Revision: Term 1, First Year Flashcards
Right visual field
Sperry’s split brain
Reports words (reading) (RVFA for words)
Projects to left hemisphere
Global aphasia
Impaired speech production and comprehension
Damage to Broca and Wernicke’s areas
Amygdala
Limbic system structure
Involved in emotionally charged memory encoding
Occipital lobe
Mostly given over to visual cortex
Receives input from pathways arising from visual receptors of eye
Dizygotic twins
Aka: Fraternal twins
Develop fro two different eggs
Genetically different
Noradrenaline
Synaptic neurotransmitter
Lowers levels associated with depression
Involved in regulation of sleep
Released from adrenal medulla as part of peripheral arousal response
Retrograde amnesia
Inability to recall previously learned material
Ex: Clive Wearing
Immune system
Natural immunity - macrophages in blood stream
Specific immunity - cellular and humoral
Axon
Elongated process conducting nerve impulses away from soma
Reticular formation
Found in brainstem (medulla and pons and extends up into midbrain)
Involved in regulateing arousal and sleep
Millions of interlinked short-axon neurons
Functions to regulate arousal level of the cortex
HM
Temporal lobe amnesia
Anterograde amnesia with patchy retrograde
Tested using serial position curve: showed no primacy effect, but a recency effect
Korsakoff’s syndrome
Concentrated in the Diencephalon (dorsomedial thalamus)
Sperry’s split brain
Based on the fact that the left visual field projects to right hemisphere
Magnocellular pathway from the thalamus to visual cortex carries:
Information about movement
Concordance rate
Probability of an individual developing the disorder if they are the monozygotic twin of someone with the disorder
Adrenal cortex
In stress-related arousal, releases corticosterone
Part of adrenal gland under hormonal control
Conduction aphasia
Cannot repeat words spoken to them (“Shadowing” experiments)
Caused by damage to arcuate fasiculus
Broca’s area
In the frontal lobe
Patient, Tan: production aphasia (motor/expressive)
Primary motor cortex
Found in precentral gyrus (of frontal lobe)
Phineas Gage
Damage to frontal lobe
Suffered changes to personality after damage
Postcentral gyrus
In frontal lobe
Important for processing sensory input from the body senses
Houses the somatosensory cortex
Hippocampus in rats
Important in spatial memory (navigation)
Left hemisphere functions
Analytical and sequential processor
Temporally-coded stimuli
Right hemisphere functions
Parallel and gestalt processor
Spatially-coded stimuli
Optic chiasma
Point at which half the pathways from the left eye cross over to the right side of the brain and half the pathways from the right eye cross over to the left side
Angular gyrus
Reading and writing
Dorsal stream of the visual system
Location in space
Pituitary gland
In stress-related arousal, releases adrenocorticotrophic hormone
Chronic stress causes:
Downregulation of both natural immunity and specific immunity
Wernicke’s area
Located in temporal lobe Receptive aphasia (lack of comprehension)
Precentral gyrus
General body senses are processed in somatosensory cortex here
Clive Wearing
Severe anterograde and regrograde amnesia
Orientation columns
Found in visual cortex
Temporal lobe
Contains auditory cortex and association areas
Temporal lobe amnesia is mainly an anterograde amnesia (i.e. H.M.)
Dopamine
DA
Synaptic neurotransmitter
Decreased DA activity is associated with Parkinson’s diseases
Increased DA activity is associated with schizophrenia
Ventral stream
What is this?!
Pure word blindness
Alexia with agraphia
fMRI
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow
Relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled
