Neuropsychology · Simplified
What Your Battery Cannot Say
You have eighty minutes and eight questions to answer. You will not answer all of them, and the report has to say so.
The referral
One referral, eighty minutes
Mr K, 58, referred by his GP. Six months of complaints from his family that he is forgetful, short-tempered and has stopped managing the household paperwork. He says he is fine and only came because his daughter insisted. He sleeps badly. He is recovering from a chest infection and looks tired. The referral letter asks: is this the beginning of a dementia?
Choose your tasks. The clock is the constraint, and there is no combination that answers everything.
The report
Two halves, and the second one is the report
Key idea: A battery is a set of choices about what not to find out. Eighty minutes buys perhaps four or five tasks, each of which speaks to one or two questions, and the referral has more questions than that. So the useful skill is not picking good tests, it is knowing which questions your particular selection has left open and writing them down. A report that lists conclusions without listing what was not assessed invites the reader to assume everything else was normal, and with this referral the unassessed things include mood, sleep and a recent illness, any one of which could account for the complaint entirely without any progressive condition being present.
The durations are approximate and the coverage is simplified: a real task speaks to more questions than one or two, more weakly, and how much it tells you depends on the person in front of you. Nothing here is a real test, a real protocol or a real referral, and no combination of tasks on this list would be sufficient to diagnose or exclude a dementia, which is a clinical judgement made over time and with information this exercise does not include. The exercise is about the structure of the problem, not about the answer.
The longer version adds three referrals with different questions, seventeen task types, and a comparison of batteries against each other. It is at Assessment Battery Builder in the main collection.