Optic aphasia, optic apraxia, and loss of dreaming

A 47-year-old man with a left temporo-occipital infarct in the area of the posterior cerebral artery is presented. The neuropsychological examination did not reveal aphasia or gross mental deficits. The patient presented with alexia without agraphia, color agnosia, but few visual perceptual deficits. The main impairment was in confrontation naming; he was incapable of naming objects and pictures, not from lack of recognition (excluding visual agnosia) but from lack of access to the appropriate word (optic aphasia). The patient also exhibited a deficit in the evocation of gesture from the visual presentation of an object (optic apraxia) and a difficulty in "conjuring up" visual images of objects (impaired visual imagery) and loss of dreams. The fundamental deficit of this patient is tentatively explained in terms of visuoverbal and visuogestural disconnection and a deficit of mental imagery.     

试论孟子与士人精神

作为中国“轴心时代”的重要思想家,孟子希望以道德化政治,实现天下有道。他提出士人修养的“浩然之气”,在士人与君主的关系上主张“道高于君”,而对于广大普通民众则倡导“使先知觉后知,使先觉觉后觉”。在此基础上,孟子推出了四种士人典范。而在孟子这些思想中,一以贯之的乃是对德性的张扬,在“尊德性”与“道问学”之间,他明显偏重于前者,这是孟子关于士人精神的特色所在。在孟子的精神世界里,我们可以看到的更多的是一种道德信仰和勇气。正是从这个意义上讲,孟子是一位信仰道德的“宗教家”,而不是一位代表智性的“学问家”。     

The Mother Relationship and Artistic Inhibition in the Lives of Leonardo da Vinci and Erik H. Erikson

In four earlier articles, I focused on the theme of the relationship of melancholia and the mother, and suggested that the melancholic self may experience humor (Capps, 2007a), play (Capps, 2008a), dreams (Capps, 2007c), and art (Capps, 2008b) as restorative resources. I argued that Erik H. Erikson found these resources to be valuable remedies for his own melancholic condition, which had its origins in the fact that he was illegitimate and was raised solely by his mother until he was three years old, when she remarried. In this article, I focus on two themes in Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood (1964): Leonardo’s relationship with his mother in early childhood and his inhibitions as an artist. I relate these two themes to Erikson’s own early childhood and his failure to achieve his goal as an aspiring artist in his early twenties. The article concludes with a discussion of Erikson’s frustrated aspirations to become an artist and his emphasis, in his psychoanalytic work, on children’s play. Donald Capps is Professor of Pastoral Psychology at Princeton Theological Seminary. His books include Men, Religion, and Melancholia (1997), Freud and Freudians on Religion (2001), and Men and Their Religion: Honor, Hope, and Humor     

论新时期医学院校人文学科建设

加强医学人文学科建设是全面推进素质教育、培养创新精神的重要内容,也是深化医学教育改革步伐的重要举措.医学院校开展医学人文教育教学真正目的是进一步优化高等医学院校人才培养模式,使医学人文学科知识内化为医学生的人文思想和人文精神.     

The link between knowledge and remembering in Alzheimer’s disease

Current research on the influence of cognitive support (e.g., activation of task-relevant prior knowledge, item organizability, retrieval cues) on episodic remembering in normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is reviewed. Examining the effects of cognitive support on memory may shed light on the relationship between knowledge and remembering, and also provides relevant information pertaining to the development of cognitive intervention procedures. A series of studies from our own and other laboratories reveal a number of interesting empirical regularities. First, AD results in problems in utilizing cognitive support for improving memory. Conceivably, this reduction in cognitive reserve capacity is due to both the overall severity of the episodic memory impairment in AD, as well as to dementia-related deficits in the semantic network that guides encoding and retrieval of information. Nevertheless, AD patients are able to utilize cognitive support in episodic memory tasks, although they typically need more support than their healthy aged counterparts to show memory facilitation. Specifically, it is critical to provide support at both encoding and retrieval in order to demonstrate performance gains in AD. Moreover, successful utilization of retrieval support in this disease is most likely to occur when the encoding requirements force the individual to engage in elaborative cognitive activity (e.g., generation of task-relevant knowledge, categorical organization). Finally, a reduction in cognitive reserve capacity occurs later in the pathogenesis of AD than a generalized episodic memory impairment. This observation reflects the insidious nature of AD, and suggests that the transition from normal aging to AD may be continuous rather than discrete.     

结核病诊治进展与科技革命

现代科技革命极大地促进了结核病各方面的发展.微生物学和免疫学的发展,揭示了结核病的病因、发病机制、病理生理的本质,分子生物学技术使结核病的基础研究不仅停留在器官、细胞水平,而是深入到蛋白质、核酸、基因的水平;基因治疗的方法可望从根本上治疗结核病.高新技术的产物如X线照片、电子计算机断层扫描、纤维支气管镜检查和新药的出现等极大地提高了临床诊治的能力.借助于各种先进的医疗设备而进行精确的诊断,基因治疗将成为一种崭新的治疗手段.     

What will the future bring? Thoughts of children after missile bombardment

Abstract

We examined how cognitive views of the future relate to degree of exposure to trauma and to posttraumatic stress reactions in children. Following the experience of Scud missile bombardment during the Persian Gulf war, 492 Israeli pupils from grades 5, 7, and 10 from regions actually hit and from regions under threat but not hit, described what they thought life would be like next year for children of their age. Based on recent cognitive theories, it was expected that children who experienced higher levels of stress would also express more pessimistic views of the future. We found that children's dominant perception of the future was positive. However, children who expressed stronger postwar reactions also tended to have more pessimistic future views, especially in areas that were hit by missiles. Discussion focused upon views of the future as a direct consequence of the stress as well as a means of coping with stress.     

Correspondence between children's and adults' ratings of stimulant-induced changes in ADHD behaviours in a crossover trial with medication-naive children

Correspondence between children's and adults' ratings of changes in ADHD behaviours was investigated in a paediatric ADHD stimulant crossover trial. Thirty-one children completed an ADHD self-report scale each week, and comparisons were made with an ADHD questionnaire completed by adults (combined parent and teacher ratings). Children's and adults' ratings demonstrated good internal consistency, were significantly associated with the assessment of ADHD behaviours in the placebo condition and showed comparable responsiveness to stimulants at the group level. Furthermore, a large and significant correlation was detected between the two sets of informants' ratings of changes from placebo to both methylphenidate and dextroamphetamine high-dosage conditions, but not from placebo to low-dosage conditions. Agreement in the categorization of best stimulant condition for individual children was significant, but modest from a clinical perspective. The results indicate that children's ratings correspond adequately with adults' ratings, and thus appear to be a complementary outcome measure.     

Differential impacts of age of acquisition on letter and semantic fluency in Alzheimer's disease patients and healthy older adults

The degree to which the typical age of acquisition (AoA) of words and word frequency have separable influences on verbal production tasks has been strongly debated. To examine the overlap between these factors in verbal fluency tasks, the performance of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients (N?=?34) and normal elderly controls (N?=?36) was compared on semantic (e.g., vegetables) and letter (e.g., words that begin with F) fluency tasks. These comparisons revealed that words generated for the semantic fluency task had an earlier AoA while words generated for the letter fluency task had a higher word frequency. Differences in AoA between AD patients and controls were larger for semantic than letter fluency. These results suggest that AoA has an effect on verbal production that is independent of word frequency and that AoA has a semantic locus.