Thinking Of Words Research Articles

A - 101 A Neuropsychological Case Study of Progressive Bulbar Palsy.

There has been limited literature regarding cognitive dysfunction associated with progressive bulbar palsy. This case study presents the neuropsychological profile of a 66-year-old White male diagnosed with progressive bulbar palsy (evolving primary lateral sclerosis) with speech production difficulties. The patient was referred by his neurologist for a neuropsychological evaluation of progressively worsening cognitive changes over the past two years, including difficulties with reading directions, spelling, structuring sentences, thinking of words to write down, and counting. He also described progressively worsening speech production difficulties. During the evaluation, the patient communicated solely through written means. Available MRI results demonstrated subtle evidence of anterior temporal atrophy bilaterally. Additional relevant history includes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a remote history of recreational opioid use. Given the patient's speech production difficulties, measures were selected to include those that did not require verbal responses. For the few measures that did require verbal responses, administration was adjusted to allow him to provide written responses. On evaluation, he demonstrated intact orientation, processing speed, receptive language, and visuospatial functioning. In contrast, he demonstrated relative weaknesses on measures of attention, executive functioning (i.e., problem solving and cognitive flexibility), and free recall of information (with intact recognition). Behavioral features were also noted during the evaluation, including impulsivity and disorganization. The case provides preliminary data regarding possible cognitive profiles associated with progressive bulbar palsy, including possible areas of cognitive strengths and weaknesses. This case also highlights the need for further investigation of cognitive profiles of the condition which may assist with treatment planning.

Keeping the inner voice inside the head, a pilot fMRI study.

IntroductionThe inner voice is experienced during thinking in words (inner speech) and silent reading and evokes brain activity that is highly similar to that associated with external voices. Yet while the inner voice is experienced in internal space (inside the head), external voices (one's own and those of others) are experienced in external space. In this paper, we investigate the neural basis of this differential spatial localization.MethodsWe used fMRI to examine the difference in brain activity between reading silently and reading aloud. As the task involved reading aloud, data were first denoised by removing independent components related to head movement. They were subsequently processed using finite impulse response basis function to address the variations of the hemodynamic response. Final analyses were carried out using permutation‐based statistics, which is appropriate for small samples. These analyses produce spatiotemporal maps of brain activity.ResultsReading silently relative to reading aloud was associated with activity of the “where” auditory pathway (Inferior parietal lobule and middle temporal gyrus), and delayed activity of the primary auditory cortex.ConclusionsThese pilot data suggest that internal space localization of the inner voice depends on the same neural resources as that for external space localization of external voices—the “where” auditory pathway. We discuss the implications of these findings on the possible mechanisms of abnormal experiences of the inner voice as is the case in verbal hallucinations.

Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words Second Edition

Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words Second Edition

Writing Resources—An Annotated List of Helpful Books

Writing Resources—An Annotated List of Helpful Books

Exploratory study of imagery rescripting without focusing on early traumatic memories for major depressive disorder.

BackgroundMental imagery has a more powerful impact on our emotions than thinking in words about the same material. Treating intrusive images with imagery rescripting (IR) has been reported for various disorders, including post‐traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety disorder, and bipolar disorder. There has been less research about IR as a major depressive disorder (MDD).AimsWe examined whether IR without focusing on early traumatic memories is effective in MDD.MethodsWe enrolled 19 participants with MDD, who received 15 weekly sessions of full CBT, including two sessions for IR of intrusive images and, separately, for memory rescripting. Before and after the IR intervention, participants were asked to rate the intrusive images they experienced against, an intrusion index that included difficulty (interference with daily life), uncontrollability, distress caused by the negative image, and vividness. We recorded the contents of each participant's negative and positive imagery to classify these.ResultsThe intrusion index scores decreased after the IR sessions. Negative images experienced by the participants while in a depressive mood were categorized into three different types: blame, social exclusion, and loneliness. The rescripted positive images were categorized into good relations and worthy self (competent self).ConclusionsThese results suggest that IR of intrusive images without focusing on early traumatic memories may usefully be incorporated into routine CBT sessions for MDD.

