Chapter 1 (from the slides) Flashcards
What is Consciousness?
- Several phenomena involving the human brain that provide insights into the nature of the human mind.
- Awareness of, and the ability to communicate about one;s thoughts, perceptions, memories, and feelings.
- There is an awareness of environment and the creation of a strategy to communicate.
What is Blindsight?
The ability of a person who cannot see objects in his or her blind field to accurately reach for them while remaining unconscious of perceiving them; cause by damage to the “mammmalian” visual system.
How does consciousness differ from wakefulness?
Wakefulness is just a sense of “being” while consciousness requires more such as your ability to communicate your thoughts, perceptions, memories, and feelings
What happens with Blindsight?
Indicates that consciousness is not a property of all parts of the brain.
- The cortex is damaged when this occurs.
What is involved in the split-brain operation?
- This operation occurs when a person has an epilepsy.
- The corpus callosum is split during this surgery
- Remember: Right and left hemisphere communicate constantly; we can’t know what arises in the hemisphere,
- Simply resecting through the bundle white matter of the two hemispheres.
- Limits the seizures to one hemisphere
What happens when the corpus callosum is split?
- People who have a resected corpus callosum often note that their left hand seems have a “mind of its own”.
- People will say they do not understand what is going on in their left hemisphere
- Experiment: RH is most likely mute. If you present a rose to the right nostril, they will not recognize it in the left. However, the left had would chose the rose since the right side in contralateral.
Split-brain phenomena
- Show that information becomes conscious only if able to reach the left hemisphere (responsible for language)
What is unilateral neglect?
- syndrome in which people ignore objects located toward their left and left sides of objects located anywhere.
- This is often associated with damage to the right parietal lobe.
Rubber hand illusion
- shows that consciousness is “constructed” in the brain
What are the Specialties of Neuroscience?
Physiological psychology, psychophamacology, neuropsychcology, psychophysiology, cognitive neuroscience
Who is Pierre Flourens and what did he do?
- Physiologist who removed various parts of animals’s brains and observed their behavior.
- Experimental ablation: research method in which the function of part of the is inferred by observing the behaviors an animal can no longer perform after that part is damaged.
Who is Paul BROCA and what did he do?
- Extended Flouren’s study to humans.
- Discovered Broca’s area
- If you have a lesion in left frontal lobe, then you will have issues producing language
Who are Fritsch and Hitzig and what did they do?
- used electrical stimulation of the brain to understand function
Who is von Helmholtz and what did he do?
- Responsible for developing the law of conservation of energy; developing the first measurements of the speed of nerve conduction.
Natural Selection and Evolution
- Charles Darwin
- Formulate the principles of natural selection and evolution, which revolutionized bioology
What is functionalism?
- best way to understand biological phenomenon is to try to understand its useful functions or organism
- What does it do and what is it useful for?