historical research Flashcards
describe what happend to phineous gage
a worplace incident resulted in a pointy piece of iron being forced into the left seide of his face under is cheeck bone and continuing up and back before exiting throuugh the top of his skull
what were the immediate consequences of this incident
this caused him to br thropwn on his back, his limbs convulsed a few times before he regained his speech after a few minutes.
- he remained concious, his wounds were treated by doctors for a fractured skull and some prtruding brain was removed before the scalp was repaired
what happened post - accident
he has since been described as impatient, impulsive, uncaring, and he would often swear.
why did this happen
serious damage to his prefrontal lobe caused a shift in personality and organizational skills.
describe the aim of walter freeman’s surgery
freeman believed that the thalamus was teh centre of human emotion, therfore the source of mental illness.
- he belived that if the neural connections between the thalamus and prefrontal cortex were severed, excess emotions would be elimnated, resulting in a stabel personality
what was a labotomy
a labotomy was a surgery usedin the 20th century to treat severe mental health conditions such as, untreatable depression, schizophrenia and some personality disorders
what were the side effects of a labotomy
- increase in agaitation
- developing apathy ( lack of interest )
- decreased concertration
- numbness in emotional responce
what were sperry’s studies
his preliminary studies were performed on cats and monkeys. He cut the corpus callosum in these animals to study the functions within each hemisphere in the brain.
describe Sperry’s human experiments
Sperry discorvered that the left hemisphere of the brain was responsible for language understanding and articulation, while the right hemisphere could recoignise a work but couldn’t articulate it.
what were the findings of Sperry’s experiments
- these experiments show that participants could detect the words with both hemispheres, but information presented to the left eye/right hemisphere could not be spoken about as the right hemisphere does not have a language feature.
- in order to say that one has seen something, the region of the brain associated with speech must be able to communicate with areas of the brain that processes visual information via the corpus callosom.
what were the limitations of Sperry’s experiments
- split - brain pateints are very rare, so findings are based on a small sample size
- hese patients had additional neurological problems, hich may have resulted in confounding variables
- patients did not alwasy have their corpus callosum completely split open.
