2-neuro shit Flashcards
(39 cards)
what does the amygdala detect?
- EMOTIONAL SALIENCE, not threat
- The stronger the emotional salience, the more active the amygdala
emotional salience in regards to positive and negative experiences
- All kinds of things are emotionally salient, including positive experiences and novelty
- Negative experiences quickly and easily reach very strong emotional salience
Emotional Salience
- The emotional significance of percepts, thoughts, or other elements of mental experience
- which can draw and sustain attention through mechanisms outside of cognitive control
Cognitive control
The DELIBERATE GUIDANCE of current thoughts, perceptions or actions.
- This control is imposed in a goal-directed manner by currently active top-down executive processes
Typical hospital delivery sequence of steps
After the baby is born:
- Cut the cord
- Wipe the baby with a towel
- Wrap the baby in another towel
- Put a hat on the baby’s head
- (Finally) give the baby to mother
types of disgust
- distaste
- disgust
- moral disgust
function of distaste
to avoid toxins
ex: eating spoiled food, unpleasant tastes
function of disgust
to avoid infection
ex: Seeing spoiled food, vomit, maggots, etc; Seeing injuries, blood, bodily deformities; Contact with sick or unfamiliar individuals
function of moral disgust
to Avoid “unsuitable” interaction partners
ex: Violations of social and moral norms)
effects of fear and disgust on motivation
they are HIGHLY motivating!!
UK’s Gen Unhooked campaign of anti-smoking ads
- The campaign received hundreds of complaints about th advertisements, describing them as “offensive”, “disturbing”, or “violent”
- Campaign eventually stopped and the advertising agency said it “broke rules” The UK’s Department of
- Health said the campaign was “highly effective”
what detects taste in the brain?
- the insula
- orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)
The Insula
primary gustatory cortex
- taste identification and intensity
- damage can lead to inability to identify taste experiences
Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC)
secondary gustatory cortex
- the motivational value (approach/ avoid) of taste experience
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (VMPFC)
“Somatic markers”
conscious experience
- physiological affective states associated with
particular stimuli - different somatic markers created by different stimuli are integrated in VMPFC to produce a net somatic state
- a mechanism by which emotional processes can guide or bias reasoning
how is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrated
- amygdala
- other regions
- nucleus accumbens (Nacc)
when do we need to recruit cognitive control and the lateral PFC
- when we are in conflict with our own dominant values (for example, intervention)
- causes increased cognitive difficulty
- talk yourself out of something
when do we need to recruit the ventromedial PFC (VMPFC)
- when we are considering or doing something that is congruent with our dominant values
- relatively HIGH processing fluency (ease of thinking, processing, deciding)
legally speaking, when does the fetus become a person
until it is fully born!! separated from the mother and living independently
how do obstetricians currently regard the fetus
- as a separate entity from the mother… or their “second patient”
- makes the pregnant person LESS of a person
- takes away the rights of the mother
problems with treating the fetus as a second patient
- Health care providers become responsible for negative fetal/newborn outcomes — and therefore vulnerable to lawsuits
- Creates a conflict between health care providers and pregnant women who decide to refuse medical treatment
* providers see themselves as the advocate for the baby
* can resort to court orders to force invasive interventions on pregnant women for the perceived benefit of the fetus
placenta previa
- when the placenta is at the bottom of the uterus, covering the cervix!!
- issue because the baby has to go through the placenta before the cervix!!
- many blood vessels there… so baby will not get as much oxygen
- certain death to the baby… but also remember that we don’t know for sure, and what happens during it we don’t know for certain
ultrasound
- uses sound waves with frequencies higher than those audible to humans (>20,000 Hz)
- sends pulses of ultrasound into tissue using a probe
- when a sound wave encounters a material with a different density, part of the sound wave is reflected back to the probe and is detected as an echo
- the greater the difference in density, the greater the echo (placenta not really dense tho)
- seeing deep into the body with sonography is very difficult: most of the signal is lost from acoustic absorption
- can produce false positives, as well as
misses
Ventral amygalofugal pathway
plays important role in associative learning
