United States
Freelance medical writer and editor specializing in neuroscience and neurodivergence, seeking work. I write and edit for 2 audiences:
1) For researchers & medical professionals: journal articles, research grant proposals, book chapters, presentations.
2) For patients and the public: blog posts, health communication, and science writing.
You can commission me to proofread at https://ko-fi.com/mosaicofminds, by LinkedIn DM, or by email.
I completed University of Chicago's Medical Writing and Editing certificate program in June 2023.
Formative Experiences:
*10 years as a cognitive neuroscientist and research consultant, publishing 4 peer reviewed research papers and writing and editing grant proposals.
* 2 years as a student speech/language therapist, developing communication skills and experience in clinical settings (and writing many clinical reports and SOAP notes).
15 years writing the Mosaic of Minds neuroscience blog and its associated X account.
We are launching a series of blog posts discussing the current state of neurodegenerative disease research. We will cover various diseases and biomarkers, keeping you informed whether you are starting your own research program, curious about your colleagues' discoveries, or simply interested in neurodegenerative diseases. Throughout, we'll examine how technology is helping advance biomarker research.
NfL makes an excellent biomarker for assessing neurodegenerative disease severity, predicting progression, and evaluating treatments. The next challenges for researchers is to standardize the process of measuring NfL levels and establish reference values for research and eventually, clinical use.
Science Communication
Research on how the brain learns to read shows how learning works, in general
What do operations on the wrong ear, unwanted removal of foot bones, and forced hysterectomies from 100 years ago have to do with informed consent today? Keep reading to find out.
Learn how to do a meta-analysis by designing one with me. Here's how to develop a research question and choose relevant evidence.
Why Meta-Analyses are the Highest Quality Evidence, and How to Understand Them
Neurons aren't arranged at random. In some areas of the cortex (the mitten-shaped section we normally just think of as "the brain"), neurons are laid out in maps based on the properties of stimuli to which they respond. The response patterns of the neurons change systematically as you move across the cortical sheet.
When you learn a lot about something, you look at it differently.
What does it mean to have autistic traits, but not be autistic? Aren't they also just autistic but not severely so, seeing as it's a spectrum anyway? - Person on Quora How can someone have autistic traits, but not be autistic?
4 ways to find free copies of any academic journal article
Individual brains differ in shape and size. Brain atlases let us find and study important locations they share.
The human brain is the culmination of a long evolutionary process. This visual tour of the brain, from fish to humans, will show the order in which its different parts evolved.
During my orientation to a training program in speech/language therapy, the teachers instructed us to play a game. The goal was simple: we had to arrange ourselves in line by age. Most of us were strangers, ranging from fresh out of college to forty-something. We were given a challenge: we had to accomplish this without speaking.
When experimental research and lived experience of disabilities come to conflicting conclusions, what should we believe? The problem becomes personal for autistic people who research autism - or anyone who researches their own disability. I think both experimental research and lived experience are valuable, and they're best suited to answer different questions.
Most humans have an important skill: the ability to share attention. They can pay attention to the same thing, each knowing the other person is also attending to and thinking about it. The way researchers define it, though, joint attention means looking back and forth between another person and an object, a complex series of eye movements. But in most of the world's cultures, sharing attention often occurs through other senses. Even in the US, people can share attention without looking at...
The autism community has become increasingly concerned about understanding people with no spoken language, and often, severe developmental delays. Fortunately, psychology offers a variety of tools for learning about the mental life of people who cannot speak, most of which involve measuring eye movements.
Researchers in science and medicine must address privacy and consent issues so participant's data won't be used to train AI without permission.
Experts have long claimed that autistic people learn and use language differently than other people. What is language in autism like, and is there anything unique about it at all? Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Elizabeth Grace, and I investigated studies done from 2000-2015 with every language skill at all ages.
What my mentor and I learned from surveying the research on language in autism from 2000 to ~2015. Although language does not feature in the current "diagnostic Bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-5, yet when autism first appeared in the 1980 DSM, one of the few criteria was "gross deficits in language development" (APA, 1980). So, do autistic people develop language differently, and if so, how? The answers may surprise you...
For over 13 years, people who care about autism research have debated how to discuss autism in a way that doesn't harm the people discussed -- and whether to bother.
Scientific papers can be hard to read. But it's not just the jargon that makes them difficult. Scientific papers, like poetry, are meant to be read in special ways. Researchers know how to read studies efficiently, and you can learn, too.
Editing
Heavy edit example: Complete rewrite and image/alt text editing of a blog post.
Disability and Neurodivergence
Over the past few decades, both autism and trauma have become better understood and more frequently diagnosed. Researchers, clinicians, and autistic people themselves all perceive a relationship between autism and trauma. However, we don't yet know why or how they're related. Do autistic children face more bullying and abuse, which is traumatizing?
Understanding what labels like "autism" and "ADHD" mean and how to use them can help us avoid stereotyping and use them kindly,
An impairment is only considered a disability when it affects a culturally valued trait that everyone is expected to have
Imagine a person with a reading disability who reads slowly and effortfully. Text surrounds them constantly, demanding to be read: news articles, emails, work documents, tax forms, user's manuals, street signs, and menus. This omnipresent text puts people with reading disabilities at a disadvantage.
