Brain Flashcards
Involuntary mouth and throat movements involved in swallowing, coughing, and sneezing, and it regulates a number of functions that are essential for survival including respiration, heart rate, and blood pressure. Brain injury and certain diseases and drugs (especially opioids) can disrupt the functioning of the medulla
Medulla
Connects the two halves of the cerebellum and helps coordinate movements on the two sides of the body, and it relays messages between the cerebellum and cerebral cortex
Pons
Plays a role in respiration and the regulation of deep sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
Pons
Coordinates voluntary movements and is responsible for maintaining posture and balance. Damage can cause ataxia which is characterized by symptoms associated with alcohol intoxication and include a lack of muscle control, impaired balance and coordination, slurred speech, nystagmus (jerky eye movements), and blurred or double vision
Cerebellum
Regulation of muscle tone, coordination of eye movements, and control of pain. It contains the reticular activating system (RAS) which is also known as the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS).
Reticular Formation
Reward-seeking, drug addiction, and, through its connection to the basal ganglia, motor control
Substantia Nigra
Body’s homeostasis and regulates functions critical to survival through its influence on the autonomic nervous system and pituitary gland. These functions include regulating body temperature, blood pressure, heart and respiration rates, thirst and hunger, growth, sexual activity, reproduction, and the body’s response to stress. It also contributes to emotions, memory, and circadian rhythms
Hypothalamus
Blank contains the mammillary bodies, which play a role in memory, and the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which serves as the body’s biological clock and regulates the sleep-wake cycle and other circadian rhythms.
Hypothalamus
described as a “relay station” because it receives and then transmits sensory information to the cortex for all of the senses except smell. It also plays an important role in the coordination of sensory and motor functioning, language and speech, and declarative memory. With regard to memory, Korsakoff syndrome is caused by a thiamine deficiency that’s often the result of chronic alcoholism and that damages neurons in the thalamus and mammillary bodies
Thalamus
The caudate nucleus, putamen, nucleus accumbens, and globus pallidus.
Basal Ganglia
These structures are involved in the initiation and control of voluntary movements, procedural and habit learning, cognitive functioning (e.g., attention and decision-making), and emotions.. damage has been linked to a number of conditions including mood disorders, schizophrenia, ADHD, OCD, Tourette’s disorder, Huntington’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.
Basal Ganglia
Important role in the experience of emotions, recognition of fear and other emotions in facial expressions, acquisition of conditioned fear responses, evaluation of the emotional significance of events, and attachment of emotions to memories
Amygdala
is involved in the formation of flashbulb memories, which are vivid and enduring memories for surprising and shocking events.
Amygdala
Symptoms include hyperphagia, hyperorality, reduced fear, hypersexuality, and visual agnosia (which is also known as psychic blindness)
Kluver-Bucy syndrome
plays a role in motivation, memory, and emotions, including emotional reactions to pain. experience pain but are not emotionally distressed by it.
Cingulate Cortex:
involved more in memory and less in emotions than the other limbic system structures are. responsible for transferring declarative memories from short-term to long-term memory and plays an important role in spatial memory (memory for the spatial characteristics of the environment)
Hippocampus
People with this disorder have slow, labored speech that consists primarily of nouns and verbs. They also exhibit impaired repetition and anomia (an inability to recall the names of familiar objects), but their comprehension of written and spoken language is relatively intact.
Broca’s area
plays an important role in executive functions, which are also known as higher-order cognitive functions and include planning, decision-making, social judgment, and self-monitoring.
The prefrontal cortex
which prefrontal cortex is involved primarily with executive functions, and damage can cause concrete thinking, impaired judgment and insight, poor planning ability, deficits in working memory, perseverative responses, and disinterest and apathy
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
Which prefrontal cortex plays a role in emotion regulation, response inhibition, and social behaviors. Damage to this area can cause poor impulse control, social inappropriateness (e.g., immature behavior, offensive jokes), lack of concern for others, aggressive and antisocial behaviors, distractibility, and affective lability. Damage to this area can cause poor impulse control, social inappropriateness (e.g., immature behavior, offensive jokes), lack of concern for others, aggressive and antisocial behaviors, distractibility, and affective lability
orbitofrontal cortex
Which prefrontal cortex isinvolved in decision-making, social cognition, memory, and emotion regulation. Damage can produce impaired decision-making and moral judgment, lack of insight, deficits in social cognition (e.g., impaired emotion recognition, reduced empathy), confabulation, and blunted emotional responses.
ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC)
Which lobe? auditory cortex is involved in processing sound, and damage to this area can produce auditory agnosia, auditory hallucinations, or cortical deafness. Wernicke’s area is a major language area and is located in the dominant (usually left) hemisphere.
