About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about autopsies, strokes and traumatic brain injuries, focusing in particular on: (i) understanding autopsy to be a post-mortem examination, often with the intention of identifying a cause of death; (ii) the discovery of the brains regions known as Broca and Wernicke’s areas through post-mortem examinations; (iii) Paul Broca’s discovery that lesions in the left frontal lobe were responsible for the aphasia he observed in his patients; (iv) a common result of a stroke being the development of vascular dementia; (v) the term infarct, referring to the cluster of dead tissue left after a stroke, which is surrounded by reversibly injured brain tissue, known as penumbra; (vi) penetrative and non-penetrative traumatic brain injuries, with axonal and mild traumatic injury as examples of the latter; (vii) patient observation as a key pre-treatment action after a brain injury is discovered or suspected; (viii) the process of functional recovery, whereby the brain remaps functions which used to be completed by the now damaged brain region; (ix) Patrick Wall’s 1977 publication, which explored this remapping process via neuronal unmasking.

About the lecturer

Dr Ivana Babicova is a lecturer in psychology in the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University. Dr Babicova’s research interests are in dementia, pain assessment and positive psychology. Some of Dr Babicova’s recent publications include ‘Validation and evaluation of psychometric properties of PainChek®: an electronic pain assessment tool for people with moderate-to-severe dementia’ and ‘Pain in people with dementia: a systematic review and a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of observational pain assessment tools’ (2020).