Class Presentation about Language Abilities and Brain Degeneration

This semester, I’m taking a class called Language Processing and the Brain with Dr. Ann Laubstein. There’s been some pretty interesting things so far, though admittedly we’ve covered mostly psycholinguistics (psychology of language) rather than neurolinguistics (language and the brain) material. When we’re not reviewing the material from last class (which I suffer through for the sake of people who find it helpful), I’m pretty engaged with the material. Specifically, I want to argue with everything. That’s… probably good, but I think there’s other fields for me in the long term.

Side note: I realize I haven’t posted about what classes I’m taking this semester. The reason I haven’t posted about this semester is because I still have to post about last semester. And the reason I haven’t posted about that is because I haven’t posted about my summer. But I’ve written that post! I just need to break it up into a series of posts because it’s long.

Anyway, back to the point: one of the required projects was a group presentation. We were assigned groups by last name, and my group presented this past Tuesday. The task was to find a recent paper that had made a significant contribution to the field, and present it to the class in ~10 minutes. On the advice of our TA, our group went with the paper Cognition and Anatomy in Three Variants of Primary Progressive Aphasia (note: paywall, sadly). I realize no one has any idea what that means, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

You can see all the materials over on UniNotes. The “Merged notes” documents have the notes each person took while preparing their section (plus full paper notes from me), so that’s the best free explanation you’re going to get about what the paper is about. The images are the graphs I created for the presentation, using the data I pulled from the HTML version of the paper, which is in “aphasia.csv”. Which took way too long for me to reformat for proper processing (Me: “Why is this being parsed as ordinal data rather than numeric…?” Professor Biddle: “Great question, let me know when you find out!”). Then the code for producing those graphs is in “aphasia.r”, which was a five-hour long foray (plus time spent looking at online help and such) into programming in R.

Then there’s the presentation itself. I was handling the introduction and conclusion, and by virtue of being relatively comfortable presenting, spent too much talking about. We put the presentation together using Prezi, because the first group that presented used it, and now the entire class is forced to. I mean, it would just be rude to assault their eyes with PowerPoint slides. So that’s available online here, if you’re curious. In case Prezi dies, I’ve got it on UniNotes too. Anyway, you can see there’s very little text in the sections I handled, which makes the whole thing pretty confusing for anyone who wasn’t around for the presentation.

Anyway, I actually like this paper. Their results are genuinely compelling, to me anyway: “damage in areas X, Y, and Z led to problems X, Y, and Z”. “We’re pretty sure Area Y is related to Problem X, so that suggests Areas Y and Z are related in some way to Problems Y and Z.” “Based on genetic profiles, the underlying cause may be X rather than Y.” Direct links like that are pretty rare, generally speaking.