Shlomit Ritz Finkelstein | Emory University (original) (raw)
Papers by Shlomit Ritz Finkelstein
This chapter explores and summarizes the current knowledge about the neurophysiological substrata... more This chapter explores and summarizes the current knowledge about the neurophysiological substrata of the utterance of expletives—its brain regions, pathways, and neurotransmitters, and its interaction with hormones. The chapter presents clinical data that have been gathered directly from patients of aphasia, Tourette syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, and brain injuries—all are disorders often accompanied with expletives. It also discusses the possible relations between swearing and aggression, swearing and pain, and swearing and social inhibition in the population at large. Finally, the chapter examines the clinical data and the data gathered from the population at large within one frame, and proposes two hypotheses that can serve as possible directions for future research about the biological substrata of swearing. No previous knowledge of the brain is assumed.
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2005
ABSTRACT Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79.2 (2005) 370-372 In Picturing Personhood, the ant... more ABSTRACT Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79.2 (2005) 370-372 In Picturing Personhood, the anthropologist Joseph Dumit positions himself as a relativist who questions "the constellation of codes of 'objectivity,' 'normality,' 'automaticity,' and 'veracity'" (p. 143). His inquiry takes us through a gallery of PET images of human brains. "PET," an acronym for Positron Emission Tomography, is made up of "positron emission" from physics and "tomography" from computer visualization, and the name suggests that this is an interdisciplinary field. Indeed, physics, chemistry, computations, statistics, neurology, and cognitive psychology meet in PET. And with a similarly interdisciplinary approach, Dumit sets out to study PET through a lens that is "part cultural studies and philosophy . . . part history . . . and part anthropology" (p. 13). Such a study need not be limited to PET, since it would be appropriate for other brain-imaging technologies, and especially for the other major functional imaging process, fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). To introduce authentic and authoritative voices, Dumit conducts many interviews and lets experts of the participating disciplines talk for themselves. This makes room for many perspectives and insures against misplaced reverence toward "ultimate truth." Dumit emphasizes that brain imaging is built on assumptions, has technological shortcomings, is applied to brains with individual variability, and leads to data interpretation that depends greatly on the scientists who produce the image and read it. These qualifications of brain imaging shake the authority that we tend to attribute to colorful pictures as telling a "true" and "real" story. In the first half of the book Dumit introduces some of the technological intricacies of PET. This is an uneven journey in which some of the expert explanations are lucid but others are less satisfying. Opening the black box of brain-imaging exposes both the potency and the shortcomings of PET technology. The potency is in the "visuality of these images" (p. 58). The issues involved in creating the image unfold as the reader learns about this complex process. Finally, the reading of the image is challenging and is the focus of Dumit's attention. Usually when we see a picture we trust that we understand it, and we take its content to represent a fact in the world. Not so simple, says one judge when PET images are brought before his jury. Interlude 3 and its succeeding chapter 4 take up the use of PET in courtrooms and the notion of expert images: "The use of expert images in the courtroom is fraught with difficulties . . . stemming from our current cultural semiotics that privileges machines over experts in terms of objectivity" (p. 133). Machines, of course, are also products of human experts. The information, however, cannot be simply read from the image: the image has to be accompanied by a human expert and, unlike most other visual images to which we have grown accustomed, can easily be misread by a layperson. Even the experts are challenged. An interview with Henry Wagner highlights the danger of confusing scientifically useful conventions with some truth: "putting anything into a category should be done not because there is some kind of intrinsic truth to it but because it is useful" (p. 181). This presents a profound challenge to the human scientific quest: how do the tools that we use in research, whether theoretical or physical instruments, affect our understanding? The final chapter, which looks at PET images themselves, comes to the conclusion that "understanding a PET image of a person with depression requires . . . reflection on categories of people and metaphors of the brain, as well as imaging technologies and practices" (p. 185). What began as an anthropological study of the PET culture evolved into a study of the interaction between PET and the larger culture. Dumit raises many questions (maybe too many), but especially that of objectivity. PET imaging is not a simple recording of an objective truth but rather a sophisticated scientific-technological-cultural process, whose outcome is formed by the very culture it...
