In the article, we describe a rare case: a 52-year-old male patient with an isolated lesion of the anterior thalamic nuclei in the dominant hemisphere due to an ischemic stroke. The patient's syndrome of disordered verbal fluency, working memory, learning and executive functions is seen as a part of a lesion in the dorsolateral complex circuit. During the following 6 months, we observed significant improvement in visual learning, recent memory and categorisation of subjects, while verbal learning and visuospatial planning remained insufficient. In this context, the preservation of thalamic structures in different types of cognitive deterioration is discussed.