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| The violin-maker's cat, over-exposed |
We were talking about Trompe this morning, and I remarked idly that his cluster of behaviors rather resembles Frontal Lobe Syndrome. Then I started thinking about it, checked in my books, and finally saw the following online:
Characteristic features are:
- Decrease or lack of spontaneous activity: the patient feels no desire to do anything and is unable to plan activities, but may have periods of restlessness.
- Loss of attention: the patient displays a lack of interest and is easily distracted.
- Memory is normal but the patient cannot be bothered to remember.
- Loss of abstract thought: eg, cannot understand proverbs.
- Perseveration: a tendency to continue with one form of behavior when a situation requires it to change.
- Change in affect: depending on the nature of the damage to the brain, the patient either becomes apathetic and 'flat' or becomes over-exuberant and childish or uninhibited with possibly inappropriate sexual behavior.
- The mini mental status protocol [the one used recently on DJT] does not measure frontal lobe damage properly. Other tasks where this impairment might show up are: inability to maintain a sequence (messes up the order of elements); inability to follow instructions ["Do Not Congratulate" "Do not look at the sun"]; paucity of vocabulary ["I have the best words"]; inability to orient oneself in space [e.g., trouble learning the layout of a new place, such as, oh, the East Wing], inability to inhibit undesired actions [tearing up documents after being told repeatedly that they must be saved intact]. And there's more, isn't there.