Neurological Sciences, Aug 16, 2017
Studies of saccadic eye movements in subjects with Tourette syndrome (TS) have provided additiona... more Studies of saccadic eye movements in subjects with Tourette syndrome (TS) have provided additional evidence that there is a link between TS symptoms and deficits in fronto-striatothalamic networks. These studies revealed impaired timing and inhibition of saccades. We compared fixational eye movements, such as microsaccades and ocular drifts, in subjects with TS and healthy controls.We measured horizontal and vertical eye positions with video-oculography in 14 subjects with Tourette syndrome. We found reduced microsaccade amplitude but increased time between adjacent microsaccades (intersaccadic interval). Hence, the rate of microsaccades was reduced in subjects with TS compared to controls. Measure of ocular stability during intersaccadic intervals revealed increased drift velocity and increased variance in eye position. We hypothesize that increased activity of the direct fronto-striatal pathway and the resulting reduction in basal ganglia outflow targeting the superior colliculus fixation zone affect the rate and amplitudeS of microsaccades in subjects with TS. The resulting impairment in frontal eye field fixation leads to increased drifts during intersaccadic interval in subjects with TS. Possible clinical implication for these results is that fixational eye movements can be objective biological markers of TS.
De Gruyter eBooks, May 22, 2018
We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressi... more We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressing and evoking emotions and that studying swearing might shed light on the evolutionary path from motor behavior to language. Our lens is the involuntary swearing-coprolalia-associated with Tourette syndrome (ts). In a qualitative analysis of videotaped interviews with 16 ts sufferers and their families, we arrive at the following findings, of which the first one replicates previous findings, and the following are novel: (i) coprolalia, once believed psychogenic, is embodied; (ii) the pragmatics of swearing obeys the cultural rules of communication while violating the culture's values; (iii) coprolalia is unique as a speech act as it relies mainly on cultural context rather than semantics; (iv) coprolalia's sensitivity to culture affords its performative effectiveness in hurting its hearer. Therefore, reducing the automaticity of the hearer's interpretation of the coprolaliac's intention can reduce the hurtful effect.
International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Apr 1, 1986
Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian m... more Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian manifolds to spaces of higher dimension, and not the most plausible. If we take seriously a certain construction of time space from spinors, and replace the underlying binary spinors by ...
This report is published in the interest of scientific and technical information exchange, and it... more This report is published in the interest of scientific and technical information exchange, and its publication does not constitute the Government's approval or disapproval of its ideas or findings.
Cognitive semantics, Sep 23, 2016
We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressi... more We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressing and evoking emotions and that studying swearing might shed light on the evolutionary path from motor behavior to language. Our lens is the involuntary swearing-coprolalia-associated with Tourette syndrome (ts). In a qualitative analysis of videotaped interviews with 16 ts sufferers and their families, we arrive at the following findings, of which the first one replicates previous findings, and the following are novel: (i) coprolalia, once believed psychogenic, is embodied; (ii) the pragmatics of swearing obeys the cultural rules of communication while violating the culture's values; (iii) coprolalia is unique as a speech act as it relies mainly on cultural context rather than semantics; (iv) coprolalia's sensitivity to culture affords its performative effectiveness in hurting its hearer. Therefore, reducing the automaticity of the hearer's interpretation of the coprolaliac's intention can reduce the hurtful effect.
International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Feb 1, 1988
ABSTRACT We seek the dynamics of a Bergmann manifold: a manifold of dimensionn=N 2 supporting a b... more ABSTRACT We seek the dynamics of a Bergmann manifold: a manifold of dimensionn=N 2 supporting a bundle of spinor spaces of dimensionN, and a map from the tangent spaces to the Hermitian spinor forms. Even though the spin-vector is the fundamental variable of the theory, every invariant analytic function depending on and its firstm derivatives alone can be expressed in terms of the chronometric tensorg and its firstm derivatives. Bergmann manifolds of dimensionn > 4 do not have invariant second-order equations for. We find a family of invariant actions which lead tonth-order quasilinear equations of motion on Bergmann manifolds and reduce to the Einstein-Hilbert action forn=2. The resulting gauge particles have spin, 1/2,1, 3/2, and 2.
History and Technology, 2006
History and Technology, 2006
International journal of theoretical …, 1986
Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian m... more Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian manifolds to spaces of higher dimension, and not the most plausible. If we take seriously a certain construction of time space from spinors, and replace the underlying binary spinors by ...
International journal of theoretical …, 1986
Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian m... more Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian manifolds to spaces of higher dimension, and not the most plausible. If we take seriously a certain construction of time space from spinors, and replace the underlying binary spinors by ...
