Neuropsychology

Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how a person’s cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system.

Neuropsychology Notes

• The distance from immediate experience offered by the frontal lobes can allow us to either exploit and use or to be empathetic
• The left hemisphere filters experience into an abstract representation, while the right sees things without preconceptions
• The right hemisphere handles alertness, vigilance, sustained attention, and divided attention
• The left hemisphere handles focussed attention
• The right hemisphere has broad, global, and flexible attention, while the left has narrow attention
• Lantern consciousness
• Spotlight consciousness
• Novelty is handled by the right hemisphere, and is transferred to the left hemisphere as it becomes familiar
• The left hemisphere prioritizes things that it already knows and expects
• The right frontal lobes allow for flexibility in thought and behavior
• When solving problems, the left hemisphere tends to rely on a single solution that fits what it already knows
• The right hemisphere can link together distantly related words and ideas
• The right hemisphere is able to use the left hemispheres style of cognition, but the left cannot use the rights
• Relaxation broadens attention and enables right hemisphere flexibility of thought
• The right hemisphere is able to access and hold larger quantities of information
• The global attention of the right hemisphere precedes the narrow attention of the left hemisphere
• The right hemisphere sees the whole first, and then the left hemisphere separates it into parts
• The right hemisphere sees things in their context
• The right hemisphere understands language in its context
• The left hemisphere sees things abstracted, isolated, and stripped of context
• The left hemisphere prioritizes theory over experience
• The right hemisphere is responsible for the capacity to understand metaphor
• The right hemisphere allows for the recognition of uniqueness and familiarity, while the left only re-presents generic categories of things
• The right hemisphere recognizes and groups things by comparing them with an exemplar whereas the left recognizes things by categories
• The right hemisphere is able to integrate individual aspects of things into a coherent whole whereas the left sees only separate entities
• Right hemisphere deficits may lead the left hemisphere to see people who are in different places as duplicates
• The right hemisphere attends to the personal, while the left focuses on the abstract and impersonal
• The right hemisphere is concerned with living things and the left with the non-living
• The left hemisphere is concerned with utility and the mechanical
• The right hemisphere deals with real things that have meaning to us in the lived world
• The left hemisphere deals with non-realistic and artificial images
• The right hemisphere is responsible for the ability to put ourselves in anothers shoes
• The right hemisphere is responsible for our capacity for emotional understanding
• The right hemisphere is capable of identifying emotional expression
• The right hemisphere is responsible for emotional expression
• The left hemisphere deals with superficial and forced presentations of emotion
• The left hemisphere generally remains emotionally neutral
• The right hemisphere can deal with both positive and negative emotions, where as the left tends to be over-optimistic
• The right frontal lobe has a depressive stance, where as the left shows undue cheerfulness
• The right hemisphere brings anxious, disturbed depression while the left brings indifferent or apathetic depression
• The left hemisphere deals with conscious explicit linear reasoning, and the right with implicit unconscious deductive reasoning
• The right hemisphere plays a large role in deductive reasoning
• The right hemisphere is concerned with the self as embodied
• The right hemisphere sees the body as something we live, while the for the left it is devitalized
• Right hemisphere damage can result in adnormal integration of our drives with a self
• The right hemisphere cares about the meaning of language, whereas the left cares more about having control of language
• The right hemisphere can understand broad and implicit meaning, while the left only understands explicit literal meaning
• Processing ambiguity requires right hemisphere intuition because language is to precise and definite
• A right hemisphere stroke is more disabling than a left in that one loses the ability to socialize and empathize
• The right hemisphere is responsible for our sense of time as continuous and unified
• The left hemisphere perceives time as a sequential series of fragmented individual moments
• The right hemisphere is better at dealing with fluidity and motion, whereas the left is better at dealing with things in stasis
• The right hemisphere allows for the sense of spatial depth, whereas the left understands depth categorically, i.e. above, below
• Right hemisphere deficits result in difficulty with perceiving irregular smoothly curved surfaces
• The left hemisphere tends to be stubbornly certain, whereas the right acknowledges ambiguity and is always uncertain
• The left hemisphere of split-brain subjects has been shown to have to come up with random reasons for things the right hemisphere does
• The left hemisphere will confabulate explanations for things it doesn’t know and seems completely convinced of them
• When guessing a sequence, the left hemisphere will choose a strategy even at the expense of getting things wrong
• When flashing lights were changed to follow whatever strategy was being used to guess them, the left hemisphere will insist that it had just cracked the sequence
• The right hemisphere can juggle multiple ambiguous possibilities and interpretations, whereas the left hemisphere jumps to premature conclusions
• The right hemisphere can understand unclear and fleeting images, while the left requires clarity and stillness
• The narrowness of certainty appeals to the left hemisphere
• The right hemisphere is more self-aware and realistic, while the left is more grandiose, optimistic, and unrealistic about it’s shortcomings
• The right hemisphere is more realistic but also more pessimistic and favors depression
• Those with damage to the right hemisphere lack insight into illness or even denial of it
• Those with right hemisphere legions show a dull unrelenting cheerfulness in the face of incapacity
• The left hemisphere is prone to over-optimistic denial
• The right hemispheres tendency for melancholy may be linked to its heightened capacity for empathy
• Moral values are dependent on right hemisphere intuition and empathy, rather than left hemisphere abstract reasoning
• Those with impairments in the right frontolimbic regions have trouble with stopping whatever they’re currently doing
• The frontal lobes for each hemisphere only negate the posterior regions rather than resist, enabling something new to arise
• The right frontal lobes enables one to step back form espousing ‘my’ position, which enables us to empathize and consider the others point of view
• The left frontal lobe enables one to peacefully detach from the striving towards individual gain
• The right hemisphere may have more control over the SNS, and the left may have more control over the PNS
• The right hemisphere presents the world with detail and depth, while the left represents it abstractly, undetailed and even in one plane
• The right hemisphere is much more involved in emotions and bodily experience than the left hemisphere
• Every word is metaphorically linked to the something in the lived world
• All denotation and abstraction has its metaphorical roots in the lived world
• The right hemisphere sees metaphor as the means of keeping language linked to the experienced world, while language seems separate from the world for the left hemisphere