Scientific writing = thinking in words

Scientific writing = thinking in words

Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words

Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words

Two Hauntings, and: Dead Poet in the Passenger Seat

Two Hauntings, and: Dead Poet in the Passenger Seat Lesley Wheeler (bio) Two Hauntings It's mostly slag, the geologist says. He squintsat each chunk of my dead grandmother's rockcollection, then up at me to see if my feelingsare hurt. Glass, leftover. He tries the amberlump with his pocketknife, to see it break,I guess. Some copper ore, too, and basalt.Could be from anywhere. Her motives unclear. Somebody's with you now. The medium pointsat my sister, on a ghost tour with a packof college friends. She had just started thinkingof our other grandmother. The memories made her somber:a family row, some pills not swallowed, a stroke.She wants you to know that it was an accident.She misses you all. My sister phones me in tears. I miss her too, but I knew her grief. What hurtsis the story lost in the rubble. That vitreous trace. [End Page 74] Dead Poet in the Passenger Seat Dickinson flickers beside me,a sepia projectionin too few frames per second—an analog broadcast, broken as trees break light. Discrete, despitethe slant-rhyme of us. She's dazedby the persistence of her signal,but grows sharp as she plays with the radio knobs. She asks how I dreamand conjure while I drivethis carriage at such shuddering speed.Observes that I'm not alive to the blurred show at the roadside—plungeof hawk for carrion,stems staggering under seed. She warns,slow down. I carry on about parallel routes, the mapI might have used. Her imagegoes snowy, faintly doubled. I askif she regrets her fine-stitched silences. Thinking of words, she slantsforward, as if against wind,and wrings her hands. She says, oh, yes,I do. Too many friends were ghosts, or I a ghost to them.But glancing at her eyesjust for one attentive moment,I glimpse the no, joyous, [End Page 75] the banked-up fire of her bound-up hair.Her dash protracts—each inky linesizzles like a telephone wire.Connected the old way. Alone. [End Page 76] Lesley Wheeler Lesley Wheeler's newest collection, Heterotopia, won the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. Her previous books include Heathen (C&R) and Voicing American Poetry (Cornell); her poems appear in Poetry, Blackbird, Slate, and other journals. Copyright © 2011 University of Nebraska Press

How to Have a Visitor

How to Have a Visitor Toby Bochan He is flying in to see you for a long weekend. He works at a place where you get every possible holiday, a bank or a school or the government. You don't know exactly what he does. Something involving numbers. You have known each other since college, from college. You've seen him once or twice a year since graduation: same place, same time kind of things. But this is his first visit to see you, just to see you. He lives far enough away that driving isn't feasible. Especially because you hate to drive and he doesn't own a car. Thomas, always for you Thomas and never Tom, Thomas lives in Boston. He doesn't, he says, need a car. How nice for him! Your car, on the other hand, has been acting up: making rude noises, stalling. Mornings you pump the gas (three times three is the magic number) and hope that it will start. There is really no other way to get around where you live in Texas. Thomas takes the T, the mass transit in Boston, Massachusetts. You mix up the words, try to fit it into a limerick: There once was a young man named Thomaswho preferred to a car the train mass,And twice a day heis found riding the Tfrom his home to his work in Boston, Mass! Poetry is not your strong suit. It's not a red power suit. It's not even your conservative navy blue interview suit that got you your current crummy job, copy editing. Poetry is the bargain dress that looks like a suit, but really is only one piece, a faux suit with a jacket that can't be removed. [End Page 166] 100% Polyester, but you kind of like it anyway. You wear it occasionally. Play around with it. Limericks are your new puzzle. Instead of trying to figure out a five-letter word for fatigued (tired) over coffee at work, spend time thinking of words that rhyme with Thomas. Make a list: bass, brass, crass, class, gas, grass, lass, pass, sass. Your big fat ass, impossible to pass after Christmas. Alas! Start dieting. Start going to the gym every day, an hour and a half each time. You want to have nice, flat abs for him. Don't hope for a washboard stomach. Okay, hope for it all you want, but know it won't happen. You only have twelve days. Each morning, stand in front of the mirror, stretching your arms overhead. Check your thighs for cellulite. Whoop! There it is! Go to the mall and buy an expensive, ineffectual cellulite cream. It is 35 dollars. You don't have this kind of money to spend on a cream, so charge it. At the Clinique counter, a woman asks if you would like a free skincare analysis. She is wearing a white lab coat open over her dress. You guess this is supposed to make you feel like she's a scientist, like she has a degree in dermatology or at least has taken a night course in beauty school. The way she has applied her blush, two peach slashes, makes you doubt that she has. Still, what the hell! You want to look your best. Say: "Sure." The woman with bad blush sits you in front of a magnifying mirror. This is not pleasant. And you have good skin! Mrs. Blush 1986 looks at you and slides the answers to question on a little plastic chart. She slides a silver knob over so a yellow block that says, Fair, shows in the window labeled Skin Color. She looks directly into your eyes, squinting. Eye color: Hazel/Brown. "Is that your natural hair color?" she asks. Say: "Yes," but it is not—you think. You think this shade is a little redder than your natural color, but it's close enough for her. What color is this hair? The box said dark copper. You think of old pennies. Your hair is nothing like the color of any penny. Dark Brown, she slides in, looking at your roots. "Do you bum...

