Thursday, February 15, 2007

Visual thinking

This seminar will examine how the brain executes higher level cognitive processes, such as problem-solving, language comprehension, and visual thinking. The topic will be addressed by examining what recent brain imaging studies can tell us about these various kinds of thinking. This new scientific approach has the potential of providing important information about how the brain thinks, indicating not only what parts perform what function, but also how the activity of different parts of the brain are organized to perform some thinking task, and how various neurological diseases (e.g. aphasia, Alzheimer's) affect brain activity. A variety of different types of thinking will be examined, including short-term working memory storage and computation, problem solving, language comprehension, visual thinking. Several different technologies for measuring brain activity (e.g. PET and functional MRI and also some PET imaging) will be considered, attempting to relate brain physiology to cognitive functioning. The course will examine brain imaging in normal subjects and in people with various kinds of brain damage. Graduate Students Only.

Hemispheric contributions to pragmatics.

Twenty-seven patients with right-hemisphere damage (RBD) and thirty-one patients with left-hemisphere damage (LBD) received a new pragmatics battery in Hebrew consisting of two parts: (1) comprehension and production of basic speech acts (BSAs), including tests of assertions, questions, requests, and commands, and (2) comprehension of implicatures, including implicatures of quantity, quality, relevance, and manner. Each test had a verbal and a nonverbal version. Patients also received Hebrew versions of the Western Aphasia Battery and of the Right Hemisphere Communication Battery. Both LBD and RBD patients were impaired relative to controls but did not differ from each other in their overall scores on BSAs and on Implicatures when scores were corrected by aphasia and neglect indices. There was a systematic localization of BSAs in the left hemisphere (LH) but not in the right hemisphere (RH). There was poor localization of Implicatures in either hemisphere. In LBD patients, BSAs were associated with language functions measured with the WAB, suggesting the radical possibility that the classic localization of language functions in aphasia is influenced by the localization of the BSAs required by aphasia language tests. Both BSAs and implicatures show greater functional independence from other pragmatic, language and cognitive functions in the RBD than in the LBD patients. Thus, the LH is more likely to contain an unmodular domain-nonspecific set of central cognitive mechanisms for applying means-ends rationality principles to intentional activity.

PMID: 10857742 [PubMed - in

Friday, February 9, 2007

Free- English Pronunciation Program


LIMEWIRE and Karaoke


Speech (Classical music)

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

The Aphasia Book



Aphasia Cards



Marymount Manhattan



Sunday, February 4, 2007

the brain

the user's guide to the brain

the new map of the brain

the new map of the brain

the mystery of consciousness

the mystery of consciousness

the mystery of consciousness

the mystery of consciousness

the mystery of consciousness

the mystery of consciousness

the mystery of consciousness

the mystery of consciousness

the mystery of consciousness

how the brain rewire itself

how the brain rewire itself

how the brain rewire itself

how the brain rewire itself

how the brain rewire itself

6 lesson for handing stress

6 lesson for handing stress

6 lesson for handing stress

6 lesson for handing stress

five paths to understanding

five paths to understanding

five paths to understanding

time travel in the brain

what the mouse bain tell us

what do babies know

what do babies know

who should read your mind?

who should read your mind?

who should read your mind?

how to change a personality

the flavor of memories

the flavor of memories

the flavor of memories

the gift of mimicry

the gift of mimicry