Lecture 2 Brain Dev Flashcards
What is the Critical Fundamental Principle?
The brain develops and organizes as a reflection of developmental experience, organizing in response to the pattern, intensity, and nature of sensory and perceptual experience.
What is Neuroplasticity?
- Varies by age
- Changes happen due to experience (Positive or Negative)
- Two types (Functional vs. Structural)
What are the 4 Dimensions of Neuroplasticity?
1) Development (Time)
2) Anatomy (Structure)
3) Specificity (Specific Neural Networks)
4) Pattern (Frequency, intensity, timing)
What is Allostatic Load?
The cost or wear and tear on biological and psychological systems as a result of chronic or repeated exposure to significant stress
What is Allostasis?
The moment-to-moment process of increasing or decreasing vital functions to new steady states in response to the demands of the environment and the organism’s response to those demands.
Why is the human brain not designed for the modern world?
For thousands of generations, we lived in small, multi-generational, multi-family groups
What are the three steps to Sensitization (Vulnerability)?
1) Unpredictable
2) Extreme
3) Prolonged
What are the three steps to Tolerance (Resilience)?
1) Predictable
2) Moderate
3) Controllable
What are the 4 layers to the Neurosequential Network?
1) Brainstem: Blood Pressure, Heart Rate, Temperature
2) Diencephalon: Arousal, Appetite, sleep, motor regulation
3) Limbic: Emotional regulation, sexual behavior, attachment
4) Cortex: Abstract thought, concrete thought, affiliation/ reward
What is the ANS (Sympathetic-adrenal medulla activation)
- Increased arousal via the release of hormones (dopamine, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine
- You find higher levels of norepinephrine and epinephrine
What does the ANS do?
- Hormones associated with fight or flight response to stress.
- Increase in respiration, cardiovascular tone, and blood flow to skeletal muscles
- Simultaneous inhibition of vegetative functions (digestion)
What are 3 components to SRS?
1) Coordination of an allostatic response to physical and psychosocial challenges
2) Encoding and filtering information from the environment, thus mediating the organism’s openness to environmental inputs.
3) Functions to shift physical or behavioral endpoints
What is the PNS (parasympathetic nervous system)?
- The process is designed to help your system recover after an acute stress event.
- The PNS promotes rest and restorative behavior, inhibits cardiac activity and output, and enables sustained attention as a consequence of regulatory mechanisms
What is the CNS (Locus Coeruleus-Amygdala Activity)
- serves as a mediating function in the stress response.
- increase in activity in this area increases the firing rate of corticotropin-releasing factor neurons in the amygdala.
- Creates a positive feedback loop
What is the HPA System?
1) Complex set of interactions primarily between the pituitary gland, the amygdala, hippocampus, and the hypothalamus (approx 66 steps).
2) Sensory information the amygdala receives is conveyed to the central nucleus, which projects to several parts of the brain involved in responses to fear.
3) At the hypothalamus, fear-signaling impulses activate both the sympathetic nervous system and the modulating system of the HPA axis.
What is somatic input?
Influences from the inside world
What is Sensory Input?
Influence from the outside world.
What is the sequence of engagement regarding the neuro-sequential network?
1) Influence from the outside world
2) Regulate
3) Relate
4) Reason/ Reflect
What is the correlation between freezing and Oppositional Defiant Disorder diagnosis in children?
Freezing is the first reaction to a stressful situation as you are trying to organize a response to the threat.
Adults react to children freezing in these scenarios as being oppositional, thus leading to frequent ODD diagnoses. This increases anxiety and intensifies this freeze response.
Describe Dissociation
1) The ability to dissociate varies individually. Some do it early in the fear response cycle.
2) in young children, dissociation looks like numbing, compliance, avoidance, and restricted effect.
3) Older children report going to a “different place.” This looks like assuming the persona of heroes or animals, a sense of watching a movie.
4) Observers will report the children as numb, robotic, nonreactive, daydreaming, acting like they are not there.
What does the Amygdala do?
1) Emotion regulation
2) no direct connection to the external world
3) All information received by the amygdala is coming from other parts of the brain that do have a direct connection
What does the Nucleus Accumbens Do?
Controls the release of dopamine
What does the Ventra Tegmental do?
Releases dopamine and very active in the stimulus reward network.
What does the cerebellum do?
1) Controls muscle function
2) More experience-dependent part of the brain
3) Has a link to cognitive functioning due to a connection between higher-order neocortical functions.
4) Involves attention, forms of learning, memory tasks, conditional anxiety, complex reasoning and problem solving, sensory and motor tasks
What does the Pituitary Gland do?
Releases beta-endorphins which decrease pain, oxytocin (love hormone), and vasopressin (also connected to bonding).
What does the Ventral Palladium do?
Critical for motivation, behavior, emotions
What is Cortisol?
Stress hormone!
1) Cortisol is released to manage alarm reactions to stress, activating an adaptive phase of a general adaptation syndrome in which alarm reactions, including the immune response, are suppressed, allowing the body to attempt to return to homeostasis
What happens if there is a high level of cortisol?
Helps fix traumatic memories in your mind. Recent findings with soldiers showed that giving them cortisol in the immediate hours after exposure to combat or trauma decreased PTSD.
What are Glucocorticoids?
1) Responsible for modulating stress.
2) Levels change throughout the day
3) The implication is that acute responses to stressors/ triggers vary depending on the time of day because glucocorticoid levels drop later in the day.
What is Oxytocin?
1) The love hormone!
2) Strongly associated with attachment, affiliation, compassion, empathy, social recognition, communication, territorial aggression, and social bonding.
3) Interactive touch between humans can produce more oxytocin in the brain.
What is the Hippocampus?
1) Located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain
2) Affected by stress and is tied to cognitive functions such as learning, memory, and behavior regulation
3) A direct correlation was found between poverty and a decrease in gray matter in the hippocampus.
4) Explain differences in long-term memory, learning, control of neuroendocrine functions, and modulation of emotional behavior.