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• An organism will feel less stressed if they believe they have control over a situation
• Predictable information may lower our stress-response while we are experiencing the stressor by letting us know what coping stratagies are best to use
• Organisms feel less stressed when they can control the rewards they can get than when those rewards are given to them for nothing
• Organisms feel a loss of control when faced with an novel and unpredictable situation
• The left hemisphere inhibits the right more than the right inhibits the left
• Instilling fear is a common marketing strategy because it quites the prefontal cortex and encourages impusivity
• Stress-related disease among the poor usually has more to do with feeling poor than actually being poor
• Income inequality is a strong predictor of poor health because it is about being made to feel poor
• Income inequality does not predict poor health as much in more egalitarian countries
• There is a steep rise in health from very poor to lower middle class, but it flattens out in the upper SES range
• Societies with more income equality, both the poor and the wealthy are healthier than their counterparts in a less equal society with the same average income
• The low social capital that comes with income inequality can lead to more stress and poor health
• Dramatic income inequality gets rid of the possibility for there to be lots of social capital in a society, leading to more stress and poor health
• More social capital in a society can improve the health of the society
• More income inequality means that the wealthy will spend more money on their own private goods, leading to more stress among the public
• To really address the poor health of the poor, we would have to uproot the stressors involved in low rank rather than give people more money
• Unlike monkey’s, humans who rank low in the hierarchy almost always have a disproportionate share of disease
• Receiving a reward at an unpredictable time interval creates a stronger stress response than when it is received predictably
• Having social support is shown to lower the stress-response in primates
• Having social support is shown to lower the stress-response in humans
• Our brains make us-them distinctions extremely quickly
• People have an enhanced capacity for empathy towards in-group members
• Conformity is a deeply ingrained and automatic instinct in humans
• People have been shown to change their answer to a question if the group disagrees
• Brain scans show that those who defy the groups opinion will try to revise their memories while the brain tries to convince them otherwise
• Brain scans show that those who defy authority opinion struggle to change opinion
• Conformity has as much to do with safety as it does with avoiding punishment
• Those who take their heaviest imprint on the limbic system tend to be viscerotonic

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