Dinishak.com MindBlog

All things between psychology and technology

July 2nd, 2017

Open source article looking at the effects of being tethered to our smartphones on working memory and fluid intelligence. Pretty much, keep that smartphone physically away from yourself if you have to focus and solve problems.

October 31st, 2016

I’ll be in the department of criminology at Fresno State University next week going over some aspects of the neuropsychology of sex offense. The topic of sex offending is not simple; there are numerous factors that go into it but I’ve been curious about the assessment of the neuropsychological functioning of offenders in the forensic setting. My talk will be an overview of what I’ve found

https://www.fresnostate.edu/socialsciences/criminology/news/

August 19th, 2016

As I assess more patients over time, I’m always coming back to the importance of observations during evaluation. I think a recent report’s behavioral observation section was over one page. Reminds me of Sherlock Holmes:

Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for. By a man’s finger nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed. That all united should fail to enlighten the competent enquirer in any case is almost inconceivable.

—From “The Book of Life,” an article by Sherlock Holmes quoted in A Study in Scarlet

March 6th, 2015

Damasio in Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain (1994), observes:

The standardized psychological and neuropsychological tests revealed a superior intellect. . . Elliot performed normally on memory tests employing interference procedures.. . . In short, perceptual ability, past memory, short‐term memory, new learning, language, and the ability to do arithmetic were intact. Attention, the ability to focus on a particular mental content to the exclusion of others, was also intact, and so was working memory. . . My prediction that Elliott would fail on tests known to detect frontal lobe dysfunction was not correct. . . . What was the chance he would fare well in the prime personality test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, also known as the MMPI? As you may have guessed by now, Elliot was normal in that one too. . . After all these tests, Elliot emerged as a man with a normal intellect who was unable to decide properly, especially when the decision involved personal or social matters.

Could it be that reasoning and decision making in the personal and social domain were different from reasoning and thinking in domains concerning objects, space, numbers, and words? Might they depend on different neural systems and processes? I had to accept the fact that despite the major changes that had followed his brain damage, nothing much could be measured in the laboratory with the traditional neuropsychological instruments. Other patients had shown this sort of dissociation. (pages 41–43)

As neuropsychologists, we are asked to assess an individual’s ability to carry out complex everyday tasks including social interactions and juggling plans for the future. We try our best, in a limited amount of time, to capture executive functions with standardized measures in an artificial setting. It’s important to remember the importance of supplementing formal measures with informal information gathering. This could entail the addition of a process approach to assessment, or, more indirect methods such as naturalistic observation, collateral interviews, and an item-level analysis of behavioral-executive-function rating scales.

January 19th, 2015

If you’re an amazon prime member and buy stuff all the time like I do, try to use Amazon Smile. It lets you benefit a charity of your choosing when you make purchases through smile.amazon.com. They take 0.5% of the total of eligible items and donate that – but only when shopping through smile.amazon.com. The 0.5% does not change the cost of the items. Currently this offer is US only.

You can find the official explanation of Amazon Smile here.

December 31st, 2014

It’s going to be an interesting year.

Come funziona l’occhio, “Il secolo illustrato”, 1936

Come funziona l’occhio, “Il secolo illustrato”, 1936

December 29th, 2014

Some really good longer format sciency topics from the BBC here and here

October 3rd, 2013

Feeling kinda nerdy after finishing up two posters
transforming skewed data

May 19th, 2013

Here is a reference for Syndromes and Associated Neuroanatomic Localization of Lesions

lesions

December 11th, 2012

Blink (2007) observes:

“You see someone, you click, and you’re euphoric.
And in response, your ventral tegmental area uses
chemical messengers such as dopamine, serotonin,
and oxytocin to send signals racing to a part of the
brain called the nucleus accumbens with the good
news, telling it to start craving. [Certain regions]
are deactivated—areas as within the amygdala,
associated with fear (p. 3; cited in Hatfield &
Rapson 2009)”.

October 13th, 2012

Ah, the memories….sitting in the library at UD, reading this amazing, yet difficult, work. Miss that.

