Neuroscience Flashcards

1
Q

Central Nervous System

A
  • Brain and spinal cord
  • Contains 86 billion neurons
  • We can only use 10% of our brain is a myth
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2
Q

Peripheral Nervous System

A
  • Stuff other than brain and spinal cord
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3
Q

Peripheral Nervous System: SENSORY NERVOUS SYSTEM

A
  • Nerves picks up information –> Sends to spinal cord –> Sends to brain
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4
Q

Peripheral Nervous System: MOTOR NERVOUS SYSTEM

A
  • Signals coming from brain –> Sends to muscles –> Muscles contract –> Movement
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5
Q

Autonomic Nervous System

A
  • Controls important bodily function that we don’t need to think about
  • Uses neurotransmitters
    E.G. Heart rate
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6
Q

Sympathetic Nervous System

A
  • Engages body for fight or flight
  • Increases blood pressure
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7
Q

Parasympathetic Nervous System

A
  • Resting conditions
  • Decrease blood pressure
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8
Q

Enteric Nervous System

A
  • Controls digestive activity
  • Senses physical and chemical conditions in gut
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9
Q

CNS Protection

A
  1. Bone
  2. Meninges - Protect brain from hitting skull
  3. Blood-Brain Barrier
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10
Q

Brainstem

A
  • Regulates life-supporting functions (Maintain breathing)
  • Regulate basic aspects of movement (Posture)
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11
Q

Cerebellum

A
  • 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
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12
Q

Thalamus

A
  • Sensory relay to cortex
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13
Q

Hypothalamus

A
  • Hormonal regulation
  • Motivational control
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14
Q

Limbic System

A
  • Control emotion and memory
  • Smell is evocative sent to limbic system straight away
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15
Q

Basal Ganglia

A
  • Control thoughts and actions
  • Cerebellum is fine tuning motor neurons to make precise movement
  • Basal Ganglia decides which movement should be done now
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16
Q

Neocortex

A
  • 1cm thick tissue wrapped around brain
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17
Q

Corpus Callosum

A
  • Connects 2 hemispheres
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18
Q

Lobes of Neocortex

A
  1. Frontal Lobe - Future planning
  2. Parietal Lobe - Spatial awareness
  3. Temporal Lobe - Memory and language
  4. Occipital Lobe - Vision and recognising different objects
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19
Q

Sleep Depravity

A
  • Affects acquiring and remembering information
  • Contributes to overeating
  • Increases sympathetic nervous system
20
Q

What Keeps Us Awake?

A
  • 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
21
Q

What Sends Us To Sleep?

A
  • Preoptic area is responsible for making us tired
  • Destruction of this area can cause insomnia
22
Q

Adenosine

A
  • While we are awake, adenosine is built up
  • Adenosine increases sleepiness by inhibiting alertness
  • Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors and prevents adenosine from binding
23
Q

Melatonin

A
  • 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
24
Q

Sleep Cycles

A
  • 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
25
Q

REM Sleep

A
  • 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
26
Q

Neural Mechanism of Reward

A
  • 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
27
Q

Right Hemisphere

A
  • Receives sensory input from left and controls motor response on left side of body
28
Q

Left Hemisphere

A
  • Receives sensory input from right and controls motor response on right side of body
29
Q

Lateralisation of Language

A
  • Biased 90% right handed and 10% left handed due to language being lateralised in our left hemisphere
30
Q

Dichotic LIstening Task

A
  • 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
31
Q

Damage to Borca’s Area

A
  • 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
32
Q

Damage to Wernicke’s Area

A
  • Difficulty understanding language and speech
  • Can produce fluid speech
  • E.G. People saying words, it’s fluid but it’s not making any sense
33
Q

Split Brain (Roger Perry)

A
  • 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
34
Q

HM

A
  • Hippocampus removed
  • Memories were intact but couldn’t learn new information
35
Q

Alzheimer’s Disease

A
  • Loss of newly learned information
  • Widespread degeneration of brain tissue
36
Q

Brain Lesions

A
37
Q

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

A
  • Uses magnetic pulses to stimulate parts of the brain and study their functions
38
Q

Single-Cell Recording

A
  • Observing the activity of individual brain cells
39
Q

Functional Imaging

A
  • Techniques for observing which areas of the brain are active
  • EEG
  • MRI
  • fMRI
  • MEG
40
Q

EEG

A
  • Records electrical activity in the brain
  • Good for timing (temporal resolution)
  • Not good in locating where activity happens
41
Q

MRI

A
  • Shows detailed images of brain structures by measuring water in brain tissues
42
Q

fMRI

A
  • Shows which brain areas are active by measuring oxygen levels in blood
  • Good spatial resolution
  • HOWEVER, response is a bit delayed
43
Q

MEG

A
  • Measures magnetic fields from brain activity
  • Good spatial and temporal resolution
  • HOWEVER, expensive and sensitive to interference
44
Q

Lateral Hypothalamus

A
  • Controls hunger
  • Damage makes animals eat less
45
Q

Ventromedial Hypothalamus

A
  • Controls fullness
  • Damage causes animals to eat more frequently but in normal meal sizes
46
Q

Arcuate Nucleus

A
  • Contains neurons that either promote or suppress eating
  • Reacts to hunger and fullness signals from hormones