2-neuro shit Flashcards
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
Nucleus accumbens
plays roles in brains pleasure circuits
other things involved in amygdala pathway thing idk man
○ Ventral striatum
○ Septum
○ Hypothalamus
○ Nuclei of the brainstem
○ Certain parts of the cortex
§ Orbitofrontal
§ Piriform
§ Cingulate
hippocampus and amygdala
located beside and have many connections with each other
Basal ganglia
- group of sub-cortical nuclei
- seems to be closely invlved in voluntary emotional activity
how does the brain wire fear
- Outputs of the amygdala provide a good idea of what is necessary for the experience of an emotion
- Other parts of the brainstem trigger the cascade of physiological reactions associated with fear that send feedback to the brain
pathway of fear
- When the brain recieves a sensory stimulus indicating a danger, it is routed first to the thalamus
- Info is then sent over two parallel pathways
§ Thalamo-amygdala pathway (short pathway)
§ Thalamo-cortico-amygdala pathway (long pathway) - info that travelled along the long route and been processed in the cortex reaches the amygdala and tells it whether or the stimulus represents a real threat
- at an even higher level of analysis, The polymodal associative cortex conceptualizes the object and also informs the amygdala about it
Hippocampus role in fear processing
structure that supports the explicit memory required to learn about the dangerous of an object or situation in the first place
amygdala role in fear
discharge patterns activate the efferent structures responsible for physical manifestations of fear
○ Increased heart rate and blood pressure
○ Sweaty hands
○ Dry mouth
○ Tense muscles
human olfactory lobe vs in primates
- In humans, the olfactory lobe is only 30% of the size it would be if it were in the same proportion to the entire brain as in other primates
prefrontal cortex in other species vs in primates
- In other species it is dedicated to voluntary motor control
- In primates, it has developed considerably
prefrontal cortex in humans vs in great apes
Relative size of the prefrontal cortex was found to be almost the same in humans as in the great apes
- Our closest cousins
- Chiimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans
what can humans’ superior abilities to anticipate and plan be attributed to?
other specialized regions of the cortex and to denser interconnections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain
- Humans have a larger volume of white matter in their prefrontal cortex
the prefrontal cortex plays an active role in our working memory: true or false
true
what do we recruit when we are doing something that is CONGRUENT with our dominant values
the ventromedial PFC
what do we recruit when we are in CONFLICT with our own dominant values (for example, intervention)
recruit cognitive control and the lateral PFC
