Re: Vegatative states and neuroscience: From Hari Kumar

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

I haven't been reading more than a acattering of posts today, so I
haven't read any other posts with heading. But "cognitive" is, in
psychiatry, defined a bit more narrowly than Doug's definition.
Schizophrenia does directly impair cognitive functions of the brain,
while bipolar and unipolar are _Affective Disorder[s]_. Both of course
have indirect and often serious cognitive effects as well. It has
recently been established that depression (unipolar) actually shrinks
the hippocampus, hence the memory problems in unipolar affective
disorder. It has also been more or less established that _one_ SSRI,
Paxil, actually _grows_ new neurons in the hippocampus.

We're still pretty ignorant. But MRI techniques are leading to huge
leaps in knowledge, not yet translated into understanding.

Carrol

"Devine, James" wrote:
>
> Doug wrote:
> > "One of the key areas for the disabled rights movement is
> > cognitive issues. To be clear when I use this term,
> > cognitive, many disabled people do not use
> > it in broad context, but to mean a specific area of
> > disability.  Cognitive for me is involvement of the brain in
> > a disability.  Schizophrenia,
> > developmental disability, blindness, dyslexia and so forth
> > have cognitive issues.
>
> For what it's worth, dyslexia and many developmental disabilities are more perceptual or information-processing (awareness) problems rather than being cognitive (knowing & judgement) problems.
> Jim