Chapter 1: The Origins of Brain and Behaviour Flashcards
Central nervous system (CNS)
Brain + spinal cord
Peripheral nervous system (PNS)
All processes outside CNS
3 major parts of the brain
- Cerebrum
- Brain stem
- Cerebellum
Locked-in syndrome
Awake and sensitive to external world but cannot move or communicate
Minimally conscious state (MCS)
Person displays elementary behaviours but is not conscious
Persistent vegetative state (PVS)
Person is alive but unable to communicate even at the most basic level
Deep brain stimulation (DBS)
Neurosurgery where electrodes implanted in the brain stimulate a target area w/ a low-voltage electrical current
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) can
- Improve MCS patients
- Treat disorders like Parkinson’s disease and depression
- Aid recovery from traumatic brain injury (TBI)
Consciousness in PVS patients can be assessed by
Imaging brain activity
Most behaviours are a mix of
Inherited and learned actions
Smaller brains consist of most behaviours being
Inherited
Larger brains consist of most behaviours being
Learned
A physical object, a living tissue, a body organ
Brain
Action, momentarily observable but fleeting
Behaviour
Brain and behaviour have evolved ___
Together
- major structure of the brain
- conscious behaviour
- has symmetrical halves (hemispheres)
Cerebrum
- central structure of the brain
- unconscious behaviour
Brainstem
___ is responsible for learning/coordinating movement
Cerebellum
The movements we make/perceive are central to communication
Embodied behaviour
Under total relaxation, people felt the brain had gone blank
Mental emptiness (Jacobson 1932)
People reported the experience was extremely unpleasant - some hallucinated
Sensory deprivation (Heron 1957)
___ believed in mentalism
Aristotle
Explanation of behaviour as a function of the nonmaterial mind
Mentalism
Aristotle believed the brain ___, had ____ in producing behaviour, and that our ___ survives our death
cooled the blood; no role; consciousness
Psyche is a synonym for
Mind
___ believed in dualism
Descartes
Both a nonmaterial mind + material body contribute to behaviour
Dualism
Descartes thought that ____ and ____ are unable to pass intelligence tests because they don’t have a ___ (proven false)
nonhuman animals; machines; mind
Difficulty of explaining how a nonmaterial mind and a material body interact
Mind-body problem
Dualists thought the mind resides in the
Pineal gland (false)
___ believed in materialism
Darwin
Behaviour can be explained as a function of the nervous system, not mind
Materialism
Modern psychology takes for granted that behaviour and neural function are
Completely correlated, one causes the other
4-step experimental procedure
- theory
- hypothesis
- test
- confirm/modify theory
A ~humanlike~ brain came around
6 million years ago
Our [modern] human brain came around
200,000 years ago
Brain cells and brains evolved
Recently
____ and ____ evolved first, allowing animals to move
Brain cells (neurons); muscles
Neurons and muscles likely have origins in single-cell animals such as
Amoeba
Simple nervous system that has no centre/brain; consists of neurons that receive sensory info + connect directly to other neurons that move muscles
Nerve net
___ and ___ have nerve nets
Jellyfish; sea anenomes
The nervous system on one side of the animal mirrors that on the other side
Bilateral symmetry
____ are bilaterally symmetrical
Flatworms
Division into a number of parts that are similar
Segmentation
____ and ____ display segmentation
The human spinal cord; brain
Collection of nerve cells that function somewhat like a brain
Ganglia
___, ___ and ___ have ganglia
Clams; snails; octopi
A single nervous system pathway connects the brain with sensory receptors and muscles
Spinal cord
The chordate phylum displays the greatest degree of
Encephalization
Of all chordates, humans have the ___ brain size relative to body size
Largest
The evolution of complex behaviour is closely related to the evolution of the ___ and ___
Cerebrum; cerebellum
Humans and ___ share a common ancestor that lived 5-10 million years ago
Chimpanzees
Hominids evolved ___ years ago
5 million
Hominids’ evolution included enhanced ___ perception, highly developed ___ sense and ___ movements, as well as larger ___
depth; vision; hand; brains
Succeeding members of the human lineage display a steady ___ in brain size
Increase
The brain of the ___ was about the same size as living nonhuman apes
Autralopithecus
- 2 million years ago in Africa
- made simple stone tools
Homo habilis (handy human)
- 1.6 million years ago in Europe and Asia
- made more sophisticated tools than H. habilis
Homo erectus (upright human)
Harry Jerison (1973) developed a quantitative measure of brain size:
Encephalization quotient (EQ)
EQ’s are obtained from the ratio of ___ to ___ brain size
actual:expected
Estimates of brain size and behavioural complexity line up better if ___ are compared
Cell counts (_% of nervous system)
Brains with more neurons have ___ more connections between those neurons
Exponentially
5 theories on hominid brain enlargement
- Climate change
- Primate lifestyle
- Changes in hominid physiology
- Altered maturation
- Human genome
Climate change theory: ape species living in a ___ climate to the east of Africa’s ___ evolved into upright humans
drier; Great Rift Valley
Primate lifestyle theory: ___ size, complex ___ foraging/selection, use of ___
social group; food; fire
Why do fruit eaters have larger brains?
