Googling the results

First, a doctor’s impressions of my recent (yesterday morning,) MRI. Now, my attempt to read and interpret what they’re trying to tell me.

-No evidence of acute infarct, acute hemorrhage, mass effect or midline shift.

After googling (ten minutes, first-page basic results,) it seems that I do not have a current or “acute” brain injury, there was no evidence found of these. This is good, I am not currently suffering a stroke.

-Focal encephalomalacia with gliosis right frontal parietal junction likely sequela of remote ischemia or contusion.

This second line is harder, this is what it appears that I do have.

A softening or loss of brain tissue, with a fibrous proliferation of glial cells in the injured areas, of the front right parietal junction likely caused by impaired blood flow to that section of my brain as a result of another region of injured tissue in which capillaries had been ruptured, a bruise.

So, a bruise in one region of my brain caused another area to have reduced blood flow causing a softening or loss of brain tissue in that second region, my “right frontal parietal junction“.

Up to this point, with the google definitions I can roughly put together what they’re trying to tell me. However, reading up on the current thoughts of what the damaged region of my brain was responsible for, is interesting so far and will likely be years until I have completed researching this topic to satiate my content. A few quick points in a single article that I found will require further study:

1. The right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) is frequently associated with different capacities that to shift attention to unexpected stimuli (reorienting of attention) and to understand others’ (false) mental state [theory of mind (ToM), typically represented by false belief tasks].
2.  A conjunction analysis across ALE meta-analyses delineating regions consistently recruited by reorienting of attention and false belief studies revealed the anterior rTPJ, suggesting an overarching role of this specific region.
3. Moreover, the anatomical difference analysis unravelled the posterior rTPJ as higher converging in false belief compared with reorienting of attention tasks. This supports the concept of an exclusive role of the posterior rTPJ in the social domain.
4. The combination of MACM and RSFC mapping showed that the posterior rTPJ has connectivity patterns with typical ToM regions, whereas the anterior part of rTPJ co-activates with the attentional network.
5. Taken together, our data suggest that rTPJ contains two functionally fractionated subregions: while posterior rTPJ seems exclusively involved in the social domain, anterior rTPJ is involved in both, attention and ToM, conceivably indicating an attentional shifting role of this region.

So taken with the above, the region of my brain that was damaged appears to have been partially responsible (according to some studies,) for the “reorienting of attention” and for “false belief studies”.

Having no idea what “false belief studies” were, led to more googling, and really, more that I’m prepared to read and to try to understand right now.  Looks like I may be putting Psychology back on my list of topics I would like to study more.

Time to keep going.