Big books: Monkey Puzzle

Learning objectives •Following the text using a left to right movement. •Predicting, using the clues in the text. Hearing rhymes (the matching sounds at the end of words) and understanding that they will not necessarily look (be spelt) the same. Choosing other rhyming words. •Joining in, following instructions and listening. •Careful colouring within outlines; adding own creatures to the scene. •Thinking of words described by a particular adjective and drawing them. •Learning and recording a song. •Understanding that rhyming words sound the same at the end. Choosing some rhyming words, making up a sentence and drawing a picture. •Finding out about a jungle animal and drawing it. • Learning about the strange life cycles of butterflies and frogs. •Thinking about using verbs to describe how creatures move. •Thinking about simple similes. •Having the opportunity to show work to the class.

A 75-year-old man with cognitive impairment and gait changes

Two to three years prior to presentation to Mayo Clinic, this elderly man, a former practicing psychiatrist, noted reduction in the ease and fluency of dictating progress notes. The problem progressed, and he developed difficulty operating the dictation system itself. He had difficulty writing prescriptions, and, for example, would leave the patient’s name off the prescription. One year prior to presentation, one of the facilities for which he worked expressed concern that he might be a danger to his patients, and he promptly retired. The patient and his wife noted other problems as well. He would pay some bills twice and had difficulty doing arithmetic in his head. His wife said he would veer toward the center line while driving, and she would need to remind him to get back in the lane. Once he made a wrong turn and went 100 miles out of the way before realizing the problem. He had trouble thinking of words he wanted to say. On one instance his language was “garbled” for a few seconds. He was slower getting dressed. His gait had changed, and he was described as “hunched over” and having difficulty stopping walking if he was walking very fast. He had one fall. He had a tremor of both hands at rest, more pronounced on the right than the left, and difficulty getting up out of a chair. Eight or nine years earlier, during sleep, he would vocalize, yell, vigorously shake a limb, or act as if he is running in bed. When awakened, he often described being chased by something. At present these activities were occurring one night per week. His wife learned to awaken quickly and would either wake him or move out of the way to avoid injury. These behaviors tended to occur earlier in the night …

Word finding difficulty as a post-polio sequelae.

Seventy-nine percent of respondents to the 1990 National Post-Polio Survey reported difficulty "thinking of words I want to say," with 37% reporting frequent, moderate-to-severe word finding difficulty. This study was undertaken to objectively document polio survivors' word finding difficulty and to identify its relationship to fatigue, neuropsychologic processes requiring cortical activation, and a peripheral marker for brain dopamine secretion. In this study, 33 polio survivors were administered the Post-Polio Fatigue Questionnaire, Animal Naming and FAS Tests, and tests of attention and information processing speed. Plasma prolactin was also measured as a marker for brain dopamine secretion. Subjects reporting high fatigue severity and word finding difficulty had clinically abnormal or significantly lower Animal Naming Test scores compared with subjects with low symptom severity. Impaired performance on the most difficult tests of attention and information processing speed were also associated with lower scores on the word finding tests. A significant negative correlation between Animal Naming Test scores and plasma prolactin suggests that a decrement in brain dopamine secretion is related to reduced animal naming ability. These data support the hypothesis that decreased dopamine secretion, possibly secondary to poliovirus damage to the basal ganglia, may underlie not only fatigue and impaired attention but also word finding difficulty in polio survivors.

