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Studies aimed at characterizing the operation of cognitive functions in normal individuals have examined data from patients with focal cerebral insult. These studies assume that brain damage impairs functions of the cognitive processes along lines that honour the ‘normal’ pre-morbid organization of the cognitive system¹. For example, detailed study of individual brain-damaged patients has revealed apparently selective disruption of cognitive functions such as auditory/verbal working memory², phonological processing ability³, grapheme-to-phoneme translation procedures⁴and semantic processing⁵. Warrington et al. have studied patients with even more fine-grained selective disturbances of the semantic system^6,7. The most selective deficits have been reported for four patients who were significantly better at identifying inanimate objects than they were at identifying living things and foods⁸. These patterns of …