the full monty on frontal love syndrome

Mind Hacks offers up this humorous vignette for your entertainment:

There’s a lovely typo in a 1976 paper from the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry that reports on a study about epilepsy after surgery. Check out the last sentence of the abstract …

I’ll spare you the suspense (but read the abstract anyway!): an undisclosed subset of patients in the sample were fortunate enough to suffer from “temporal love trauma”. You might have thought temporal love trauma to be an unusual disorder (it’s certainly much rarer than temporal lobe trauma), but that’s an empirical question, and the empirical answer is you’d be wrong. At least according to Google Scholar, which assures us quite confidently that temporal love epilepsy is a well-documented condition:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22temporal+love%22&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search

Marvel that it is, Google Scholar also gives us a rare glimpse into the symptoms of a related but even more mysterious disorder: frontal love epilepsy. Consider the title of the following paper, cited in the reference section of a book by one M. Cherkes Julkowski:

Burgess, PW & Shallice, T (1996). Response suppression, initiation, and strategy use following frontal love lesions. [For reasons that are presently unclear to me, I wasn't able to locate this article in the primary literature.]

Or the following helpful tip from a set of lecture notes on functional neuroanatomy, now mysteriously disappeared from their original Cambridge home (a conspiracy?):

Theories of frontal love function have superseded ARAS theory in explaining personality differences.

The lecture notes then go on to say that empirical studies have shown that the personality traits of extraversion and agreeableness depend in large part on one’s frontal love capacity. Illustrations are provided in the text. If you don’t believe me, you can go and see for yourself. Wait, I forgot: they’re no longer online. How unfortunate.

I imagine there are also cases of parietal love lesions or occipital love epilepsy (blinded by one’s feelings?) out there, waiting to be discovered. It really is a great time to be alive and doing science…