International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 1983
Interactivity generates paradox in that the interactive control by one systemC of predicates abou... more Interactivity generates paradox in that the interactive control by one systemC of predicates about another system-under-studyS may falsify these predicates. We formulate an “interactive logic” to resolve this paradox of interactivity. Our construction generalizes one, the Galois connection, used by Von Neumann for the similar quantum paradox. We apply the construction to atransition system, a concept that includes general systems, automata, and quantum systems. In some (classical) automataS, the interactive predicates aboutS show quantumlike complementarity arising from interactivity: The interactive paradox generates the quantum paradox. Some classicalS's have noncommutative algebras of interactively observable coordinates similar to the Heisenberg algebra of a quantum system. SuchS's are “hidden variable” models of quantum theory not covered by the hidden variable studies of Von Neumann, Bohm, Bell, or Kochen and Specker. It is conceivable that some quantum effects in Natu...
Cognitive Semantics
We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressi... more We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressing and evoking emotions and that studying swearing might shed light on the evolutionary path from motor behavior to language. Our lens is the involuntary swearing—coprolalia—associated with Tourette syndrome (ts). In a qualitative analysis of videotaped interviews with 16 ts sufferers and their families, we arrive at the following findings, of which the first one replicates previous findings, and the following are novel: (i) coprolalia, once believed psychogenic, is embodied; (ii) the pragmatics of swearing obeys the cultural rules of communication while violating the culture’s values; (iii) coprolalia is unique as a speech act as it relies mainly on cultural context rather than semantics; (iv) coprolalia’s sensitivity to culture affords its performative effectiveness in hurting its hearer. Therefore, reducing the automaticity of the hearer’s interpretation of the coprolaliac’s intention...
A spin vector sigma_{ dot AA}^{rm a} maps the Hermitian bilinear forms psi {_{(dot AA)}} to the t... more A spin vector sigma_{ dot AA}^{rm a} maps the Hermitian bilinear forms psi {_{(dot AA)}} to the tangent space dx^{rm a } of time-space manifold at each point x ^{rm t} of the manifold. The dimension of the emerging non-Riemannian manifold is n = N^{2}. We seek the dynamics of that Bergmann manifold. We prove that even though the spin-vector sigma is the fundamental variable of the theory, every invariant analytic function depending on sigma and its first m derivatives alone can be expressed in terms of the chronometric tensor g and its first m derivatives. We prove that invariant actions for Riemannian manifolds of higher dimensions which lead to second order equations of motion (Lovelock and Zumino actions) cannot be generalized to actions for Bergmann manifolds of dimension n ne 4 with second order equations. We find a family of actions which lead to Nth order quasilinear equations of motion on Bergmann manifolds and reduce to the Einstein-Hilbert action for N = 2. The resulting gauge particles have at most spin 0, 1over 2, 1, 3over 2, and 2. We propose some questions for future study.
The neuropsychiatric disorder Tourette syndrome (TS) is characterized by motor and vocal involunt... more The neuropsychiatric disorder Tourette syndrome (TS) is characterized by motor and vocal involuntary stereotypical tics. Its adult population (ATS) is little studied and often excluded from research. Only little medical help is available for ATS and many of them have limited access to health care due to lack of health insurance or inability to drive to a clinic. ATS is the focus of this study. Its phenotypic presentation is heterogeneous with no reliable phenotype that serves as a basis for research. Instead there is a phenotype spectrum that may or may not include obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention disorders like attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and more. This study of ATS is interdisciplinary, drawing on the history of medicine, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. The historical dynamics of the elusive TS include changes in its definitions and treatments from the 19th century of Gilles de la Tourette to the prese...
Abstract: The research performed under this contract assessed whether fundamental symbolic operat... more Abstract: The research performed under this contract assessed whether fundamental symbolic operations-predication, conceptual combination, and the representation of abstract concepts-arise from the simulation of modality-specific states in the brain. Traditionally, ...
This chapter explores and summarizes the current knowledge about the neurophysiological substrata... more This chapter explores and summarizes the current knowledge about the neurophysiological substrata of the utterance of expletives—its brain regions, pathways, and neurotransmitters, and its interaction with hormones. The chapter presents clinical data that have been gathered directly from patients of aphasia, Tourette syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, and brain injuries—all are disorders often accompanied with expletives. It also discusses the possible relations between swearing and aggression, swearing and pain, and swearing and social inhibition in the population at large. Finally, the chapter examines the clinical data and the data gathered from the population at large within one frame, and proposes two hypotheses that can serve as possible directions for future research about the biological substrata of swearing. No previous knowledge of the brain is assumed.
