awareness of intending to act following parietal cortex resection neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies have provided evidence suggesting that the inferior parietal lobule ipl plays a crucial role in the awareness of motor intentions for instance patients with ipl lesions caused by stroke selectively differ in the temporal judgements of their intentions to move compared with healthy controls sirigu a daprati e ciancia s giraux p nighoghossian n posada a et al 2004 altered awareness of voluntary action after damage to the parietal cortex nature neuroscience 71 8084 they experience the will to move only at the moment they start moving and not before as it should normally be the case in the study presented here we failed to replicate the main behavioral findings of the study quoted above in three patients with surgical resection of the right ipl following slowgrowing lesions their performances contrasted with that of stroke patients the timing of their intentions to act but also the delay between their judgements of intention and movement onsets were in the normal range of values for matched controls when tested with the temporal judgement task developed by benjamin libet there are in the literature some reported cases of functional neuroplasticity following surgical resection of large amount of cerebral tissue this mainly concerns the brain regions underpinning language and primary sensorimotor functions because of the small number of patients our data must be regarded cautiously they provide preliminary behavioral support to extend to conscious awareness of willing the functional neuroplasticity potentialities of the brain in human adults a new perspective towards a hodological view for higherorder cognitive processes seems open