On the Very Idea of Thinking in Words

The common view of thought as a kind of inner speech, whether in a natural language or in some other language-like representational system, gains much of its intuitive force from the introspective evidence of what appears to be thinking in words. Presumably, silent uttering is a way of thinking something in the same way that vocal uttering is a way of asserting something. But upon closer examination this analogy does not hold up, and the very idea of thinking in words turns out to be conceptually confused

Thinking of a word under different retrieval constraints

Subjects were given, as stimuli, either letters or bigrams and asked to think of a word beginning with those stimuli. Words emitted were to be 3, 4, or 5 letters in length. Each of the six groups contained 100 Ss. Subjects were given 60 sec per stimulus to produce a word. Response measures were the number of words emitted, latency of response, and language frequency of emitted words. It was found that responses were fewer, latencies were longer, and word frequencies were lower for bigram than for letter stimuli, and for longer vs. shorter word lengths. It was pointed out that the effective pool of acceptable words is smaller for bigram than for letter stimuli and is probably smaller for longer than for shorter words. The findings with all response measures were interpreted leager terms of a greater difficulty in thinking of words as pool size is reduced.

Cystic degeneration in glioblastoma multiforme: trapped-air sign.

THE SIGN IN roentgen diagnosis is born when certain details of the roentgenogram are repeatedly found to bear a positive correlation to a given clinical diagnosis. A sign springs, then, from regular follow-up of the patient to the operating room or the autopsy laboratory, where puzzling or poorly understood roentgen findings can be explained in terms of the underlying pathologic anatomy. Such signs are almost never 100 per cent accurate; further, their presence may be entirely of academic interest, since the final diagnosis is often promptly established by other means. It is always challenging and stimulating, however, to attempt to push the diagnostic frontier as far as possible; also, the roentgen sign occasionally permits redirection of therapy into more appropriate channels. To this end, this paper will describe a roentgen sign of glioblastoma multiforme, namely, the presence of trapped air within multiple small, uneven cysts in the center of the tumor. Two cases illustrative of this sign will be reported. Material While a Fellow in the Registry of Radiologic Pathology, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the author collected the roentgenograms from 500 cases of primary tumor of the brain and spinal cord to be screened for accessioning in the Registry. In each case the clinical history, the gross and histologic findings, and the roentgenograms were carefully related. In 3 instances, multiple radiolucencies, interpreted as bubbles of gas within brain substance, were observed in the ventriculograms. The histologic diagnosis in each of these 3 cases proved to be glioblastoma multiforme. Observation of this sign in 3 additional cases has proved its usefulness. Illustrative Cases CASE I (Armed Forces Institute of Pathology): A 52-year-old white male complained of headaches, lethargy, stupor, and right homonymous hemianopsia of two months duration. A ventriculogram was interpreted as showing pronounced displacement of the ventricular system to the right. Multiple gas-filled cysts were visualized in the left parietal region (Figs. 1 and 2). At operation a large tumor was removed from the left temporoparietal area. Multiple hemorrhagic areas were present. Histologic diagnosis: Glioblastoma multiforme. CASE II (State University of Iowa). B. S., a white woman aged 68, complained of difficulty in swallowing. Three months previously her husband had noticed that she was having difficulty in thinking of words. Shortly thereafter severe headaches and right-sided weakness developed and, somewhat later, vomiting and difficulty in swallowing. Physical examination showed right homonymous hemianopsia, right hemihypesthesia, and severe right hemiparesis with spasticity. An electrocardiogram indicated an abnormal focal process, possibly due to an expanding lesion in the left temporal region. Spinal fluid protein was 178 mg. per cent.

Thought without Words

HAVING much of the same experience as Mr. Galton, I nevertheless prefer dealing with a larger group of facts. I have often referred to the mutes of the seraglio at Constantinople, who cannot be charged with thinking in words. They have their own sign conversation among themselves, and which has no necessary reference to words. Even the names of individuals are suppressed among themselves, though they sometimes use lip reading to an outsider to make him understand a name. Anyone having a knowledge of sign language is aware that it is independent of words. The tenses of verbs, &c., are supplied by gestures.