Core - Chapter 2 - The Brain and Brain Plasticity

Question 1

Which part of the brain is especially stimulated by environment enrichment?

Answer 1

Cerebral cortex

Question 2

What is brain plasticity?

Answer 2

The brain’s ability to rearrange the connection between its neurons

Question 3

How does brain plasticity work?

Answer 3

The density of neural connections increase with high levels of stimulation

Question 4

What is dendritic branching?

Answer 4

New traces in the brain between neurons created when learning something new.

Question 5

Describe a study regarding brain plasticity that comes from outer stimulation

Answer 5

Rosenzwieg and Benett (1972)

Question 6

Describe a study regarding brain plasticity that comes from our own thinking

Answer 6

Richard Davidson (2004)

Question 7

What are mirror neurons?

Answer 7

A neuron that fires when an animal or person performs and action or when the animal observes somebody else perform the same action

Question 8

Describe a study on mirror neurons with animals

Answer 8

Gallese et al. (1996)

Question 9

Describe a study on mirror neurons with humans

Answer 9

Marco Iacoboni (2004)

Question 10

Why have we developed mirror neurons?

Answer 10

Ramachandran: Play a role in how people react to sports, theatre, video games. Mirror neurons may have evolved to make us capable of understanding and interacting with fellow human beings.

Question 11

Describe the Mozart effect

Answer 11

The Mozart effect, Rausher et al. (1993)
Has been argued that listening to Mozart will temporarily increase spatial reasoning ability. By listening to the music, the brain will develop a more sophisticated ability to solve spatial problems.

Question 12

Describe a study contradicting the Mozart effect

Answer 12

Thompson et al. (2001)

Question 13

Rosenzwieg and Bennett (1972)

Answer 13

Rats were placed in one of two environments to measure the effect of either enrichment (lots of toys) or deprivation (no toys) on the development of neurons in the cerebral cortex.
Rats spent 30 or 60 days in environment. Post-mortem studies showed that the stimulated rats had an increased thickness in the cortex, frontal lobe (thinking, planning, decision making) was heavier. Similar research proves that social interaction further increase the thickness of the cortex.
Limitation: can this be generalized to humans? Only to a certain extent. What is an enriched environment for a human?

Question 14

Richard Davidson (2004)

Answer 14

Eight buddhist monks highly experienced in meditation, 10 volunteers who had been trained in meditation for a week. All participants were told to meditate on love and compassion. Using a PET scan, Davidson observed that two of the controls and all of the monks experienced an increase in the number of gamma waves (have been linked to higher reasoning faculties) in their brain during meditation. When terminating the meditation the volunteers’ gamma wave production returned to normal, while the monks (who had meditated on compassion for more than 10,000 hours in order to attain the rank of adept) did not experience a decrease. The synchronized gamma-wave area of the monks’ brains during the meditation was found to be larger than the corresponding activation of the volunteers’.
Davidson argues: Meditation could have significant long term effects on the brain and the way it processes emotions.
Brains adapt to stimulation - whether from environment or as a result of our own thinking.

Question 15

Gallese et al. (1996)

Answer 15

Carried out research on motor neurons, neural messages are electrical in nature, a crackle of the electrical signal when a neuron is activated could be detected. Had isolated the neural response in rhesus monkeys reaching for food (a peanut). Every time the monkey reached for a peanut, the telltale crackling noise was heard. One day, a researcher reached for a peanut and the same crackling noise was produced. By watching somebody else reach for a peanut, the monkey’s brain acted as though the monkey was carrying out the behavior.

Question 16

Marco Iacoboni (2004)

Answer 16

Asked participants to look at human faces while undergoing and fMRI. Will simply looking at the emotion expressed in someone’s face cause the brain of the observer to be stimulated?
First, participants were asked to imitate the faces they were shown, and then only to look them again. Not only were the same areas of the brain activated in both cases - observing a happy face activated pleasure centers in the brain.

Question 17

Thompson et al. (2001)

Answer 17

Little to do with Mozart and a more to do with arousal.
When participants’ moods were elevated, they had improved spatial skills; those who’s mood did not change as a result of the music did not show any improvement.
Mozart not an example of plasticity, rather of a heightened sense of attention that increases learning in some people.
Criticism: problems with ecological validity. Laboratory settings and tasks that were not something they would do in the “real world”. May not predict the behavior in a real life situation.

Question 18

Hubel and Wiesel, 1965

Answer 18

The brain can change as a response to environmental input. Based on laboratory experiments on rats but has now become generally accepted that environmental enrichment can modify the brain, especially the cerebral cortex, which is the area of higher cognitive functioning. It seems like the brain is always changing as a result of experience throughout the lifespan.

Question 19

Give an example of researchers disproving the brain of being unchangeable

Answer 19

Hubel and Wiesel, 1965