Question: hi laura, I would like to know do you get scared of the brain or looking at the brain ?

Laura Fisk answered on 10 Jun 2019: last edited 10 Jun 2019 10:09 pm

Oooh! What an excellent question 🙂

I don’t get squeamish generally, so I’m ok with blood and guts and gore – but in fact, I don’t have to deal with that side of the brain anyway. I ‘see the brain’ through how it performs – the stuff it does.

I get to administer ‘neuropsychological assessments’ – this means presenting a person with a load of tasks (like games and puzzles) that get the brain working in different ways. A person’s performance in those tasks (how they do the tasks) gives me an idea of how different part of the brain are working. So for example, some of the tasks rely on the brain working quickly – this is called ‘processing speed’ -some people’s brains work quicker than others. Another set of tasks relies on a person being able to keep some bits of information in mind while they do something else – this is called ‘working memory’. When a person has done a load of these different tasks, I get scores that I can compare against the average score got by a load of people in the population of the same age and this gives me an idea of how the person I’m testing compared – e.g. whether their processing speed is quicker than most people’s, or whether their working memory holds a bit less than most people’s. From this, I can work out if a person has relative strengths or weaknesses and give them ideas of how to ‘fill in the gaps’ or ‘work to their strengths’.

So, I am looking at the brain – but more what it does, than what it looks like (all sguidgy and grey, mostly)