Temporal Lobe:
Which lobe? People with this disorder have impaired comprehension of written and spoken language, impaired repetition, and anomia. Although their speech is fluent, it contains many word substitutions and other errors and is devoid of meaning.
Temporal lobe
Which lobe contains the somatosensory cortex, which processes sensory information related to touch, pressure, temperature, pain, and body position
Parietal Lobe
an inability to recognize objects by touch
tactile agnosia
a lack of interest in or recognition of one or more parts of one’s own body
asomatognosia
denial of one’s illness
anosognosia
Damage to the X lobe can also produce hemispatial neglect, ideomotor apraxia, ideational apraxia, or Gerstmann’s syndrome:
Parietal
is also known as unilateral neglect and contralateral neglect and is usually caused by damage to the right (nondominant) parietal lobe and involves neglect of the left side of the body and stimuli on the left side of the body
Hemispatial neglect
involves an inability to perform a motor activity in response to a verbal command (which apraxia?)
Ideomotor apraxia
involves an inability to plan and execute a task that requires a sequence of actions (e.g., an inability to complete the steps needed to make a sandwich
ideational apraxia
involves finger agnosia, right-left disorientation, agraphia (a loss of writing skills), and acalculia (a loss of arithmetic skills).
Gerstmann’s syndrome
contains the visual cortex, which processes visual information. Damage to this area can cause visual agnosia, visual hallucinations, achromatopsia (loss of color vision), or cortical blindness.
occipital lobe
occurs when the primary visual cortex is damaged while the eyes and optic nerves are intact. When the visual cortex in only the left hemisphere is damaged, blindness affects the right visual field, and vice versa
Cortical blindness
do not consciously see a visual stimulus but have appropriate physiological and behavioral responses to it (e.g., they reach for objects they claim they cannot see)
blindsight
main bundle of nerve fibers that allows the two hemispheres to share information with each other
corpus callosum
Which system includes the brain and spinal cord
central nervous system (CNS)
Which system transmits signals between the CNS and the rest of the body and includes the somatic and autonomic nervous systems
peripheral nervous system
transmits information from the body’s sensory receptors to the CNS and from the CNS to the skeletal muscles. It’s responsible for actions that are usually considered voluntary
somatic nervous system
transmits information from the body’s smooth muscles and organs to the CNS, and vice versa
autonomic nervous system (ANS)
responsible for preparing the body for action. For instance, during the body’s fight-or-flight response to an emergency, the sympathetic nervous system causes pupil dilation, sweating, and increased heart and respiration rates and inhibits digestion and sexual activity
sympathetic nervous system
responsible for activities that govern rest and relaxation, and it causes the body to return to its pre-emergency state after a fight-or-flight response.
parasympathetic nervous system
refers to the brain’s ability to modify, change, and adapt both structure and function throughout life and in response to experience
Neuroplasticity
4 types of neuroplasticity
Homologous area adaptation occurs when, in response to early damage to a particular area of the brain, the functions of that area shift to the corresponding area in the opposite hemisphere. A drawback of this type of neuroplasticity is that the pre-existing functions of the corresponding area may be negatively affected. As an example, when the right parietal lobe is damaged in childhood and the left parietal lobe takes over its visuospatial functions, the mathematical functions normally carried out by the left parietal lobe may be impaired. (b) Cross-modal reassignment occurs when a brain area that is responsible for processing a particular type of sensory input is deprived of that input and, as a result, the function of the neurons in that area changes. For example, neurons in the visual cortex of a child who was born blind do not receive and process visual input. As a result, these neurons may receive and process somatosensory input which, like visual input, allows the child to create cognitive representations of the physical world. (c) Map expansion is the temporary or permanent enlargement of a functioning cortical region as the result of practice or exercise and involves recruiting neurons from the borders of that region. This type of neuroplasticity often occurs when people are learning and practicing a new skill such as playing a musical instrument. (d) Compensatory masquerade occurs when person is no longer able to perform a task using usual cognitive processes that were mediated by a recently damaged area of the brain and, instead, begins using alternative cognitive processes that are mediated by an intact area of the brain. For instance, when people lose their spatial sense (sense of direction) as the result of a brain injury, they may rely on memorizing landmarks to get from one place to another.
serves both excitatory and inhibitory functions. It contributes to movement, personality, mood, and sleep and has been identified as a contributor to several disorders.
Dopamine
is both excitatory and inhibitory and is involved in movement, arousal, attention, and memory. causes muscles to contract, and myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disorder that causes muscle weakness by destroying X receptors at neuromuscular junctions.
Acetylcholine
excitatory neurotransmitter and contributes to movement, emotions, learning, and memory.