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2005
ABSTRACT Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79.2 (2005) 370-372 In Picturing Personhood, the ant... more ABSTRACT Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79.2 (2005) 370-372 In Picturing Personhood, the anthropologist Joseph Dumit positions himself as a relativist who questions "the constellation of codes of 'objectivity,' 'normality,' 'automaticity,' and 'veracity'" (p. 143). His inquiry takes us through a gallery of PET images of human brains. "PET," an acronym for Positron Emission Tomography, is made up of "positron emission" from physics and "tomography" from computer visualization, and the name suggests that this is an interdisciplinary field. Indeed, physics, chemistry, computations, statistics, neurology, and cognitive psychology meet in PET. And with a similarly interdisciplinary approach, Dumit sets out to study PET through a lens that is "part cultural studies and philosophy . . . part history . . . and part anthropology" (p. 13). Such a study need not be limited to PET, since it would be appropriate for other brain-imaging technologies, and especially for the other major functional imaging process, fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). To introduce authentic and authoritative voices, Dumit conducts many interviews and lets experts of the participating disciplines talk for themselves. This makes room for many perspectives and insures against misplaced reverence toward "ultimate truth." Dumit emphasizes that brain imaging is built on assumptions, has technological shortcomings, is applied to brains with individual variability, and leads to data interpretation that depends greatly on the scientists who produce the image and read it. These qualifications of brain imaging shake the authority that we tend to attribute to colorful pictures as telling a "true" and "real" story. In the first half of the book Dumit introduces some of the technological intricacies of PET. This is an uneven journey in which some of the expert explanations are lucid but others are less satisfying. Opening the black box of brain-imaging exposes both the potency and the shortcomings of PET technology. The potency is in the "visuality of these images" (p. 58). The issues involved in creating the image unfold as the reader learns about this complex process. Finally, the reading of the image is challenging and is the focus of Dumit's attention. Usually when we see a picture we trust that we understand it, and we take its content to represent a fact in the world. Not so simple, says one judge when PET images are brought before his jury. Interlude 3 and its succeeding chapter 4 take up the use of PET in courtrooms and the notion of expert images: "The use of expert images in the courtroom is fraught with difficulties . . . stemming from our current cultural semiotics that privileges machines over experts in terms of objectivity" (p. 133). Machines, of course, are also products of human experts. The information, however, cannot be simply read from the image: the image has to be accompanied by a human expert and, unlike most other visual images to which we have grown accustomed, can easily be misread by a layperson. Even the experts are challenged. An interview with Henry Wagner highlights the danger of confusing scientifically useful conventions with some truth: "putting anything into a category should be done not because there is some kind of intrinsic truth to it but because it is useful" (p. 181). This presents a profound challenge to the human scientific quest: how do the tools that we use in research, whether theoretical or physical instruments, affect our understanding? The final chapter, which looks at PET images themselves, comes to the conclusion that "understanding a PET image of a person with depression requires . . . reflection on categories of people and metaphors of the brain, as well as imaging technologies and practices" (p. 185). What began as an anthropological study of the PET culture evolved into a study of the interaction between PET and the larger culture. Dumit raises many questions (maybe too many), but especially that of objectivity. PET imaging is not a simple recording of an objective truth but rather a sophisticated scientific-technological-cultural process, whose outcome is formed by the very culture it...
Neurological Sciences, Aug 16, 2017
Studies of saccadic eye movements in subjects with Tourette syndrome (TS) have provided additiona... more Studies of saccadic eye movements in subjects with Tourette syndrome (TS) have provided additional evidence that there is a link between TS symptoms and deficits in fronto-striatothalamic networks. These studies revealed impaired timing and inhibition of saccades. We compared fixational eye movements, such as microsaccades and ocular drifts, in subjects with TS and healthy controls.We measured horizontal and vertical eye positions with video-oculography in 14 subjects with Tourette syndrome. We found reduced microsaccade amplitude but increased time between adjacent microsaccades (intersaccadic interval). Hence, the rate of microsaccades was reduced in subjects with TS compared to controls. Measure of ocular stability during intersaccadic intervals revealed increased drift velocity and increased variance in eye position. We hypothesize that increased activity of the direct fronto-striatal pathway and the resulting reduction in basal ganglia outflow targeting the superior colliculus fixation zone affect the rate and amplitudeS of microsaccades in subjects with TS. The resulting impairment in frontal eye field fixation leads to increased drifts during intersaccadic interval in subjects with TS. Possible clinical implication for these results is that fixational eye movements can be objective biological markers of TS.
