A number of my very favorite authors have been impacted by Alzheimer's Disease or associated disease variants. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, W. Somerset Maugham, and Terry Pratchett are among the most prominent that come to mind. Dr. Peter Garrard wrote a brilliant article pubmed link here on the dissolution of narrative in the work of Dame Iris Murdoch, a renowned British author. As I revisit Dr. Garrard's work, I wonder if world class expertise in writing (or other creative pursuits) would respond uniquely to cognitive treatment or require a tailored approach. We have been working on a treatment targeting lexical preservation in progressive conditions like these (e.g., progressive nonfluent aphasia, semantic dementia). I wonder how this approach would work among high level writers -- perhaps pairing behavioral treatment with an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. Email if you have any thoughts on this.
Temporoparietal junction
Here's a nice graphic of the TPJ from my upcoming chapter on Transcortical Sensory Aphasia in the Oxford Handbook of Language Disorders.
modeling word concreteness
Here we have a 3d scatterplot representing the spread of a set of 400 abstract and concrete English nouns within a multi-dimensional space bounded by three broad cognitive domains (magnitude, sensation, emotion). Abstract words are reflected by the black bubbles, and concrete words are the red bubbles. Their positions in this x,y,z plane reflect ratings from almost 400 adults from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. It's interesting -- Abstract and concrete words cluster in unique ways in this space. We're arguing that a multi-dimensional 'topography' approach like this obviates the need for multiple semantic systems (e.g., verbal for abstract words, visual for concrete words). The other neat thing about this approach is that deficits in concrete or abstract word representation can be modeled in terms of dimensionality reduction (e.g., a sensory impairment might reduce the dimensions to only magnitude and emotion). We just submitted this article for review. Its recent ancestor was just also published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Here's the R code for generating this 3d scatterplot using the rgl package:
Congratulations, graduates
We're pleased to announce that this semester we saw four of our very helpful seniors graduate with a major in Communication Sciences and Disorders. All will be continuing their studies at graduate school. Samantha Morrill will pursue her Doctor of Audiology here at UF. Melissa Salzberger will be heading back home to New York to Hunter College work toward her master's in Speech Language Pathology. Jayna Becker will be Temple University to obtain her master's in Communication Sciences and Disorders. Finally, Catherine Kadechka will remain at UF to pursue her master's in Communication Sciences and Disorders. Congratulations and good luck! We will miss you all.
Starting a semantic society
I plan on starting a semantic society in a few months when I move to Philadelphia. I envision something akin to Paris in 1925 where a bunch of authors (e.g., Hemingway, Fitzgerald) lounged in cafes and waxed existential. My dream is to have the society meetings at my ramshackle house. We have an old manual typewriter upon which members will 'tweet' messages. I will then post the minutes online. Maybe we will eventually generate Proceedings of the Philadelphia Semantics Society. Wine and cheese served.