Chapter 3 - Physiology of the mind Flashcards
who discovered white and grey matter
Thomas Willis
what did Franz Joseph Gall discover
- commisures
- white matter runs from one side of the brain to the other side of the spinal chord
- intelligence correlates with brain size (seems to be true between species, but not within)
- cortex of the brain
- the cerebellum (he thought it predicted amativeness and sexual desire)
commissures
bundles of white matter connecting the 2 sides of the brain
- discovered by Franz Joseph Gall
phrenology
Gall claimed that you are able to determine a person’s intelligence by examining the shape and size of their skull
physiognomy
assessing a person’s character or personality traits based on their facial features, expressions, and overall appearance
Pierre Flourens
stood in contrast to Gall and did not believe in phrenology
- used ablation techniques and other scientific experiments to refute phrenology
ablation techniques
surgically removing small parts in the brain and observing the changes in behavior
Flourens’ ablation studies
he removed the cerebellum of a dog and observed the dogs behavior
- found that the dog could now only walk zigzag but his intellectual faculties and senses remained intact
- concluded that the cerebellum is responsible for locomotion
also studied the cortex using ablation
Jean Baptiste Bouillaud
dealt with speech disorders and localization of language
Ernest Aubertin
Bouillaud’s son-in-law who found a patient with symptoms consistent with Bouillaud’s theory
Paul Broca
a chief surgeoun in a Paris hospital
- performed a brain autopsy on patient Tan and found brain damage of the left frontal lobe
- he was able to locate the specific area that causes speech disorder
- Broca’s area
- the speech order is called motor aphasia (able to understand speech but cannot talk)
Carl Wernicke
found sensory aphasia (Wernicke’s area)
- can produce speech but in an impaired manner
conduction aphasia
one can speak and understand language, but cannot control their own speech
Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig
discovered that stimulation of specific points in an area (the motor strip) results in specific movements on the opposite side of the body
- did this by surgically exposing a dog’s cortex and applying mild electrical stimulation
David Ferrier
- discovered that the occipital cortex of the brain contained a visual area
- discovered an auditory area in the temporal lobe and the sensory strip behind the motor strip
- ablation of the sensory strip resulted in a loss of sensitivity in parts of the body
Wilder Penfield
used brain stimulation in order to study the brain
- when he stimulated the temporal lobe (interpretive cortex), 2 responses were elicited
- interpretative responses: with specific emotional attitudes
- experiential responses: either hallucinatory dreams or flashbacks of past experiences
Shepherd Franz and Karl Lashley
- studied cats with the use of ablation
- later studied rats’ ability to solve a maze after ablation
- Lashley later conducted a larger and more systematic study on rats and memories
Lashley’s findings
- equipotentiality: memories are evely distributed across the cortex
- law of mass action: if the damage to the brain is too great, all cells lose their function of memory
redundancy hypothesis
each individual memory is stored in multiple places, and when a part of the brain is damaged, it can be taken over by other areas
Milner and Penfield
researched the hippocampus
- patient HM
corpus callosum
the brain bar connecting the left and right hemispheres
- when cut a patient is split brained
Scoville
destroyed parts of HM’s hippocampus in hopes to remove his epilepsy
- HM’s epilepsy diminished
- however he lost his LTM and was not able to learn anything new
declarative memory
being able to consciously experience or recall stored knowledge
procedural memory
someone can learn new skills
tomography
dividing the brain into sections and then mapping them