Glutamate
Excessive X can cause cell damage and death, which is referred to as “X-induced excitotoxicity” and is believed to contribute to a number of conditions including stroke, seizure disorders, and several neurodegenerative diseases including Huntington’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease
Glutamate
excitatory neurotransmitter and is involved in arousal, attention, learning, memory, stress, and mood. According to the catecholamine hypothesis, some forms of depression are caused by a deficiency of X while mania is due to excessive X.
Norepinephrine
It has an inhibitory effect and plays a role in many functions including arousal, sleep, sexual activity, mood, appetite, and pain.
Serotonin
primary inhibitory neurotransmitter and is involved in memory, mood, arousal, sleep, and motor control
GABA
mimic or increase the effects of a neurotransmitter
Agonists
do not produce any effects on their own but block or reduce the effects of a neurotransmitter or agonist.
Antagonists
X cues depend on both eyes, are responsible for depth perception of objects that are relatively close, and include retinal disparity and convergence. Retinal disparity occurs because our two eyes see objects from two different views and, the closer an object, the greater the disparity
Binocular cues
depend on one eye and are responsible for depth perception of objects at greater distances. They include the relative size of objects, the overlap (interposition) of objects, linear perspective, texture gradients, and the relative motion of objects (motion parallax).
Monocular cues
a major theory of pain perception and distinguishes between two types of nerve fibers in the spinal cord: Small unmyelinated fibers are responsible for transmitting most pain signals to the brain, while larger myelinated fibers transmit other sensory signals.
Gate control theory
predicts that the just noticeable difference (JND) for a stimulus is a constant proportion, regardless of the intensity of the original stimulus. For example, the proportion is always 2% for weight, which means that, to notice a change in weight, a second object must be at least 2% lighter or heavier than the first object. Weber’s law applies only to some stimuli and to intensities in the mid-range.
Weber’s Law:
predicts that there’s a logarithmic relationship between psychological sensation and the magnitude of a physical stimulus. In other words, the JND “grows to an increasingly greater degree with each linear increment in intensity”
Fechner’s Law:
and it proposes that there’s an exponential relationship between psychological sensation and the magnitude of a physical stimulus and that the exponent varies for different stimuli
Stevens’s Power Law
What theory? assumes that perception of a stimulus (signal) is the outcome of both sensory and decision-making processes. It proposes that the decision-making process is always accompanied by some degree of uncertainty, which is caused by the presence of background noise (e.g., random neural activity in the perceiver’s perceptual system, the perceiver’s levels of motivation and fatigue, distractions in the environment).
Signal Detection Theory:
theory proposes that exposure to an emotionally salient stimulus causes a physiological reaction which, in turn, is perceived as an emotion – e.g., when a person is faced with a growling bear while hiking in the woods, her heart begins to beat faster and she starts breathing more deeply, and she then feels afraid
James-Lange Theory:
theory proposes that the experience of an emotion and physiological arousal occur together when an environmental stimulus causes the thalamus (which receives input from the senses) to simultaneously send signals to the cerebral cortex and the sympathetic nervous system.
Cannon-Bard Theory:
known as cognitive arousal theory and describes the experience of emotion as the result of physiological arousal followed by an attribution (“cognitive label”) for that arousal
Schachter and Singer’s Two-Factor Theory
proposes that differences in emotional reactions to events are due to different appraisals of those events. In other words, two people can experience the same event but respond with different emotions because they appraise the situation differently. It also assumes, in contrast to other theories, that physiological arousal follows cognitive appraisal.
Lazarus’s Cognitive Appraisal Theory
theory proposes that fear consists of two separate but interacting systems that both respond to threatening stimuli: (a) The subcortical system is also referred to as the survival system. It reacts quickly and automatically to sensory information about a threatening stimulus with physiological and defensive behavioral responses. The amygdala is the major component of the subcortical system. (b) The cortical system is also referred to as the conscious emotional system. It processes information from the senses, subcortical system, and episodic and semantic memory using relevant cognitive processes (e.g., attention, working memory, and decision-making) and generates the conscious feeling of fear when it determines that the stimulus is actually threatening and warrants a fear response.
LeDoux’s Two-System Theory
An influential model of the body’s reaction to stress. initial alarm reaction stage, resistance stage , exhaustion stage
by Selye’s (1976) general adaptation syndrome,
Structural Neuroimaging Techniques?
computerized axial tomography (CT scan), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and are used to identify structural changes due, for example, to traumatic brain injury, strokes, tumors, degenerative diseases, and infections.
Functional Neuroimaging techniques
regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) or blood volume (Small, 2006). These techniques include positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), and functional MRI (fMRI). PET and SPECT both use radioactive tracers (radiotracers) that are injected into the bloodstream to measure brain activity; fMRI, like MRI, uses magnetic fields and radio waves.