Fruit is harder to find than grass - need good sensory, spatial and memory skills
Why is there difficulty with measuring brain size?
There are large differences between individual brains due to factors such as body weight, age, sex, injury etc.
Why is there difficulty with measuring intelligence?
- Flynn effect - next-gen scores 25pts higher on IQ tests
- Multiple intelligences - verbal, social, mathematical etc.
Learned behaviours that are passed on from one generation to the next thru teaching and experience
Culture
___ growth/adaptation make our modern human behaviours different from Homo sapiens’ 200,000 years ago
Culture
___ found that we subliminally move when thinking, even when we are entirely motionless (mental emptiness)
Edmond Jacobson
___ conducted experiments on sensory deprivation
Woodburn Heron
___ found that they can stimulate MCS patients’ brains and improve their behavioural abilities
Nicholas Schiff
___ used MRI to find that comatose patients are conscious and can communicate when given the opportunity
Adrian Owen
___ wrote his textbook Ethology: The Biology of Behaviour, and stated “Behaviour consists of patterns in time”
Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt
Descartes thought that the mind instructed the ___ to direct fluid from ventricles thru ___ into ___ - when the fluid expanded, the body would move
pineal gland; nerves; muscles
___ proposed that a machine could be judged conscious if a questioner could not distinguish its answers from a human’s
Alan Turing
___ was responsible for uncovering that chimpanzees can understand complex human speech
Stewart Watson
the theory explaining how new species evolve + how existing species change over time
natural selection
a group of organisms that can breed among themselves
species
studies how gene expression is turned on/off at different times + how environment/experience influence our behaviour thru their effects on our genes
epigenetics
___ can turn on/off a gene’s function so that the gene influences the function of our body/behaviour, or it stops that influence
epigenetic factors
___ describes the acceptance of materialism stating that behaviour and neural function are perfectly correlated
Donald O. Hebb
___ explains the consciousness contrasts the position of ___, which states if behaviour can be described adequately w/o recourse to the mind, the mental explanation should be eliminated
Donald O. Hebb; eliminative materialism
___ has strong religious beliefs to aid in his brain injury recovery
Fred Linge
order of taxonomy
phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (PCOFGS)
Humans belong to the ___ kingdom, ___ phylum, ___ class, ___ order, ___ family, ___ genus, ___ species
animal; chordate; mammalian; primate; great ape; Homo; sapiens
only the kingdom most recently evolved, ___, contains species with muscles and nervous systems
animalia
chordates have both a ___ and ___
brain; spinal cord
chordates get their name from a ___, a flexible rod that runs the length of the back
notochord
only ___ and ___ have a large forebrain
birds; mammals
increases the brain’s surface area to fit into a small skull
folding
the first member of the genus Homo was found in ___ about ___
Ethiopia; 2.8 million years ago
the first Homo erectus was found about
1.6 million years ago
modern humans, homo sapiens, appeared about
200,000 years ago
homo sapiens interbred with ___ in Europe, whom they then replaced about ___
neanderthals; 20,000 years ago
a blue whale’s brain cells make up ___ of its body
0.01%
who came up with EQ
Harry Jerison
who came up with a method to count brain cells using a counting machine (packing density)
Karina Fonseca-Azevedo
who estimated that the average group size of modern humans is 150
Robin Dunbar
who documented the relationship between fruit foraging and larger brains
Katharine Milton
who reasoned that if the brain’s radiator, the circulating blood, adapted into a more effective cooling system, brain size could increase
Dean Falk
who, in their book “the Mismeasure of Man’, criticized research on: brain measurement, correlating brain size and intelligence, and what intelligence is
Stephen Jay Gould
who carried out the first formal performance analysis among various tests used to rate intelligence in humans - also g, general intelligence factor
Charles Spearman
who proposed that humans have multiple kinds of intelligences
Howard Gardner
who’s work is related to memes
Alex Mesoudi
