OVERVIEW

Behavioral & Cognitive Neurology Course is organized by National Academy of Neuropsychology (NAN) and will be held from May 01 - Jul 24, 2024.

Description:
The goal of this 12-week course is to provide students with an overview of the behavioral geography and large scale networks of the brain and to review the disorders of higher cortical functions and the major neurobehavioral syndromes, including frontal lobe syndromes, hemispheric asymmetries, attention and confusional states, memory and amnesias, aphasia and related disorders, affective prosody and aprosodias, disorders of complex visual processing, and the dementias.

Objectives:
Upon completion of the course, the learner will be able to:
• Describe the major divisions of the cerebral cortex and understand the functions of the individual cortical zones, the modality-specific (unimodal) association areas for vision, audition, somatosensory functions, and motor functions, temporal heteromodal cortex and the agnosias, Wernicke’s area as a transmodal gateway for language; and identify the functions and syndromes of the posterior heteromodal cortex.
• Identify the prefrontal heteromodal cortex and frontal lobe syndromes; list the paralimbic (mesocortical) areas and limbic structures and describe their functions; know the structure and function
of the amygdala, hippocampus, limbic system, basal ganglia, cerebellum, thalamus, and the ascending reticular activating system; identify the primary specializations of the cerebral hemispheres and the distributed large-scale networks and their cortical epicenters (human connectome).
• Describe the biology of the attentional matrix in brain; understand the composition and functionality of the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS); list the clinical characteristics, causes, course, and outcome of acute confusional states; understand neglect syndromes as disorders of spatial attention; describe the functional anatomy of unilateral neglect and right hemisphere dominance for neglect; and compare the causes, course, and treatment of unilateral neglect to other components of the right hemisphere syndrome.
• Define memory and describe its disorders; list the anatomical substrates of the major subcomponents of memory; and know the primary amnesia syndromes, their anatomical basis, etiologies, course, and outcomes.
• Compare and contrast the major classical aphasias including Broca’s, Wernicke’s, conduction, global, and the transcortical aphasias; describe the language impairments following damage outside of the classic language territories (e.g., basal ganglia, thalamus); know the primary progressive aphasias; understand the linguistic characteristics of sign language; describe the role of the nondominant hemisphere in language; and list our current understanding of recovery and aphasia management.
• Examine the neurology of prosody and know its subtypes; describe the neurology of kinesics (gesture, pantomime); list and detail the components of the aprosodias; know how to conduct a clinical examination of affective prosody and gesture; understand the hemispheric lateralization of affective prosody and the callosal integration of language functions; and compare the aprosodia display behaviors and emotional experience.
• Describe the pattern recognition agnosias; list the other types and aspects of visual agnosias including facial emotion, nonconscious recognition, cortical blindness, Anton’s syndrome, alexia without agraphia, and disorders of topographical (spatial) orientation; know the functional anatomy of the achromatopsias; list and understand the neurology of other disorders related to color vision; and describe the major disorders of spatial analysis (including Balint’s syndrome, stereopsis, and cerebral akinetopsia), disturbances of constructional ability, and disturbances in the ability to dress.