Neuro Psychology & Beer

Thursday June 1st – I can’t believe it’s already June! The year is half over, where does the time go?

This morning began with a guest speaker, a Nueropsychologist. She was fascinating! A Neuropsychologist is a psychologist who is trained in assessing and treating behavioral and cognitive problems after brain injuries. They assess things like; attention and concentration, memory and new learning, visual spatial skills, verbal abilities, reasoning, problem solving and planning. They also give recommendations on how to manage cognitive deficits, and development if treatment plans for difficult behavior related to brain injury. Interesting stuff.

Our client training practice consisted of scanning training while walking in the hallway of the training center. The hallway has a series of doorway on each side and paper ‘targets’ were placed inside the doorjambs on the visual field loss side requiring a turn of the head and scanning to locate.

Just before lunch we had another “treasure hunt” walk with the simulators. This took place in an area of town like our “China town”. This provided many additional challenges as stores and items we were trying to locate were in an unfamiliar language. This was to simulate what a person with ABI and damage to areas effecting language and reading skills might experience. I have to say it was quite frustrating to go into a grocery store and try to find “Gangala” or “Xu Xoa Hat Luu” and not have any idea what it is. Do I look in the drink isle, frozen foods, or the nuts isle? Sometimes asking the clerk in the store was not helpful either do to the language barrier (or poor customer service). In case you’re wondering, “Gangala” is a root kind of like ginger and costs $15/kg, and “Xu Xoa Hat Luu” is some kind of nut but I never actually found it.

In the afternoon we had another guest speaker, the consulting optometrist for GDV. Her topic was, of course, about visual impairments as a result of brain injury. Again, interesting information, she had lots of statistics about the most common types of brain injury related vision loss.

This evening Sue and I went out with Ron and two of the guide dog clients to a pub. Each Tuesday and Thursday night is ‘recreation night’ and Ron usually has one or two volunteers go with clients out to do activities. On Tuesday they went 10 pin bowling, but tonight was a pub with music. Here’s a couple of photos at the pub.