Ch. 3: Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists Flashcards
Franz Josef Gall
German physician
demonstrated importance fo the brain for higher human functions
started the phrenology movement:
Phrenology (by Gull)
localized specific psychological faculties in specific regions of the brain, which are often reflected in specific bumps and indentations of the skull
Thomas Willis
British scientist
studied brain anatomy in detail and made discoveries such as gray and white matter
Pierre Fluorens
French scientist
opposed gall’s phrenology and conducted ablation studies (remove brain areas)
suggested that the brain’s cortex functions as a unified whole
Jean Baptiste Bouillaud
French physician
rejected phrenology but felt there was some truth to the idea of an area that controlled language in the frontal region of the cortex
Paul Broca was the first to…
first to seriously challenge Fluoren’s conception of the undifferentiated cerebral cortex
Carl Wernicke
used localization theory as the basis of an influential theory of aphasia
wernicke’s area
area in the temporal lobe that if damaged can cause sensory aphasia:
sensory aphasia (damage to wenicke’s area)
condition in which patients can speak fluently with correct syntax but their understanding of spoken language is impaired
Broca’s versus Wernicke’s aphasia
Broca’s: inability to speak
Wernicke’s: ability to understand speech
equipotentiality
form of neural plasticity
identified by Flrens and revised by Lashley, in which healthy area of the brain can take over the functions of damaged areas
law of mass action
Lashley’s notion that the efficiency of performance of an entire complex function will be reduced in proportion to the degree of brain injury suffered by an organism
Bartholow
physician who conducted an early but ethically questionable study of electrical stimulation of a conscious human brain using a patient and the hole she had in her skull from a cancerous ulcer
Penfield
neurosurgeon who used brain stimulation on conscious human patients to seek new surgical treatments for intractable cases of epilepsy and discovered the interpretive cortex
Penfield’s interpretive cortex
area of brain that, when stimulated, produced two types of psychical responses: Interpretive responses or experimental responses
interpretive responses: inexplicably saw their immediate situations new lights
experimental responses: hallucinatory dreams or flashbacks of real events form the past, with unremarkable content
Donald Hebb
published The Organization of Behavior
related learning and other behavior to the hypothetical functioning of neurological network in the brain that he called cell assemblies
Brenda Milner
neuropsychologist trained by Hebb and Penfield whose study of the patient HM led to the discovery of separate long and short term memory systems