Skip to main content

Or 34,00 After 66% tax deduction

I make a monthly donation I make an IFI donation
Research, science & health

Analogical reasoning revisited

Published on: 15/06/2016 Reading time: 1 min
image
Retour à la recherche

In our representation of the world, how do we link an electron and the moon ? Through analogical reasoning ! Both gravitate around a nucleus or around earth. Analogical reasoning is a thinking process enabling us to notice a similarity between two separate things. It also enables us to match a previous situation with a new similar situation.

Emmanuelle Volle, from Bruno Dubois and Richard Lévy's team has shown through new analogical reasoning tasks, carried out in patients with brain injuries, that analogical reasoning was based on the integrity of the upfront area of the left prefrontal cortex and its anatomical connections. This brain network would match and integrate the required dimensions to form an analogy.

These results shed new light on the brain network involved in the creation of new concepts and in the connection of knowledge, seemingly without any real connection with each other.

Moreover, new analogical reasoning tests open the way for a new unprecedented mode to assess the effects of frontal lesions in neurology and might therefore serve as a diagnostic tool.

Sources

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/139/6/1783/1753948
Urbanski M. et al. Brain, 2016.

Our news on the subject

La bibliothèque de Babel
Mental Time Travel: A New Case of Autobiographical Hypermnesia
Remembering past events in minute detail, revisiting them methodically, and reliving past emotions—this is the peculiarity of people with an exceptional memory of their own lives, known as autobiographical hypermnesia, or hyperthymesia. This...
08.28.2025 Research, science & health
Crédit : Ana Yael.
An International Database to Better Understand Dreams
In an article published in Nature Communications, researchers from 37 scientific institutions—including Paris Brain Institute—unveil the DREAM database: an ambitious project designed to centralize, share, and standardize data from research on sleep...
08.14.2025 Research, science & health
Le cortex moteur
Origin of Lance-Adams Syndrome Finally Elucidated
First described 60 years ago, chronic myoclonus following cerebral anoxia is now known as Lance-Adams syndrome. This is a severe disorder whose mechanisms were, until now, poorly understood. Geoffroy Vellieux, Vincent Navarro, and their colleagues at...
06.16.2025 Research, science & health
Tiré de New Theory of Colours de Mary Gartside, 1808
Aphantasia Might Be Linked to Alterations in Brain Connectivity
Thanks to 7T fMRI, researchers from Paris Brain Institute and NeuroSpin, the CEA's neuroimaging centre, are exploring the neural substrate of visual imagery at very high resolution for the first time. Their results, publiés [i] in Cortex, pave the...
06.06.2025 Research, science & health
Le développement du cerveau a une part d’aléatoire
The stochastic aspect of brain development
Although every person’s personality is the result of genetic and environmental factors, these are not the only factors at play. Bassem Hassan and his team at Paris Brain Institute have discovered that, in fruit flies (drosophila), individuality also...
05.12.2025 Research, science & health
Un iceberg
The ICEBERG cohort, 10 years of collective scientific and medical mobilization
The ICEBERG cohort, initiated 10 years ago, is interested in studying factors predictive of the onset and progression of Parkinson’s disease.
05.15.2025 Research, science & health
See all our news