De Gruyter eBooks, May 22, 2018
We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressi... more We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressing and evoking emotions and that studying swearing might shed light on the evolutionary path from motor behavior to language. Our lens is the involuntary swearing-coprolalia-associated with Tourette syndrome (ts). In a qualitative analysis of videotaped interviews with 16 ts sufferers and their families, we arrive at the following findings, of which the first one replicates previous findings, and the following are novel: (i) coprolalia, once believed psychogenic, is embodied; (ii) the pragmatics of swearing obeys the cultural rules of communication while violating the culture's values; (iii) coprolalia is unique as a speech act as it relies mainly on cultural context rather than semantics; (iv) coprolalia's sensitivity to culture affords its performative effectiveness in hurting its hearer. Therefore, reducing the automaticity of the hearer's interpretation of the coprolaliac's intention can reduce the hurtful effect.
International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Apr 1, 1986
Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian m... more Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian manifolds to spaces of higher dimension, and not the most plausible. If we take seriously a certain construction of time space from spinors, and replace the underlying binary spinors by ...
This report is published in the interest of scientific and technical information exchange, and it... more This report is published in the interest of scientific and technical information exchange, and its publication does not constitute the Government's approval or disapproval of its ideas or findings.
Cognitive semantics, Sep 23, 2016
We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressi... more We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressing and evoking emotions and that studying swearing might shed light on the evolutionary path from motor behavior to language. Our lens is the involuntary swearing-coprolalia-associated with Tourette syndrome (ts). In a qualitative analysis of videotaped interviews with 16 ts sufferers and their families, we arrive at the following findings, of which the first one replicates previous findings, and the following are novel: (i) coprolalia, once believed psychogenic, is embodied; (ii) the pragmatics of swearing obeys the cultural rules of communication while violating the culture's values; (iii) coprolalia is unique as a speech act as it relies mainly on cultural context rather than semantics; (iv) coprolalia's sensitivity to culture affords its performative effectiveness in hurting its hearer. Therefore, reducing the automaticity of the hearer's interpretation of the coprolaliac's intention can reduce the hurtful effect.
International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Feb 1, 1988
ABSTRACT We seek the dynamics of a Bergmann manifold: a manifold of dimensionn=N 2 supporting a b... more ABSTRACT We seek the dynamics of a Bergmann manifold: a manifold of dimensionn=N 2 supporting a bundle of spinor spaces of dimensionN, and a map from the tangent spaces to the Hermitian spinor forms. Even though the spin-vector is the fundamental variable of the theory, every invariant analytic function depending on and its firstm derivatives alone can be expressed in terms of the chronometric tensorg and its firstm derivatives. Bergmann manifolds of dimensionn > 4 do not have invariant second-order equations for. We find a family of invariant actions which lead tonth-order quasilinear equations of motion on Bergmann manifolds and reduce to the Einstein-Hilbert action forn=2. The resulting gauge particles have spin, 1/2,1, 3/2, and 2.
History and Technology, 2006
History and Technology, 2006
International journal of theoretical …, 1986
Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian m... more Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian manifolds to spaces of higher dimension, and not the most plausible. If we take seriously a certain construction of time space from spinors, and replace the underlying binary spinors by ...
International journal of theoretical …, 1986
Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian m... more Riemannian manifolds are but one of three ways to extrapolate from four-dimensional Minkowskian manifolds to spaces of higher dimension, and not the most plausible. If we take seriously a certain construction of time space from spinors, and replace the underlying binary spinors by ...
International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 1983
Interactivity generates paradox in that the interactive control by one systemC of predicates abou... more Interactivity generates paradox in that the interactive control by one systemC of predicates about another system-under-studyS may falsify these predicates. We formulate an “interactive logic” to resolve this paradox of interactivity. Our construction generalizes one, the Galois connection, used by Von Neumann for the similar quantum paradox. We apply the construction to atransition system, a concept that includes general systems, automata, and quantum systems. In some (classical) automataS, the interactive predicates aboutS show quantumlike complementarity arising from interactivity: The interactive paradox generates the quantum paradox. Some classicalS's have noncommutative algebras of interactively observable coordinates similar to the Heisenberg algebra of a quantum system. SuchS's are “hidden variable” models of quantum theory not covered by the hidden variable studies of Von Neumann, Bohm, Bell, or Kochen and Specker. It is conceivable that some quantum effects in Natu...
