Today is the start of Block 6, which means I actually finished up with Human Neuropsychology last Wednesday when Block 5 ended. BUT, I wanted to be sure I didn’t leave my story unfinished. The last week of Block 5 was hectic and busy, but of course filled with amazing experiences. Here are the highlights: 1) a field trip to Craig Hospital in Denver, 2) a field trip to the International Neuropsychological Society conference in Denver, 3) preparing and giving a lecture, and finally 4) writing a critical review paper.
During third week, we went up to Denver two days in a row. First we went to Craig Hospital, a world-renowned neuro-rehabilitation facility. Visiting Craig was so valuable. We learned about their mission as a hospital and got a tour of the facilities. Craig Hospital has a very well-rounded and holistic approach to neuro-rehabilitation. They house families of the brain/spinal cord injured patient for up to 30 days at the hospital because they recognize just how important family support is during the healing and recovery process. They also help injured patients not only learn how to perform basic daily functions given their new situation, but they help them have fun. They help them enjoy things they may have never thought possible given their injury. The atmosphere was so positive at the hospital — which I didn’t expect, but I so appreciated that.
The day after we visited Craig Hospital, we made our way back up to Denver for the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) conference. The conference had poster sessions as well as talks we could attend to learn about some of the recent research in the neuropsychology field. The last talk of the day, and probably my favorite, was a talk by Michael Gazzaniga. Gazzaniga is responsible for a lot of work done with split-brain research. In other words, what happens when the two hemispheres of the brain no longer communicate with each other. Gazzaniga didn’t speak about any current research during his talk, but instead gave a keynote speech about his overall journey and often encouraged the audience to “just do it” when it comes to research and investigating the unknown.
I was responsible (along with an awesome partner) for teaching the class the Friday afternoon after our two field trips. Needless to say, I was exhausted. Lecturing is already difficult, but exhaustion makes it harder. My partner and I spent the week before our lecture reading the material, making notes and trying to find SOME way to create an intriguing and organized 90 minute lecture on our topic— emotional disorders. Thankfully, we powered through and our efforts paid off. This was the second time I had given a lecture at CC, and both times that hardest part was synthesizing the information into a good lecture. You can’t teach everything in the textbook. You don’t have time and it bores your audience. You have to teach the way you’d want to learn. And that’s hard. My partner and I chose a topic that unfortunately had a vague and somewhat disorganized chapter in the textbook. We weren’t given much structure to start with… but in order to engage the class and ensure that we actually taught them something, we had to think of a way to put some structure to the material, which was TOUGH. So, there were all of the challenges of normally preparing a lecture PLUS our exhaustion — but we still succeeded! I took a long nap after that afternoon.
To end the block, we also had a critical review paper to finish up. I won’t bore any of you with the details of writing the paper (nobody wants to hear about that, we all know what that’s like, ha!). I will, however, share with you all what I wrote my paper on because that’s not boring. I wrote my paper on a neuropsychological disorder called Capgras Syndrome. Individuals with Capgras Syndrome believe that a close friend or family member has been replaced by an identical looking imposter. Crazy, right? So, if I went up to my mom I’d think that that wasn’t actually her, but an imposter who looks exactly like her. The idea behind this disorder is that the region in the brain that recognizes faces is functioning just fine, but this region is not communicating with the limbic system (which is all about emotional processing). An individual sees a familiar person and recognizes who he/she is but no longer feels any emotional response when recognizing that person. So the brain makes stuff up. If you don’t feel anything when seeing a familiar person, it must not be them, right? I wrote my paper on whether or not the basis for this syndrome is neurological (e.g., structural problems in the brain) or psychiatric (e.g., another cause that’s not brought on by any physical changes in the brain). I came to the conclusion that there may be pure Capgras Syndrome (in which the individual has no other psychological abnormalities except for these delusions) and Capgras-like symptoms (in which an individual has these delusions among many other delusional thoughts or psychological abnormalities). Capgras Syndrome appears to be neurological in origin, whereas many Capgras-like symptoms can occur from a psychiatric origin and are often comorbid with other psychiatric issues such as paranoid schizophrenia.
So, there it is. My reflections on the end of the block. I loved this class. For any neuroscience or psychology majors, I highly recommend it. You can’t NOT be interested in the material, our professor, Kristi, is awesome and you learn so much. I enjoyed sharing my experiences with all of you taking the time to read this. Please let me know if you’d like to hear more! I could talk about this stuff for hours.
