Biopsychology Flashcards
Phineas Gage
1848 - working on a rail line
Piece of iron through skull
Change in personality - loss of inhibition and anger
Motor Area
Located in the frontal lobe
Responsible for voluntary movement
Hitzig + Fritsch - motor
Different muscles are coordinated by different areas of the motor cortex
Electrically stimulating motor areas of dogs - muscular contractions in different areas of the body depending on where the probe was inserted
Somatosensory area
Located in the parietal lobe
Recieves incoming sensory information from the skin to produce sensations related to pain
Robertson - somatosensory
Somatosensory area of the brain is highly adaptable, with braille readers having larger areas in the somatosensory area for their fingertips compared to sighted participants
Visual area
Located in the occipital lobe
Recieves and processes visual information
Information from the right hand side is processed in the left hemispere and info from the left is processed in the right hemisphere
Auditory area
Located in the temporal lobe
Analysing and processing acoustic information
Info from the right goes to the left hemisphere and vice versa
Brocas aphasia
impaired ability to produce language
Wernickes aphasia
inability to extract meaning from spoken or written words
Peterson - brain scans
demonstrated Wernickes area was activeduring a listening task and Brocas area during a reading task
Dougherty - OCD
lesioning the cingulate gyrus improved symptoms of OCD
Neuroplasticty
The brains ability to change over time through learning and experience
Synaptic pruning
rarely used connections are deleted and frequently used connections are strengthened
When do synaptic connections peak?
Age 2-3 with around 15,000 per neuron
Maguire - taxi drivers findings
significantly more grey matter in posterior hippocampus than in matched control group
Posterior hippocampus associations
Spatial and navigation skills in humans and animals
Draganski - brain scan of med students
Imaged the brains of medical students 3 months before and after final exams
Learning-induced changes were seen in the posterior hippocampus and the pariettal cortex, presumably as a result of learning
Process of Functional Recovery
- Axonal sprouting - growth of new nerve endings which connect up
- Denervation supersensitivity
- Recruitment of homologous areas on opposite sides of the brain
Negative Plasticity
Brains adaptation to prolonged drug use leads to poorer cognitive function in later life
60-80% of amputees have been known to develop phantom limb syndrome - thought to be due to cortical reorganisation in the somatosensory cortex
Bezzola - Age and Plasticity
40 hours of golf training produced changes in the neural representations of movement in ppts age 40-60
fMRI showed increased activity in motor cortex in novice golfers, suggesting more efficient neural representations after golfing
Seasonal Brain Changes
Suprachiasmatic nucleus regulates sleep/wake cycle
Shrinks in spring, expands in autumn
Most research done on animals
Application of functional recovery
Neurorehabilitation
Understanding axonal growth encourages new therapies
Constraint-induced movement therapy used on stroke patients
Cognitive Reserve - Schenider
Those who spent more time in education had a greater chance of a disability free recovery
Banerjee - Total Anterior Circulation Strokes
5 participants all treated with stem cells - all made a full recovery compared to typical 5%