Neuroanatomy

Question 1

What is the brain?

Answer 1

A means
of communication between
the internal and external
world

Question 2

Neuron definition

Answer 2

Fundamental building blocks of the nervous system
Individual cell

Question 3

How many neurons does the human brain have?

Answer 3

100 billion

Question 4

What are the 3 major parts of a neuron?

Answer 4

1. Dendrite (receives information)
2. Cell body (processes information)
3. Axon (transmits information, length depends on the location (shorter in the brain, longer in muscles, etc))

Question 5

What is the function of glial cells?

Answer 5

provide support and protection to neurons
maintain homeostasis
cleaning up debris
form myelin

essentially work to care for the neurons and the environment they are in

Question 6

How many glial cells does the brain have?

Answer 6

1 trillion (10x more than neurons)

Question 7

Collection of neurons is called..?

Answer 7

Brain nucleus
(contains hundreds to millions of neurons)

Question 8

Collection of brain nuclei is called..?

Answer 8

Brain region

Question 9

What is the difference between grey and white matter?

Answer 9

Groups of cell bodies is often referred to as grey matter, the axons traveling to different
regions white matter

Question 10

Why do we study regional specificity?

Answer 10

distinctions between regions
distinctions within regions
what do different regions do? what sets them apart from other regions?

Question 11

With neuroanatomy we look to understand these 4 categories of study…

Answer 11

regional specificity
connectivity
function
species differences

Question 12

what is the difference between anterograde and retrograde connectivity?

Answer 12

anterograde: tracing in direction of information flow (dendrite, cell body, axon)
retrograde: tracing in reverse direction of information flow (axon, cell body, dendrite)

talk to professors about this and how it matches up with action potential and myelin sheath stuff

Question 13

What did Broca and Wernicke do that was important to the field?

Answer 13

brain function
both studied patients who had speech problems after strokes or other problems. After the patients died, their brains were cut open and found that they all had the same areas that were damaged; which means that they discovered which part of the brain controlled certain functions

broca: speech production
wernicke: speech comprehension

Question 14

what did Olds do that was important to the field?

Answer 14

brain function
deep brain stimulation (dbs) studies in rodents to see which parts of the brain responded when it was probed with electricity. used the metal bar and sent electricity into different parts of the brain. some would respond well (serotonin, addition) but others would never press the bar again

Question 15

the larger the brain region…

Answer 15

the more important and useful that region is

Question 16

what is an mri used for?

Answer 16

standard mri
static images (gray and white 2d pictures)
1mm resolution

Question 17

what is a fmri used for?

Answer 17

functional mri
changes in brain activity by changes in brain flow
same picture as mri but it has different sections lit up red (warmer, more blood) and blue (cooler, blood is leaving that area)
2mm resolution

think about walking home from school to your house and seeing your mom (different sections of the brain will light up as you make the connections between different activities)

Question 18

what is a dmri used for?

Answer 18

diffusion mri
analyzes water movement within axons by using really strong magnets

human connectome project: mapping all of the connections in the brain

Question 19

what did tsien do that was important to the field?

Answer 19

development of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) from jellyfish and put it in the brain with different stains

allows for the visualization of the brain because each neuron takes up different stains and shows up as a different color

Question 20

what is the CLARITY method and who came up with it?

Answer 20

removing lipids from tissue (lipids scatter light, prevent deep tissue imaging), essentially making the brain see-through

Deisseroth

Question 21

what does electron microscopy (EM) do?

Answer 21

allows for the deeper and clearer imaging in nm instead of micrometers (fluorescence) or mm (mri)
Instead of taking a very thin section of a brain, you can now slice the entire brain thinly and recompose it on the computer to make a 3d image

fruit fly brain is mapped