General Principles of Ocular Motor Control I do not know of any kind of work better fitted for correcting loose habits of observation and careless thinking than a study of the ocular motor nerves. John Hughlings Jackson, 1877 This chapter…
Pupillary Abnormalities Pupil Anatomy and Neural Control The size of the pupil is determined by the balance of action between two muscles embedded in the iris: the sphincter pupillae, under parasympathetic control, and the dilator pupillae, under sympathetic control. The…
Afferent Visual System Anatomy and Physiology From a conceptual standpoint, it is useful to consider vision as having two components: central or macular vision (high acuity, color perception, and light-adapted) and peripheral or ambulatory vision (low acuity, poor color perception,…
The mechanics of swallowing are like those of an elegant wristwatch. On the surface, this appears to be a simple, perhaps even pedestrian process, but it is actually both tremendously complex and remarkably fascinating. Humans swallow approximately 500 times daily…
Motor Speech Disorders Motor speech disorders are syndromes of abnormal articulation, the motor production of speech, without abnormalities of language. A patient with a motor speech disorder should be able to produce normal expressive language in writing and to comprehend…
Acknowledgment The authors would like to thank Sarah Schneck, MS, CCC-SLP, in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, for assistance, especially with the discussion about speech and language therapy. The study of language disorders involves…
Acknowledgment Portions of this chapter appeared in Kirshner, H.S., 2002. Agnosias, in: Behavioral neurology: Practical science of mind and brain. Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, pp. 137–158. Agnosias are disorders of recognition. The general public is familiar with agnosia from Oliver Sacks’ patient,…
Apraxia is an inability to correctly perform learned skilled movements. In limb apraxias, there is an inability to correctly execute these movements in an arm or hand owing to neurological dysfunction. Apraxia is essentially a cognitive deficit in motor programming…
The disciplines of behavioral neurology, neuropsychiatry, and geriatric psychiatry are undergoing a scientific renaissance on a global scale ( ). The distinctions between traditional neurological and idiopathic psychiatric conditions are eroding, and the time is ripe to deconstruct the implicit…
Mental health has become a public health crisis ( ). In the past decade, suicide rates have increased 33%, mental illness has become the group of disorders with the highest years lost to disability (Global Health Data Exchange; ),…