Corner on the Brain: Neuropsychology and you

Imagine yourself coming out of the grocery store. You know you drove yourself there, but you cannot remember where you parked your car. This seems to be happening more frequently lately. What’s wrong? Should you be worried? Are you in the early stage of dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease? Or is it something worse?

Chances are that you were simply so preoccupied with the many details of your life that you didn’t pay attention when you parked the car. But if these kinds of moments seem to be coming more frequently, you may want to seek the help of a neuropsychologist.

Neuropsychology is all about how the brain operates and how that affects human behavior. Neuropsychologists don’t perform medical procedures on the brain nor do they diagnose medical conditions. However, they often work in collaboration with neurologists and other medical doctors to help individuals and their families cope with loss from either a traumatic brain injury, a stroke, or some other acquired brain disease process. Even one concussion, if severe enough, can lead to difficult challenges.

Pediatric neuropsychology often helps to uncover the underlying factors that lead to learning disabilities, behavioral problems, autism spectrum disorder, and other childhood mental challenges. The testing that can be done delves deeper into areas such as attention, memory, receptive language (the ability to understand others’ spoken or written language), expressive language (the ability to speak or write), visual spatial processing, personality, and executive functioning (the ability to organize and work toward a goal).

Many times, the answers that come from a neuropsychological evaluation can lead to dramatic improvements. For example, one young many kept saying that the words in his reading assignments were fuzzy, but his vision specialist said his vision was just fine. He began hating to go to school, and the tantrums became quite nasty as he grew tall and strong.

A neuropsychological evaluation uncovered the problem: his brain, not his eyes, was processing two-dimensional figures such as letters into three-dimensional shapes. In the process, the letters overlapped each other. Once his assignments were supplied on an electronic reader, where he could change the font and font size, he went from failing English and hating school to being on the honor roll.

In the coming months, this column will cover topics such as dementia, traumatic brain injury, the damage that illegal drugs do to the brain, how to help the brain work better, stem cells and the brain, autism from a neuropsychological perspective, and more.