Neuroscience

Question 1

Central Nervous System

Answer 1

• Brain and spinal cord
• Contains 86 billion neurons
• We can only use 10% of our brain is a myth

Question 2

Peripheral Nervous System

Answer 2

• Stuff other than brain and spinal cord

Question 3

Peripheral Nervous System: SENSORY NERVOUS SYSTEM

Answer 3

• Nerves picks up information –> Sends to spinal cord –> Sends to brain

Question 4

Peripheral Nervous System: MOTOR NERVOUS SYSTEM

Answer 4

• Signals coming from brain –> Sends to muscles –> Muscles contract –> Movement

Question 5

Autonomic Nervous System

Answer 5

• Controls important bodily function that we don’t need to think about
• Uses neurotransmitters
  E.G. Heart rate

Question 6

Sympathetic Nervous System

Answer 6

• Engages body for fight or flight
• Increases blood pressure

Question 7

Parasympathetic Nervous System

Answer 7

• Resting conditions
• Decrease blood pressure

Question 8

Enteric Nervous System

Answer 8

• Controls digestive activity
• Senses physical and chemical conditions in gut

Question 9

CNS Protection

Answer 9

1. Bone
2. Meninges - Protect brain from hitting skull
3. Blood-Brain Barrier

Question 10

Brainstem

Answer 10

• Regulates life-supporting functions (Maintain breathing)
• Regulate basic aspects of movement (Posture)

Question 11

Cerebellum

Answer 11

• Controls precise movements outside our consciousness
• Occupies 10% of brain but contains 70% of neurons
• E.G. Quickly controls the placement of hand when catching ball
• E.G. Controls balance when stepping on escalator

Question 12

Thalamus

Answer 12

• Sensory relay to cortex

Question 13

Hypothalamus

Answer 13

• Hormonal regulation
• Motivational control

Question 14

Limbic System

Answer 14

• Control emotion and memory
• Smell is evocative sent to limbic system straight away

Question 15

Basal Ganglia

Answer 15

• Control thoughts and actions
• Cerebellum is fine tuning motor neurons to make precise movement
• Basal Ganglia decides which movement should be done now

Question 16

Neocortex

Answer 16

• 1cm thick tissue wrapped around brain

Question 17

Corpus Callosum

Answer 17

• Connects 2 hemispheres

Question 18

Lobes of Neocortex

Answer 18

1. Frontal Lobe - Future planning
2. Parietal Lobe - Spatial awareness
3. Temporal Lobe - Memory and language
4. Occipital Lobe - Vision and recognising different objects

Question 19

Sleep Depravity

Answer 19

• Affects acquiring and remembering information
• Contributes to overeating
• Increases sympathetic nervous system

Question 20

What Keeps Us Awake?

Answer 20

• Pons, locus coeruleus and raphe nuclei maintains our arousal by sending axons to forebrains
• Locus coeruleus releases noradrenaline
• Raphe nuclei releases serotonin
• Pons release acetylcholine

Question 21

What Sends Us To Sleep?

Answer 21

• Preoptic area is responsible for making us tired
• Destruction of this area can cause insomnia

Question 22

Adenosine

Answer 22

• While we are awake, adenosine is built up
• Adenosine increases sleepiness by inhibiting alertness
• Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors and prevents adenosine from binding

Question 23

Melatonin

Answer 23

• Increases in the evening and peaks during midnight
• Has a clock mechanism that rises in evening and decrease during day
• When jet lagged melatonin is high when new country is during daytime

Question 24

Sleep Cycles

Answer 24

• When we’re awake, the electrical activity in our brains is high frequency
• When we’re tired or sleeping the activity becomes slower and wave form is larger

Question 25

REM Sleep

Answer 25

• Neurons in pons wakes up during REM and projects to back of thalamus which projects to visual cortex
• During REM, limbic system becomes active because when we are dreaming we are emotional
• During REM, we believe all our dreams are real because the prefrontal cortex which is usually” nah this can’t be true”, is suppressed

Question 26

Neural Mechanism of Reward

Answer 26

• If you stimulate the medial forebrain bundle it produced a powerful reward
• Rat pressed lever over and over again and would receive electrical simulation in medial forebrain bundle
• It prefer to starve or even tolerate shocks in order to continue self stimulating

Question 27

Right Hemisphere

Answer 27

• Receives sensory input from left and controls motor response on left side of body

Question 28

Left Hemisphere

Answer 28

• Receives sensory input from right and controls motor response on right side of body

Question 29

Lateralisation of Language

Answer 29

• Biased 90% right handed and 10% left handed due to language being lateralised in our left hemisphere

Question 30

Dichotic LIstening Task

Answer 30

• If person is hearing a different voice in each ear saying something, they will understand a word faster if presented to right ear since the right ear travels to left hemisphere straight away
• If words presented to left ear, it travels to right hemisphere and travels through corpus callosum and then to left ear

Question 31

Damage to Borca’s Area

Answer 31

• People can only utter words
• Can’t produce fluid speech
• Problems with writing but not drawing
• E.G. People saying words, but it is stopping and not fluid

Question 32

Damage to Wernicke’s Area

Answer 32

• Difficulty understanding language and speech
• Can produce fluid speech
• E.G. People saying words, it’s fluid but it’s not making any sense

Question 33

Split Brain (Roger Perry)

Answer 33

• If object was placed in right hand, it was going to left hemisphere so can tell what the object was
• Of object was placed in left hand, it was going to right hemisphere and can’t travel to left due to corpus callosum was cut

Question 34

HM

Answer 34

• Hippocampus removed
• Memories were intact but couldn’t learn new information

Question 35

Alzheimer’s Disease

Answer 35

• Loss of newly learned information
• Widespread degeneration of brain tissue