Cog Neuro Test 1 Flashcards
What did the ancient Egyptians, Aristotle and Hippocrates and Plato think about brain function?
The Egyptians thought the brains function was to produce mucus and the heart was the seat of mental processes. Aristotle also thought that the heart was the seat of mental processes. Hippocrates and Plato thought that the brain is the seat of the mind.
What was the view of where the substance of thought was until the 16th century.
The cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles was thought to be substance of thought.
What did Andreas Vesalius do?
He described that anatomy of the brain and showed that nerves were connected to the brain and not the heart.
What were Descartes views
He thought that cognition was an interaction between ventricles and the pineal gland and that the soul modifies behavior via its effects on the pineal gland. So he thought that the mind was not the same as the brain so he believed in dualism. He choose the pineal gland because it was the only organ in the brain that was not bilaterally duplicated, ,he believed that it was uniquely human. It is an endocrine gland that produces melatonin and is involved in the sleep/wake cycle.
What did thomas WIllis do
He was one of the first to note relationships between brain damage and specific behavioral deficits. He coined the term neurology. He named quite a few structures in the brain
What is phrenology? What are the good and bad parts?
This is the localization of function in the brain. The good things is that It brought direct attention to brain as enabler of mind and the idea that different brain functions are localized to discrete brain regions. The bad parts were that they said that the size of an organ with other things being equal is a measure of its power, and they said that they could read the skull for aptitudes and tendencies which lead to people thinking they could tell by the skull who was a good mother and bad etc.
Explain the localization vs holism debate and who is right
The localizationists believe that things are only in one spot of the brain. Holism says that processes are distributed throughout the brain. They are both partially right. Some are carried out in one area and some are spread out in the brain acting in concert as neural circuits and systems.
What are brodmanns areas?
They are the 52 subdivisions that Brodmann marked in the brain based on differences in cortical layers between areas
What did John Hughlings Jackson find
He noticed that seizure patients move in characteristic ways, they had muscle spasms progress in orderly way across body parts which suggested topographic organization. He wasnt totally localizationist because he said brain regions are hierarchically organized and many contribute to one behavior in a highly interactive way
What did Wilder Penfield say
He stimulated brain tissue to find the source of epileptic seizures. He found that stimulating different parts of the brain elicited different responses. He developed a map of motor cortex called the motor homunculus.
What did Helmholtz and Donders do for psychology
Helmholtz measured the velocity of nerve conduction in frogs, showed that humans wearing distorting prisms can quickly adapt to the distortions and act on the visual world normally and he said that vision was an unconscious inference which means it combined the stimulus and past knowledge. Donders used the substraction method to measure the speed of higher mental operations. This was when he substracted the time to detect a single even from the time to detect the same event when two are present.
Who started experimental psychology
Wundt had the first experimental psychology lab to study conscious experience relying on the participants introspection. James focused on functions
What is the interhemispheric fissure
It is the fissure that divides the brain into two hemispheres and goes down to the corpus callosum.
What are the boundaries of the motor and sensory cortices?
The cental, precentral and post central sulci.
What is the sylvian fissure?
It seperates the temporal lobe from the parietal and frontal lobes, the insula is buried within it.
