Lecture 12 Flashcards
What did Arnold pick find in his patient?
Arnold pick dessucated his patient and found a major atrophy in the frontal lobe.
Explain the case of phineas gage.
Injury:
Symptoms:
Conclusion:
Phinease gage was a railway worker who sustained an injury to his frontal lobes in 1848. He survived but suffered major personality changes. 12 years later he started to have epileptic seizures and died. From this case study we can conclude that the frontal lobes play an important function in personality
What is an atrophy?
An atrophy is the knife like thinning of the gyri
What did pick notice in the patients who had this atrophy in their frontal lobes?
They abnormal spontaneous behaviours suck as inappropriate joking/laughing, echolalia (repeating examiners words), echopraxia (repeating examiners actions) and primitive reflexes like suckling, rooting etc.
What movement behaviours do people with picks have?
Akinesia, rigidity
When did lobotomies start? And why?
Lobotomies started in the 40’s and 50’s in order to fix the problem of bulk patients in hospitals with severe mental issues. It aimed to sever the pathway between the emotional aspects of the brain (hypothalamus, amygalda etx) with the frontal cortex
What were the behaviour consequences of people who received a lobotomy?
They became quite stimulus bound and an reacted with those things in front of them.
They gained weight
They became sexually promiscuous (but didn’t have critical thinking about birth control and partners)
They couldn’t form or sustain goals
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Explain the case of W.R.
W.R is known as the man who lost his ego. He suffered from a glial tumour in his left lateral frontal lobe. And as a result lost motivation and interest in a lot of things. He knew his life was shitty and that he upset his family but he didn’t know how to change himself.
From the learnt case studies of Phinease gage, Pick, W.R. and lobotomy what behaviours can be associated with the frontal lobes?
Lack of apathy Irritability Aggression Poor social control- inappropriateness Poor planning and direction goals Distractibility Stimulus bound- hyper sensitive to all stimuli
Generally what symptoms are there and aren’t there in lateral prefrontal lesions ?
There is minimal damage to intelligence and language. But people have a lot of trouble interpreting their environments from past experience and knowledge. It effects the working memory, concept formation and shifting, temporal organisation and goal- orientated behaviour
What is working memory?
Working memory is the medium of short and long term memory. It holds memories without rehearsal for everyday things like where you parked your car in the morning
What did the winconsin card sorting task test? And what did the results show?
The winconsin card sorting task tested the ability to use previous knowledge to make predictions and also the ability to recognise when a concept has changed and adapt to the new one. Patients that had lateral prefrontal lobe damage were not able to recognise when a new concept or rule had occurred in the game. So they had an inability to shift and form new concepts
If a task has many dimensions what happens at the neural level?
The more dimensions a task has, the more activation is present in the prefrontal cortices
What is chronogenesis?
Chronogenesis occurs when people with lateral prefrontal lobe damage can remember events and when they happened but can’t remember what order they go in
What is goal orientated behaviour?
When behavioural decisions are based around a goal
