WHERE THE BRAIN APPRECIATES THE MORAL OF A STORY

To identify the distributed brain regions used for appreciating the gr ammatical, semantic and thematic aspects of a story, regional cerebral blood flow was measured with positron emission tomography in nine nor mal volunteers during the reading of Aesop's fables. In four condition s, subjects had to monitor the fables for font changes, grammatical er rors, a semantic feature associated with a fable character, and the mo ral of the fable. Both right and left prefrontal cortices were consist ently, but selectively, activated across the grammatical, semantic, an d moral conditions. In particular, appreciating the moral of a story r equired activating a distributed set of brain regions in the right hem isphere which included the temporal and prefrontal cortices. These fin dings emphasize that story processing engages a widely distributed net work of brain regions, a subset of which become preferentially active during the processing of a specific aspect of the text.