L01

Question 1

What is consciousness?

Answer 1

The state or quality of awareness - awareness of our thoughts, perceptions, memories and feelings. The state of awareness creates a subjective experience. If a being is capable of having subjective experiences, then there is something that it is like to be that being.

Question 2

In 1949, the Nobel Prize was awarded for which procedure?

Answer 2

The frontal lobotomy (the association considers it to be a big mistake)

Question 3

How many lobotomies had been performed in the US by the 1950s?

Answer 3

Over 20 000

Question 4

The frontal lobotomy was used to treat which mental illnesses?

Answer 4

Psychosis, depression, anxiety… Pretty much any mental illness

Question 5

Which procedure was largely advertised in the 1940s and pushed by famous physicians?

Answer 5

The frontal lobotomy

Question 6

What were the effects of having a frontal lobotomy?

Answer 6

The people became more docile, calm and overall less difficult (according to the relatives)

Question 7

What is the split-brain operation?

Answer 7

An outdated surgical approach for treating seizure disorders (epilepsy) that involves cutting the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connect the left and right sides of the cerebral cortex. The surgery is generally effective, but has unacceptable side effects

Question 8

What is the largest commissural pathway in the brain consisting of over 200 million nerve fibers-axons?

Answer 8

The corpus callosum

Question 9

What is the anterior commissure?

Answer 9

It is a small band of approximately 50 000 axons that connects the cerebral hemispheres

Question 10

Our cerebral hemispheres are critical for our ability to consciously…

Answer 10

process sensory information (sights, sounds, touch…) and purposefully move our body in space (ex. hand and leg movements)

Question 11

Each cerebral hemisphere is responsible for one half of the body, but the connections are mostly…

Answer 11

crisscrossed (its been like this for pretty much all animals since the beginning of time)

Question 12

The left brain is largely responsible for the…

Answer 12

right side of the body

Question 13

The right brain is largely responsible for the…

Answer 13

left side of the body

Question 14

When you look at something (a fixation point), everything you see to the left of that spot is processed by…

Answer 14

the right brain

Question 15

When you look at something (a fixation point), everything you see to the right of that spot is processed by…

Answer 15

the left brain

Question 16

What is the corpus callosum?

Answer 16

It is a bundle of fibers that interconnects the two cerebral hemispheres. It enables the two hemispheres to share information so that each side knows what the other side is perceiving and doing

Question 17

What happens when the corpus callosum is cut?

Answer 17

The two cerebral hemispheres cannot directly talk to each other. They can however still send information downwards, down to the brainstem and spinal cord to control muscles. These lower brain areas help coordinate body movements by integrating the information they receive from the two cerebral hemispheres. It is impressive how well they can do this job (coordinate bilateral movements) when the two cerebral hemispheres lose the ability to talk to each other.