Double Dissicociatoin
It is the last few weeks of class. This is why I have not posted in like, forever. Spring break was in March, there was no good reason to have waited so long to write something and post it, so I'm going to go ahead and post something that almost no one cares about for the sake of posting something and not letting my poor journal to starve and die in the proverbial wasteland that is the end of the semester, wherein all of my creative energies are being usurped by greedy school, silenced by dense and unpleasent revelations from friends, and drunkenly making phone calls at poor times.
I hope this gets read and that someone has not abandoned the internet for all its liars, me included. That I miss her and I hope she is not so miserable and I am genuinely upset that I am not nearly godlike enough to know at all times when my friends are suffering. Yes, thats completely an unrealistic expectation. Yes, I believe I should be, anyway.
So on to the part no one cares about! By calling on Krom once more, promising him greater glory through my accomplishments, I managed to get it together enough over the weekend to read and condense into a poster a 15 page study in neurolinguistics. I had a funny revelation about myself during this. I opened the pdf and just started reading, i didn't question for a second what it was that I was doing. The part of my brain that even knows what Krom is and holds all that other useless knowledge of fantasy and horror suddenly turned on, saw what the fantastic space brain was doing and said "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? THAT WORD HAD 27 SYLLABLES AND IT WAS NOT A PLACE THAT ONLY EXISTS IN DREAMS. WE ARE GOING TO GET A REPUTATION IF YOU KEEP DOING THIS." I had had an epiphany that all of my scientific knowledge is segregated from my offbeat nerd brain, and probably segregated again from this pithy and brilliant authorative part that I'm using now, and that possibly as little as 5 years ago the absolute density and level of specific technical and medical knowledge that I *needed* to be using to decode what this research article was trying to tell me was simply non existant.
The study, finally, I gave a presentation on and stood next to my poster and told anyone that walked by, including no less then 4 really cute grad students involved a breakdown of a situation that arose to show a double dissicotiation between two patients that showed a slightly specific neurological process that governs the mental lexicon by categorey and not as one very large lump. Two patients, one havign suffered a stroke, the second having suffered a blunt force trauma in an accident at work, both had an almost identical set of laisions around the Wernicke's area, immediately above the motor cortex. Both patients had fluent speech and had become completly self sufficient again at 7 months post trauma, including the ability to drive, but testing showed that both suffered a similar semantic deficit. The damage in that area of the brain showed a semantic impairment resulting in the loss of command for specific words. Now, the rub; The older patient, J.J the stroke victim, lost his command over almost all words barring the general categorey of animals. P.S., the patient that got pegged in the skull, retained command over everything BUT animals (also, vegetables). Semantic models orginally show the ability to decode semantic information as beign related to input. Wenicke's aphasia, for example, is found to be more of a phonological deficit then a complete impairment of the ability to produce words, similar effects governing othological stimulus and actual image association had dominated our ability to decode semantic information. These patients clearly showed that the nature of their impairment was completely unrelated to that model of recognition, as they were tested on all three inputs and results were clearly unaffected.
What we do see, though, is that the brain is obviously doing something else in the stage after recognition of a stimulus that is related more directly to the storage and recall of words, that they are being stored in sub blocks by categories, and that clearly the locations of these sub blocks are not uniform, as both patients had nigh on identical physical deformities. Later testing showed J.J. recovered some command over the category of transportation. This is interesting, for on the surface, J.J. had claimed to be a motorsport enthusiast, maybe linking familiarity with his ability to recall words, but P.S. had proclaimed a preference for watching animal documentaries, for hunting, and for visiting reserves and zoos, clearly showing that this familiarity was not immediatly the factor influencing the regeneration of a categorey. This implies that there is a set of sub categories. Semantically we are aware of them, we can describe things in this manner (Dog <+domestice, +animate, +furry, +omniverous,...>) so we can make the jump to the concept that J.J. must have retained certain overlapping categories between vehicles and animals (surprisingly similar, +mobile, +quadrupedal, +fast, etc.)
