Question: What Are the Effects of a Temporal Lobe Stroke?
Answer: A temporal lobe stroke can cause a variety of long-term effects that range from difficulty speaking to hearing loss. Here are some of the most common functional dimensions affected by temporal lobe strokes.
Language:
- Wernicke's aphasia
- Word-finding difficulties: the feeling that a word is at the tip of the tongue, but it just won't roll out
- Pure word deafness
- Transcortical aphasia
- Amnestic dysnomia: difficulty retrieving names for things and people
Hearing
- Hearing loss: Usually hearing loss is mild after one temporal lobe is affected by a stroke. But when both temporal lobes are affected the result might be complete deafness. This is very rare.
- Auditory agnosia: Difficulty recognizing combinations of sounds such as songs, musical tones, and complex conversations.
- Auditory verbal agnosia: This is the same as pure word deafness (see above)
- Auditory illusions: Aberrant perception of normal sounds so that they feel unusual, strange, repeated, or loud.
- Auditory hallucinations: One hears sounds that are not there. These sounds may be very complex (the sound of a song being played on the radio) or very simple (whistles or sirens). People may or may not realize that these sounds represent a hallucination. In some cases auditory hallucinations may be accompanied by visual ones.
Memory, Emotion and Behavior
- Loss of short or long term memory
- Fits of rage
- Violent or aggressive behavior
- Placidity
- Lack of interest
- Abnormally enhanced sexuality
Other
- Vertigo (a type of balance problem)
- Abnormal perception of time: A feeling that time stands still or goes by extremely quickly. People might intermittently lose sense of what year, season or month it is.
- Disturbances of smell and taste:
- Seizures
Source:
Allan Ropper and Robert Brown, Adam's and Victor's Principles of Neurology, 8th Edition McGraw-Hill Companies Inc, United States of America, 2005, pp 417-430.