Behold, the curb cut: a wedge cut into an elevated curb to allow smooth passage between sidewalk and street. Curb cuts were originally designed to make public streets accessible to soldiers injured in World War II, but now help everyone.
Law Enforcement is Failing the Autistic Community Here's How Kind Theory is Addressing this Huge Overlooked Equity Issue Autistic people in our communities have good reason to fear interacting with law enforcement.People with disabilities, including neurodivergent people, are disproportionately likely to interact with police. These experiences are often negative.
In a recent webinar, ADHD coach and mother of an ADHD son Laurie Dupar introduced the concept of a "tipping point" to explain why people with ADHD can suddenly start to struggle in life. These tipping points may lead people to be diagnosed.
In March 2012, Stephanie Rochester suffocated her six month old son, Rylan. On May 13, 2006, Karen McCarron killed her 3 year old daughter, Katherine. [See Mel Baggs' moving letter to Katherine here]. In July 2010, Saiqa Akhter strangled her 5 year old son, Zain, and her 2 year old daughter, Faryaal, then called a 911 operator to confess.
In the previous post, I graphed the continuum of possible effort a person can exert, and defined the concept of the "sweet spot." The "sweet spot," the small zone of maximum skill growth, is the highest amount of effort you can put in without pain.
Imagine a middle aged person whose job involves sitting in a chair for hours. They live in the suburbs, drive everywhere, rarely walk, and never have to lift heavy objects. Not surprisingly, this person has put on a little weight around the middle. When they first go to the gym, what exercise should they start with, and for how long?
"What if you were told the way you experience the world is wrong? What if they told you the way you move is wrong? What if they told you the way you talk and think and write is wrong? What if you could never say no? What if this was called therapy?"
Academic Writing
Abstract Purpose: The seductive detail effect (SDE) occurs when irrelevant text or images reduce learning of important content. Well established with adults, the SDE also affects children, who may be especially susceptible as they are increasingly surrounded by images meant to engage rather than inform.
Abstract: Autism is a developmental disability characterized by atypical social interaction, interests or body movements, and communication. Our review examines the empirical status of three communication phenomena believed to be unique to autism: pronoun reversal (using the pronoun you when the pronoun I is intended, and vice versa), echolalia (repeating what someone has said), and a reduced or even reversed production-comprehension lag (a reduction or reversal of the well-established...
Abstract: Abnormal language development used to define autism, but no longer does. Indeed, language development no longer even figures into contemporary diagnostic criteria, although early delays in language often lead to parents’ concerns. In this chapter, we review recent empirical research on language development in autism. To paint a contemporary picture, we restrict our review to studies published in the 21st century. We conclude that language development in autism is often delayed,...
ABSTRACT Fast Mapping is a laboratory task that typically involves an experimenter creating a nonsense name for an object the participant has never seen before. We demonstrate how researchers’ use of the term Fast Mapping has extended beyond its core meaning as a laboratory task to more abstractly denote an internal process, a skill that children employ in their everyday lives, and an inherent capacity. We argue that such over-extension is problematic.
Abstract: When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or other compressive) placement. For example, the distance between “5” and “10” is larger than the distance between “75” and “80.” This has often been explained by assuming that children have a logarithmically scaled mental representation of number (e.g., Berteletti, Lucangeli, Piazza, Dehaene, & Zorzi, 2010; Siegler & Opfer, 2003). However, several investigators have questioned this argument...
Abstract Several theories claim that a high working memory span is needed for accurate conditional reasoning, placing it out of reach for children under 12. Yet prior research (Wolf & Shigaki 1983) suggests gifted 5-8 year olds may reason at adultlike levels, despite age-typical working memory. However, this research did not test gifted children on the problems which are considered impossible for young children, the ones with uncertain solutions. To extend these findings, we compare...
We report clinical outcomes from a 12-week music intervention for PWD. In contrast to previous music therapy programs, Bridging Memory Through Music (BMTM) provides dyadic PWD-caregiver involvement, perceptive and expressive participation, music preferences of PWDs and caregiver training to elicit better communication and improve participants’ affect.
Personal Essays
I discovered neurodiverse communities by accident. It was 2008 and I was in college, desperately trying to understand why life seemed so much harder for me than for those around me. At that point, I wasn't diagnosed with anything. That wasn't because I had developed typically.
Being Misunderstood, Part 4: We Can Communicate Better With Neurodivergent People By Imagining We're Talking to Someone from Another Culture An effective way to create mutual understanding with neurodivergent people is to act as if we're interacting with someone from a different culture.In the previous 3 posts, we saw that throughout life, neurodivergent people are
Being Misunderstood 3: We Expect to be Misunderstood Neurodivergent People Expect to be Misunderstood...and That Only Makes Things Worse From early childhood on, neurodivergent people are often misunderstood. My previous two posts in this series explain why it happens so often.
Neurodivergent people often do not know why we are misunderstood and what we need to explain. Sometimes, that's because our behavior is associated with a different emotion than we really feel, or none at all.
Being Neurodivergent Means Being Misunderstood 1: Why We Are Misunderstood Autistic and ADHD people vary a lot, but one thing we have in common is being misunderstood. This post is the first in a series about these misunderstandings. It will explain what ways we are misperceived and why it happens so often.
On the psychology and neuroscience of writing rituals