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:
“But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Mark the babe
Not long accustomed to this breathing world;
One that hath barely learned to shape a smile,
Though yet irrational of soul, to grasp
With tiny finger—to let fall a tear;
And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves,
To stretch his limbs, bemocking, as might seem,
The outward functions of intelligent man.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)