Brain Flashcards
State the 4 lobes of the brain and where they are?
Flower pot
Frontal lobe- at the front
Parietal lobe just behind frontal
Occipital- just at back
Temporal is at side / bottom
What’s localisation of function? How’s it differ from holistic
Supported by phineas gage
Theory that different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions/ roles psychological or physical. States that if a certain area of brain is damaged by illness or injury the function associated with this part of brain will be affected.
Before this theory and Phineas gage scientists believed all parts of the brain were involved in the the processing of thought and action.
Where do the left and right hemispheres control activity?
What is the outer layer of each hemisphere called and why does this differ is from animals?
Each hemisphere controls activity on opposite side of body to itself
Cerebral cortex covers inner oats of brain and is about 3mm thick.
- ) Where is the motor area and what’s it’s function?
2. )What would damage to this area cause?
- ) It’s at the back of the frontal lobe controlling voluntary movement on the opposite side of the body.
- ) Loss of control of fine movements
- ) Where’s the somatosensory area?
- ) What type of info does it process?
- ) What separates it from the motor area?
- ) It’s at the front of both of the parietal lobes.
- ) sensory info like touch
- ) central sulcus
Where’s the visual area and what does it do?
Where’s the auditory area and what does it do?
Part of occipital lobe and receives and processes visual info.
Found in the temporal lobe the auditory area is involved with analysis of speech based info.
What’s the broca’s area and where’s it found?
What does damage to this area cause?
Found in frontal lobe in left hemisphere of the brain in most people. It’s involved in speech production.
Broca’s aphasia causing influential speech production eg. Tan.
What and where’s the wernicke’s area?
What could damage to this area cause?
Wernicke’s area- Area of the temporal lobe in left hemisphere responsible for language comprehension.
Damage to wernicke’s area can cause wernicke’s aphasia where nonsense words ( neologisms ) etc may be produced.
Phineas gage what happened to him?
What effect did it have on him?
What did it suggest?
positive evaluation points + negative
Tamping iron dropped on explosives on railways sending it through his head taking large chunk of brain with it- most of frontal lobe.
He survived but personality changed now he’s quick tempered and rude.
Change in temperament suggests frontal lobe is involved in mood regulation.
Useful as case study provides lots of data, only 1 person so hard to generalise and lacks pop val. Our views of social behaviour may have changed since 1848 and also not as scientific as brain scans.
What is plasticity?
When does functional recovery generally occur ?
When do we have most synaptic connections
Plasticity is the brains ability to change and adapt.
After damage or trauma.
Ages 2-3 we have the most around 15,000 which is twice as many as the adult brain
What’s cognitive pruning?
Why may plasticity be a negative thing?
Cognitive pruning is where rarely used connections are deleted and frequently used connections are strengthened. This can happen through out life.
Plasticity can be a bad thing eg. Prolonged drug use leads to poorer cognitive functioning and old age associated with dementia. Both are caused by changes in the brain.
Plasticity research eg . Maguire et al
- ) who were his sample group and how’d he test them?
- ) What were the findings
- ) what’s grey matter associated with
- ) what’s the knowledge test?
- ) what’s the effect of the length of time people had been doing the job ?
- ) London taxi drivers tested with MRI scans.
- ) found more grey matter in posterior hippocampus than in the control group.
- ) Spatial and navigational skills.
4) They have to be able to recall city streets and possible routes in London - ) The longer people had been doing the job a greater structural difference eg. They have more grey matter.
Evaluation of Maguire et al
Why does it matter that people weren’t tested before the study ?
Give a limitation of the study
Give a strength
1.) you don’t know if they had a high amount of grey matter before the study which made them a suitable candidate for taxi driving.
The study is limited as only 1 part of the brain was tested ( the posterior hippocampus) so its a narrow approach/ study that doesn’t test the whole brain.
Applicable to real live due to it being a real life situation. Also objective scientific measures used eg . MRI
When does functional recovery occur?
How does the brain adapt after trauma?
How quickly does functional recovery occur?
After physical injury or other forms of trauma such as infection or brain damage.
Unaffected areas of the brain adapt to help compensate for areas of the brain that are damaged. This functional recovery is an example of neural plasticity.
Functional recovery occurs quickly after trauma then slows down after several weeks or months. Eg. Phineas gage who had a tamping iron go through his head damaging his frontal lobe.
What happens during functional recovery?
Brain rewires and reorganises itself to form new synaptic connections to areas of damage. Secondary neural pathways are activated to help functioning continue.
This is helped by blood vessels reforming,
Recruitment of homologous areas of the brain eg opposite hemisphere to the specific task and axonal sprouting (new nerve endings grow and connect with undamaged areas nerves to form new pathways.)
Humble and Wiesel study
Who did they study?
What did they find?
2 limitations
They studied kittens who they sewed one eye shut on.
The visual cortex related to the damaged eye continued to process info from the other eye showing the brain adapts and functional recovery occurs.
Carried out on animals who are less developed eg . Less developed cerebral cortex so can’t generalise.
Also the study is unethical causing physiological harm.
Factors affecting functional recovery?
Age- as you get older speed and extent of functional recovery is lessened.
Gender- women supposedly have better functional recovery then males as brain functioning isn’t as lateralised.
Education - better educated = more likely to recover.
Exhaustion- alcohol consumption, stress etc can effect the effort put into functional recovery.
What application does functional recovery have?
Limitation
Has application in neurorehabilitation where recovery slows after a few weeks so therapy is needed to keep improvements.
Often little record of functioning before trauma so hard to measure recovery.
Which hemisphere controls language?
Which sides of body do left and right hemispheres control.
What’s hemispheric lateralisation?
Left hemisphere
Opposite sides eg. Left controls right and right controls left
Hemispheric lateralisation is when one hemisphere controls specific activities.
Sperry study
What kind of p’s did sperry study?
What experimental method?
Sample size
What type of tasks asked to do
People who had commissurotomy. Their corpus Callosum had been cut so they had two separate hemispheres. This helps prevent epileptic seizures. This means they would have no communication between hemispheres
Quasi experiment
11 people who had commissurotomy to treat epilepsy
Studied performance in visual / tactile tasks
Method of sperry study
Results
You project an image or word to one visual field then
an image or word to other visual field. The image is only shown for 1/10 th of a second so person can’t
move their eye across. A normal brain would share info between both hemispheres to get a complete image.
Shown to right visual field (left hemisphere) easily could describe but shown to left visual field (right hemisphere) or said nothing was there showing language centres are in left hemisphere .
Recognising by touch
Method describe
Shown an object then have to select a matching object from behind a screen. Shown to left visual field ( right hemisphere) then could select the object or select object associated eg . Ashtray related to cigarette butt. But if shown to right visual field could not verbally identify but could recognise.
Composite words task
Method
Presented two words one either side of visual field and asked to write with left hand what is seen in left visual field ( right hemisphere). They had to say what they saw in right visual field (left hemisphere)
Matching faces
Method
Function of left + right hemispheres ?
Shown a face and asked to match it to series of other faces. If shown to left vf (rh) then correctly matched but if shown to right visual field (lh) then it would be ignored.
Left hemisphere dominates verbal description
Rh dominated selecting matching pictures.
Left hemisphere contains language centres enabling it to describe what it sees
Rh recognises What it sees and dominates drawing ability
Evaluation of sperry
Negatives
Small sample size with 11 people treated for epilepsy having corpus callosum cut
Lacks ext validity as in real life things aren’t shown to 1 visual field.
Differences might be overstated and not as clear cut as sperrys research suggests
