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I agree the whole thing is hazy. The concept of a "functional" illness is such a very loose and vague one. So no sign can really indicate anything's a functional illness until we know exactly what we mean by this term and what causes it. But the basic idea of the Hoover's sign is that you...

Hi there, @LJord. Hope my post above helps address your first question about the Hoover's sign. The idea of a "functional stroke" is a relatively new kid on the block. Its now being used to describe people who have reported a stroke-like event, but their difficulties or symptoms are well in...

Weirdly enough, its the opposite. @ToneA1. The Hoover's sign is supposed to show that your problem is not due to "organic" illness. And therefore your problem is "functional" (whatever that is supposed to mean, its all very vague...). Hoover's test is said to be positive if the affected limb...

"Rule in signs" is such an Orewllian expression, because in fact they are signs that cannot be readily explained within standard neurological illness models. They aren't signs that positively indicate anything about the cause of the person's illness, other than that they don't fit the...

You're not wrong, @Hutan. :banghead:

They are rather loose and free with their conclusions! They found reduced activity in the insular and thalamic regions, but then they go all out and say that: I don't know how they decided that the insula and thalamus are involved in "bridging reason and emotion". The insula most likely plays a...

The "functional somatic symptoms" here were measured by asking people to report any aches/pains, headache, nausea, stomach pain, vomiting, overtiredness, and dizziness they experienced, that hadn't been explained medically. I think they mean: "Clinicians working with adolescents with...

Why oh why do these studies get published when there is no appropriate control group? An appropriate control group might be young people with epilepsy. Although even then, you would need to consider frequency of episodes, because epileptic seizures that are being controlled well with mediation...

PS On re-reading, this point seemed interesting (I've edited out some of the jargon): After wading through the jargon, I came out with the point that some decent proportion of the variation we measure in rating scales might not be genuine variation in the experiences or behaviours of the person...

Thanks, @SNT Gatchaman, I actually read the paper! Some interesting thoughts if you can wade through the jargon - not entirely new, but there are some nice references to other stuff in there that I've made a note of. The waffle is the philosophy type, not the psychology type. I think the author...

Agree, this is super dumb. As @rvallee says, this study confuses two very different things: - the normal, transient ECG changes that occur when we want to perform well in a task or situation (a very good thing!). - the long-term response to sustained mental or physical performance pressure...

This is just a bad piece. The Yerkes-Dodson Law does not have anything to say about perfectionism or effort at all. Its about the role of punishment in conditioned learning. Yerkes and Dodson found that mice learned to discriminate a punished from a non-punished behaviour better when the...

Once you've seen the massive problems with psychogenic reasoning you cannot unsee them: its reliance on the absence of evidence - rather than the presence of it - combined with very woolly ill-specified and untestable ideas about how the "psyche" works. We are the equivalent of Victorians who...

Yea, the hardware vs. software narrative is the most dualistic thing I've ever heard. Its saying "if we can't see any actual brain tissue damage, then the problem is psychological". Imagine if the whole of medicine worked like this - doctors would simply do MRI scans of the relevant organ or...

Yea, that's right, there's a block design subtest in the WAIS, where you have to arrange patterned blocks to reproduce a design. The puzzles progress from simple (four blocks) to complex. In the most recent version of the WAIS, there are also two other visual reasoning tasks. But the WAIS also...

@SNT Gatchaman, I like your cautious sceptical appraoch to this. But I think the DMN is more than a vascular anomaly, because of the specific structures that are implicated and what we know of their functions - which include the hippocampus (long term memory for personally experienced events)...

Hi @Ravn, I teach a little about the default mode network (DMN) in my cognitive neuroscience classes. The DMN is a bunch of brain structures which are particulary active "at rest", when the person is not processing any outside stimuli or performing any action. Importantly, these structures are...

Yay, nice to see people addressing the dangers of overuse of the assumption that unusual symptoms = FND = a psychological problem.

It's interesting, @Ravn. I saw this paper where it was used to assess concussion: https://downloads.corticalmetrics.com/pub/Pearce2021.pdf?n=1 The question of how to assess is tricky because there are literally thousands of ways to assess cognitive functioning, and so you need to first...

Hardware vs. software Yes, talk about dualistic. Its pure cartesian dualism!