Cognitive Semantics
We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressi... more We hypothesize that swearing is an emotional action that hardly says anything other than expressing and evoking emotions and that studying swearing might shed light on the evolutionary path from motor behavior to language. Our lens is the involuntary swearing—coprolalia—associated with Tourette syndrome (ts). In a qualitative analysis of videotaped interviews with 16 ts sufferers and their families, we arrive at the following findings, of which the first one replicates previous findings, and the following are novel: (i) coprolalia, once believed psychogenic, is embodied; (ii) the pragmatics of swearing obeys the cultural rules of communication while violating the culture’s values; (iii) coprolalia is unique as a speech act as it relies mainly on cultural context rather than semantics; (iv) coprolalia’s sensitivity to culture affords its performative effectiveness in hurting its hearer. Therefore, reducing the automaticity of the hearer’s interpretation of the coprolaliac’s intention...
A spin vector sigma_{ dot AA}^{rm a} maps the Hermitian bilinear forms psi {_{(dot AA)}} to the t... more A spin vector sigma_{ dot AA}^{rm a} maps the Hermitian bilinear forms psi {_{(dot AA)}} to the tangent space dx^{rm a } of time-space manifold at each point x ^{rm t} of the manifold. The dimension of the emerging non-Riemannian manifold is n = N^{2}. We seek the dynamics of that Bergmann manifold. We prove that even though the spin-vector sigma is the fundamental variable of the theory, every invariant analytic function depending on sigma and its first m derivatives alone can be expressed in terms of the chronometric tensor g and its first m derivatives. We prove that invariant actions for Riemannian manifolds of higher dimensions which lead to second order equations of motion (Lovelock and Zumino actions) cannot be generalized to actions for Bergmann manifolds of dimension n ne 4 with second order equations. We find a family of actions which lead to Nth order quasilinear equations of motion on Bergmann manifolds and reduce to the Einstein-Hilbert action for N = 2. The resulting gauge particles have at most spin 0, 1over 2, 1, 3over 2, and 2. We propose some questions for future study.
The neuropsychiatric disorder Tourette syndrome (TS) is characterized by motor and vocal involunt... more The neuropsychiatric disorder Tourette syndrome (TS) is characterized by motor and vocal involuntary stereotypical tics. Its adult population (ATS) is little studied and often excluded from research. Only little medical help is available for ATS and many of them have limited access to health care due to lack of health insurance or inability to drive to a clinic. ATS is the focus of this study. Its phenotypic presentation is heterogeneous with no reliable phenotype that serves as a basis for research. Instead there is a phenotype spectrum that may or may not include obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention disorders like attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and more. This study of ATS is interdisciplinary, drawing on the history of medicine, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. The historical dynamics of the elusive TS include changes in its definitions and treatments from the 19th century of Gilles de la Tourette to the prese...
Abstract: The research performed under this contract assessed whether fundamental symbolic operat... more Abstract: The research performed under this contract assessed whether fundamental symbolic operations-predication, conceptual combination, and the representation of abstract concepts-arise from the simulation of modality-specific states in the brain. Traditionally, ...
Adults with Tourette Syndrome, 2009
https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/f1881m33w?locale=en The neuropsychiatric disorder Tou... more https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/f1881m33w?locale=en
The neuropsychiatric disorder Tourette syndrome (TS) is characterized by motor and vocal involuntary stereotypical tics. Its adult population (ATS) is little studied and often excluded from research. Only little medical help is available for ATS and many of them have limited access to health care due to lack of health insurance or inability to drive to a clinic.
ATS is the focus of this study. Its phenotypic presentation is heterogeneous with no reliable phenotype that serves as a basis for research. Instead there is a phenotype spectrum that may or may not include obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention disorders like attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD), and more.
This study of ATS is interdisciplinary, drawing on the history of medicine,
cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. The historical dynamics of the elusive TS include changes in its definitions and treatments from the 19th century of Gilles de la Tourette to the present. The dissertation is contextualized within this historical dynamics
and aims to contribute to it.
In this qualitative study, data are gathered from video-interviews with sixteen adults with TS, video-interviews with their relatives, self reports, and medical evaluations. Based on these data, tics are classified in three ways: by modality, complexity, and triggers. A close study of coprolalia -- involuntary cursing afflicting some with TS -- is performed as well, with attention to the contribution of culture to this phenomenon and the possibilities and hindrances to its amelioration. The psychological,
neurochemical, and neurosurgical interventions administered to the participants are studied and reflected upon.
This study suggests three major areas for closer and quantitative future
investigation: (i) the role of the visual system in TS; (ii) the role of the somatosensory system in TS; and (iii) the possible application of mindfulness to the treatment of TS.