August 20th, 2012

Sometimes, when browsing media files within a folder, windows will pop up the “COM Surrogate has stopped working” error–I recently was seeing this on a new laptop running win7 64 bit when browsing pictures in a folder using the default windows picture viewer. Here is the error:

I found a neat little program to replace the windows picture viewer; best of all it is free and dims everything in the background. The program is Nexus Image. All you need to do is right click on a picture in a folder, choose “open with” then “choose default program”. Search the location for where you extracted the program “NexusImage.exe” and then make sure you have “always use the selected program to open this type of file” checked.

August 17th, 2012

“The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.”

-Steinbeck

Visited Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park today in Santa Cruz and was really touched by the redwood trees. Many of them were over 1500 years old. I took a few pictures.

May 8th, 2012

authenticity vs verisimilitude

May 6th, 2012

For some inexplicable reason, Endnote for PC does not like to play well with MicroSoft Word. Discussions with others have led me to believe this is a long standing issue.

What happens is that after inserting references, Endnote will mess up the citations even though it is set to conform to APA formatting. For example, as I am finishing editing my dissertation, I notice that many references will have the author’s first name spelled out (e.g., Steve Smith, 2000 instead of Smith, 2000). The problem arises when one tries to hand edit these mistakes that Endnote creates; Word will update the fields in your file and all the screwed up reference fields will go back to normal when you open up Endnote and your Word File. This can be quite annoying.

So, once you are done editing your work and have no more use of Endnote, you can prevent those references from updating (i.e. you are breaking the link with Endnote) by doing the following in Word:

1. Open your file in Word.
2. Select all the text (CTRL-A)
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+F9

March 1st, 2012

2012 AGS Updated Beers Criteria was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society today. Here is the link to that.

The Beers Criteria for Potentially Inappropriate Medication (PIM) Use in Older Adults is one of the most frequently consulted sources of information about the safe prescribing of medications for older adults and is used widely in geriatrics clinical care, training, and research.

For a neuropsychologist, it’s a good idea to check medication interactions and to become aware of potential cognitive side-effects of medication. Multiple drug usage is common in all developed countries. In the U.S., polypharmacy is found in 40% of those older than 65 years. An example of the importance of multiple medications can be seen with drugs that have anticholinergic effects; when more than one drug is taken that has this effect, side effects can include an increase in the patients’ total anticholinergic burden as evidenced by clinical signs such as dry mouth, sedation, confusion and even hallucinations and delirium

February 2nd, 2012

The human eye has 125 million rods, each one containing 1000 folds in its photoreceptor
membrane, with each fold containing 1 million molecules of photoceptor. This extraordinary
light-sensing array can detect one single photon, which is 10 to the (-11 power) watts
(which is 0.00000000001 watts Wow!).

December 7th, 2011

Today in brain cutting didactic we saw a patient who had a massive infarct. It got me thinking about why a stroke is called a stroke.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a sudden, inexplicable cerebrovascular accident was first likened to a “stroke of God’s hand” in 1599. The relationship of a cerebral infarction to an act of God exists in other cultures as well: the Greek verb plesso means to “stroke, hit, or beat,” and the derivative plegia gives us our term hemiplegia.
Dirckx JH: Stroke. Stroke 17:559, 1986.

November 16th, 2011

The first description of a neurologic disease appears in the Smith papyrus, which is the oldest known medical text. This ancient papyrus, translated by Edward Smith, consists of a number of “case reports” of different diseases, presented and discussed by an unknown Egyptian author, written about 3300 BC. One of the cases is a person with a traumatic head injury, which is the earliest known description of a neurologic problem.

November 16th, 2011

Doing some reading and I came across a list of people who probably had AD:

1. Ronald Reagan—U.S. president
2. Charlton Heston—actor
3. Rita Hayworth—actress
4. Immanuel Kant—philosopher
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson—writer
6. Maurice Ravel—composer
7. John James Audubon—painter

March 12th, 2011

Stories of interest for March 11th

March 9th, 2011

Stories of interest for March 8th

March 8th, 2011

Stories of interest for March 7th

March 5th, 2011

Stories of interest for March 4th

February 21st, 2011

Stories of interest for February 20th