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:
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others’ reasons for action, or the basis of others’ emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)