Cognitive Psychology can be fun, really!

So I'm taking a cognitive psychology class.  It's at 8 in the morning, which is far too early for me.  The worst thing is that it's a very tough class, so sleeping during the first half of the class is not an option.  However, there are some lessons that are so amusing that I'm not even tired.  Today's was about Spatial Neglect Syndrome - a disorder that is associated with damage to the parietal lobe of the brain (the top-backish area.)

Vision begins to be processed at the very back part of the brain, the Occipital lobe.  As your brain starts to figure out what you're seeing, it asks two questions:  What, and Where.  The "What" question is sent to your Temporal lobe, the bottom part of the brain, and the "Where" question is sent to the Parietal lobe.  When the parietal lobe gets damaged (usually by a stroke), some very odd things can happen.

In the case of a woman known as "NG", the left side of her parietal lobe was damaged by a stroke.  As a result, she is (almost completely) unable to give any attention to things on the right side of her attentional field.  So, when presented with the word "Cartoon", she only notices "Car", as well as the fact that the word is longer than just 'car'.  So she makes up the last half of the word, sometimes coming up with "Carpet", or "Cart".  Make sense?  Probably not so much.

You see, it isn't that she can't see the whole word, her brain just can't figure out the right side of it, so her brain has to guess.

It gets stranger.  Present the word "Cartoon" to her like this:

C

a

r

t

o

o

n

The exact same thing happens; it comes out as "carpet", or "cart", or something similar.  Her brain simply arranges the word mentally, is unable to process the right side of it, and so it guesses what the right half is.

In the words of my professor, "It's like her brain is putting the information on a movie screen, and removing half of it before sending it back to her consciousness."

Pictures create the same result.  When the woman, "NG", is asked to draw a clock, she will only draw the left side of the clock.

There are many different ways that Spacial Neglect Syndrome can be manifested.  In "NG"'s case, she could not pay any attention to the right half of words or objects.  In some cases, one half of each letter will be missing in a person's brain, so the letter 'O' may be seen as a 'C'.  In other cases, a person may be unable to read the left half of the page in a book.

The most interesting case my professor talked about was the case of "WBN".  After his stroke, WBN lost the ability to read, but did not lose his ability to write.  Along with losing the ability to read, WBN lost the ability to name objects.  When he was being talked to, WBN could understand about 70% of what was said to him, and only about 70% of what he said made sense - the other 30% came out as garbled nonsense (that seemed to make sense to WBN).

When WBN saw a picture of a horse, he could see the picture, label it - "Horse" - but could not read his own label, and could not say aloud what the object was, even after labelling it.  It would be at the tip of his tongue, but he would be unable to name what it was, even though his brain had written out the word for him.

As a result, there were notes written all around his house, most of which made no sense at all.

Much of his writing was garbled up.  When my professor asked for WBN's signature on a consent form, WBN (William B. N.) signed, in perfect cursive, "Brinciple Series".  My professor couldn't do much other than say, "Alright, I guess that'll have to do."

-Tim