(OMG MATT YOU ARE SO SMART AND FASCINATING AND THOUGH EVERYONE HERE LOVES IT, GET A REAL JOB AND STOP SHARING. KTHXBAI - the internet)
So this is like an awful time to point this out with something so dense and largely inaccessible, but I really wish people would leave comments on my live journal! XD
I hope this gets read and that someone has not abandoned the internet for all its liars, me included. That I miss her and I hope she is not so miserable and I am genuinely upset that I am not nearly godlike enough to know at all times when my friends are suffering. Yes, thats completely an unrealistic expectation. Yes, I believe I should be, anyway.
So on to the part no one cares about! By calling on Krom once more, promising him greater glory through my accomplishments, I managed to get it together enough over the weekend to read and condense into a poster a 15 page study in neurolinguistics. I had a funny revelation about myself during this. I opened the pdf and just started reading, i didn't question for a second what it was that I was doing. The part of my brain that even knows what Krom is and holds all that other useless knowledge of fantasy and horror suddenly turned on, saw what the fantastic space brain was doing and said "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? THAT WORD HAD 27 SYLLABLES AND IT WAS NOT A PLACE THAT ONLY EXISTS IN DREAMS. WE ARE GOING TO GET A REPUTATION IF YOU KEEP DOING THIS." I had had an epiphany that all of my scientific knowledge is segregated from my offbeat nerd brain, and probably segregated again from this pithy and brilliant authorative part that I'm using now, and that possibly as little as 5 years ago the absolute density and level of specific technical and medical knowledge that I *needed* to be using to decode what this research article was trying to tell me was simply non existant.
The study, finally, I gave a presentation on and stood next to my poster and told anyone that walked by, including no less then 4 really cute grad students involved a breakdown of a situation that arose to show a double dissicotiation between two patients that showed a slightly specific neurological process that governs the mental lexicon by categorey and not as one very large lump. Two patients, one havign suffered a stroke, the second having suffered a blunt force trauma in an accident at work, both had an almost identical set of laisions around the Wernicke's area, immediately above the motor cortex. Both patients had fluent speech and had become completly self sufficient again at 7 months post trauma, including the ability to drive, but testing showed that both suffered a similar semantic deficit. The damage in that area of the brain showed a semantic impairment resulting in the loss of command for specific words. Now, the rub; The older patient, J.J the stroke victim, lost his command over almost all words barring the general categorey of animals. P.S., the patient that got pegged in the skull, retained command over everything BUT animals (also, vegetables). Semantic models orginally show the ability to decode semantic information as beign related to input. Wenicke's aphasia, for example, is found to be more of a phonological deficit then a complete impairment of the ability to produce words, similar effects governing othological stimulus and actual image association had dominated our ability to decode semantic information. These patients clearly showed that the nature of their impairment was completely unrelated to that model of recognition, as they were tested on all three inputs and results were clearly unaffected.
What we do see, though, is that the brain is obviously doing something else in the stage after recognition of a stimulus that is related more directly to the storage and recall of words, that they are being stored in sub blocks by categories, and that clearly the locations of these sub blocks are not uniform, as both patients had nigh on identical physical deformities. Later testing showed J.J. recovered some command over the category of transportation. This is interesting, for on the surface, J.J. had claimed to be a motorsport enthusiast, maybe linking familiarity with his ability to recall words, but P.S. had proclaimed a preference for watching animal documentaries, for hunting, and for visiting reserves and zoos, clearly showing that this familiarity was not immediatly the factor influencing the regeneration of a categorey. This implies that there is a set of sub categories. Semantically we are aware of them, we can describe things in this manner (Dog <+domestice, +animate, +furry, +omniverous,...>) so we can make the jump to the concept that J.J. must have retained certain overlapping categories between vehicles and animals (surprisingly similar, +mobile, +quadrupedal, +fast, etc.)
(OMG MATT YOU ARE SO SMART AND FASCINATING AND THOUGH EVERYONE HERE LOVES IT, GET A REAL JOB AND STOP SHARING. KTHXBAI - the internet)
So this is like an awful time to point this out with something so dense and largely inaccessible, but I really wish people would leave comments on my live journal! XD