SSC01 GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY

It can have a wide range of causes including

head injury, stroke, bacterial diseases,
complex chemical imbalances, and changes
associated with aging.
Can initiate a cascade of damaging events.
After a blow to the head, a person may be
stunned or may become unconscious for a
moment. This injury, called a concussion,
usually leaves no permanent damage.
If blow is more severe and hemorrhage
(excessive bleeding) and swelling occur,
however, severe headache, dizziness,
paralysis, a convulsion, or temporary
blindness may result, depending on the area
of the brain affected.
Paul Broca was a French neuroanatomist who
discovered the area of the brain referred to as
Brocas area in 1861 based on a series of
consultations with an aphasic gentleman called
Tan. The patient was called Tan because tan
was all the patient could say. After Tan died,
Broca performed an autopsy of his brain and
found that there was an area of damage in the
left hemisphere. This specific location in the left
hemisphere of the brain (towards the back and
bottom of the frontal lobe) became known as
Brocas area.
Aphasia is caused by damage to one or more
of the language areas of the brain. Many
times, the cause of the brain injury is a
stroke. A stroke occurs when blood is unable
to reach a part of the brain. Brain cells die
when they do not receive their normal supply
of blood, which carries oxygen and important
nutrients. Other causes of brain injury are
severe blows to the head, brain tumors, brain
infections, and other conditions of the brain.
Damage to Broca's area results in Broca's
aphasia. Produces both comprehension and
production deficits.
1. Long pauses between words or also called
as dysprosody.

2. Agrammatism is the tendency to omit function
words as well as endings such as -ed in indicating
past tense. Function words are words which tie
sentences together: the, of, is, by, a, etc.
Individuals with Brocas aphasia are able to
understand the speech of others to varying
degrees. Because of this, they are often aware
of their difficulties and can become easily
frustrated by their speaking problems.
Individuals with Brocas aphasia often have
right-sided weakness or paralysis of the arm
and leg because the frontal lobe is also
important for body movement.

3. Some sound changes, simplification of
consonant clusters: It's hard to eat with a
spoon is pronounced as har eat wit poon
4. Frustration. They know there's something
wrong.

In contrast to Brocas aphasia, damage to the
temporal lobe may result in a fluent aphasia
that is called Wernickes aphasia. Individuals
with Wernickes aphasia may speak in long
sentences that have no meaning, add
unnecessary words, and even create new
words.
For example, someone with Wernickes
aphasia may say, You know that smoodle
pinkered and that I want to get him round
and take care of him like you want before,
meaning The dog needs to go out so I will
take him for a walk.
Individuals with Wernickes aphasia usually
have great difficulty understanding speech
and are therefore often unaware of their
mistakes. These individuals usually have no
body weakness because their brain injury is
not near the parts of the brain that control
movement.


A stroke is an event where the whole or
partial functioning of the brain is affected. A
stroke could be ischemic in nature, due to an
obstruction in the vessels or hemorrhagic in
nature, due to bleeding in to the brain cranial
cavity. The obstruction may be due to a clot
formed outside traveling to the vessels of the
brain or a clot formed within the premises of
the brain.
An aneurysm is the abnormal widening of an
artery, anywhere, due to the weakness in the
wall of that vessel. The locations for these
aneurysms are the abdominal aorta, the
cerebral vessels, poplitial arteries, etc. These
dilatations continue to grow and when they
go beyond the 5.5 cm diameter level, there is
a high probability of a rupture leading to
bleeding.
Is a term characterized by seizures, or
convulsions and is usually caused by
abnormal electrical discharges in the brain.
Alzheimer's is a type of dementia that causes
problems with memory, thinking and
behavior.
DEMENTIA - is a general term for a decline in
mental ability severe enough to interfere with daily
life.
Alzheimer's is a progressive disease, where
dementia symptoms gradually worsen over a
number of years. In its early stages, memory
loss is mild, but with late-stage Alzheimer's,
individuals lose the ability to carry on a
conversation and respond to their
environment.
Amnesia is the general term for a condition in
which memory (either stored memories or the
process of committing something to memory) is
disturbed or lost, to a greater extent than simple
everyday forgetting or absent-mindedness.
Amnesia may result either from organic or
neurological causes (damage to the brain
through physical injury, neurological disease or
the use of certain drugs), or
from functional or psychogenic causes
(psychological factors, such as mental disorder,
post-traumatic stress or psychological defence
mechanisms).
Anterograde amnesia (where the ability to
memorize new things is impaired or lost
because data does not transfer successfully
from the conscious short-term memory into
permanent long-term memory.

Here the patient is unable to recollect events,
that occur after the onset of the amnesia, for
more than a few minutes. In other words, in
these patients, recent events are not
transferred to long-term memory.
In this form of amnesia the affected individual
will be unable to recollect events that
occurred before the amnesia set in. The
condition is caused either by disease or a
brain injury especially in areas linked with
episodic memorythe hippocampus and the
median temporal lobes.