Effects of brain trauma on the brain Flashcards
What is brain trauma?
is any form of physical or chemical damage to the brain
- any form of head injury that impairs the functioning of the brain
What is a neurodegenerative disease?
progressive decline in structure and functioning of the brain
What is amnesia?
partial or total loss of memory
What is dementia?
chronic disorder of mental processes that is caused by brain injury
What are the two types of amnesia?
antereograde and retrograde
What is anterograde amnesia?
loss of memory of events after the trauma occurs
- AFTER = A
What is retrograde amnesia?
loss of memory of events that occurred before the trauma
What kind of amnesia relates to the memory lost of events that occur after the event?
antereograde
What is the common cause of anterograde amnesia?
damage to the temporal lobe and hippocampus
What kind of memories are affected by anterograde amnesia?
cannot form new long term memories
- cannot form or store new explicit memories
- cannot transfer info from STM to LTM
What is a cause of anterograde amnesia?
brain injury
What happens when the hippocampus is removed?
new long term explicit memories cannot be formed or consolidated
What happens when the amygdala is removed?
inability to develop a fear based response
= leads to problems with emotional memories
- cannot recall emotional significance of a memory
What happens when the cerebral cortex is removed?
left side is affected = worse recall of verbal things
right side affected = worse recall of visual things
What happens when the cerebellum is removed?
causes issues with implicit memories
- procedural and classically conditioned memories are affected
What is Alzheimer disease?
- extreme breakdown of brain neurons that causes memory to weaken
What are some symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease?
forgetting important events
forgetting names
impaired declarative memory from that day
LOSS OF SHORT TERM MEMORY
What is the most common type of dementia (memory loss)?
Alzheimer’s disease
What is the causes of Alzheimer’s disease?
- age
- genetics
- environmental factors
What are two parts of the brain that are affected by Alzheimer’s disease?
- neurofibilary tangles
- amyloid plaques
What do the neurofibilary tangles do?
found in dead and dying neurons
- bundles of twisted protein
- kill brain cells
What do the amyloid plaques do?
- clusters of protein
- destroy the synapses
- on the outside of the cells and disrupt transmission between neurons
What happens to the brain when it has Alzheimer’s disease?
starts to shrink because neurons die
What are the brain regions that are affected by the Alzheimer’s disease?
- loss of cells in the hippocampus
- brain shrinks
What happened to H.M?
had brain surgery to stop seizures but it damaged his hippocampus
What was the result of H.M’s surgery?
could no longer form new explicit memories
- could form new implicit memories like procedural and classically conditioned responses
