Higher Mental Functions
Cognitive or mental symptoms can include confusion or impaired cognition, problems with attention, impaired judgment, and amnesia or other problems with memory, especially short-term memory. Problems with memory and attention are the longest-lasting cognitive symptoms; one in four people with PCS still suffer from memory problems a year after the injury. PCS may cause slowed information processing and reactions to stimuli or difficulty with abstract thinking or problem solving. People may also experience a decrease in abilities related to work performance or social interaction. While cognitive symptoms usually resolve within a few months of injury, physical and emotional symptoms can last longer. Most cognitive symptoms clear within half a year of the injury, and the longest-lasting ones, such as memory, attention and language problems, usually resolve within a year.
Read more about this topic: Post-concussion Syndrome, Signs and Symptoms
Famous quotes containing the words higher, mental and/or functions:
“The momentary charge at Balaklava, in obedience to a blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate; but the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of Slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. Do you think that that will go unsung?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)