from the facts. Actually he created the theory of relativity, it was really a giant leap. Then I retraced the history of the views of brain from the ancient times. Before emergence of Gall, mental functions such as memory and judgment were thought to exist in ventricles. Gall thought there is no such thing as judgment, no such thing as memory. Gall made not only the conceptual point that musical aptitude (e.g.) is distinct from mathematical aptitude, but also the structural point that the basis of ech aptitude is different. Gall divided up brain surface according to gyrus, and assigned each propensity, aptitude, and quality to each gyrus. He used clinical findings of the brain-damaged patient for supporting his thesis. Although Gall is famous only because of the founding father of phrenology, he made a giant leap in brain and mind. According to the representational theory, perception is the process in the central nervous system. And the system of perception constitutes inner representation from the input by this processing. Recognition is completed after the constituted representation matched the stored representation. I listed up several points against this representation theory. Those are data from letter recognition, inattentional blindness, color perception etc. Lastly I presented an alternative idea. The purpose of perception is not to construct the representation of the world objectively. The process of perception and motion is tightly connected as Jackson suggested. Our vision is closely related with our biological structures and we process the stimuli from the world afresh each time.

  A 64-year-old right-handed patient showing corticobasal syndrome (CBS) demonstrated agraphia for kanji. He showed predominantly right-sided mild Parkinsonism, limb-kinetic apraxia of the right hand and mild memory impairment, but preserved oral language, writing of kana and reading of both kana and kanji. In dictation of kanji, the most frequent writing errors were non-responses, followed by paragraphia. The shapes of kanji written by him were not distorted and he could copy kanji smoothly and precisely. These findings indicated that his writing disturbance was characterized by disability to recall the form of kanji but not apraxic agraphia. Magnetic resonance imaging showed mild atrophy in the frontal and parietal lobes bilaterally. ¹²³I-Iodoamphetamine single photon emission computed tomography revealed severe hypoperfusion in the left posterior inferior temporal lobe and mild hypoperfusion in the left anterior superior and inferior parietal lobes and left medial thalamus—lesions that are known to be responsible for agraphia in patients with cerebrovascular diseases. Although the patient presented with CBS, his cerebrospinal fluid profile indicated Alzheimerʼs disease pathology. In this patient, the feature of agraphia and the results of functional neuroimaging were consistent with those reported in patients with Alzheimerʼs disease, but not with those reported in patients with corticobasal degeneration. Type of agraphia may help in speculating the pathology behind possible CBS.

  We report the case of a 60-year-old right-handed woman who has spoken jargon speech for more than one year despite severe non-fluent aphasia after left putaminal hemorrhage. At 5 months post onset she presented severe motor aphasia. However, her utterances showed two phases: usually non-fluent speech with effort and slow speech rate, but in some scenes fluent jargon speech with no effort or slowness of speech. Her jargon was well-articulated but consisted of meaningless syllabic sequences. Also, having no obvious grammatical separation of function words, her jargon was consistent with syllabic (in Japanese) / phonemic jargon. It appeared more in conversation than in task performance, and also in scenes where she responds to difficult tasks or gets excited. Frequency gradually reduced and disappeared without changing into other types of jargon. Because of its scene specificity and disappearing process, we assume that jargon speech in this case is oral expression that has been driven by high motivation to speak, without lexical retrieval, phonemic activation and sentence generation.