The brain Flashcards
What is the frontal lobe?
Our consciousness and awareness o what we are doing in the environment. Motor cortex is located here for voluntary motor movements.
What is the parietal lobe?
Intakes sensory information from the skin, in the somatosensory cortex.
What is the Temporal lobe?
Auditory cortex and ability to analyse speech based information.
What is the Occipital lobe
Visual information, located in the visual cortex.
What is the Broca’s area
In the left Frontal lobe, responsible for speech production. If damaged, patients with have Broca’s aphasia and have slow inarticulate speech.
What is the Wernicke’s area?
In left Occipital lobe, responsible for processing language. If damaged, patient will have Wernicke’s aphasia, and will have fluent language with no meaning.
What is Lateralisation?
The idea that two halves of the brain are functionally different and certain processes or behaviours are controlled by one hemisphere rather than the other. Connected by the corpus callosum.
What does the right side of the brain control?
The left side of the body
What does the left side of the brain control?
The right side of the body
What is the corpus callosum
A bundle of nerve fibres hat enables messages to enter the right hemisphere to be conveyed to the left hemisphere, making the brain holistic.
What does the right hemisphere control
Face recognition, creativity, emotion
Who are split brain patients?
A unique group of patients who has a commissurotomy- where the corpus callosum is severed so that the two hemispheres are separated and don’t communicate with each other.
Why are split brain patients important to researchers?
It gives an opportunity for researchers to study the roles of the two hemispheres.
What is the Sperry study (1968)
It studies 11 split brain patients and compared them to those with no hemisphere separation.
He projected a word into the left or right visual field, and the information is dealt with by the opposite hemisphere of the brain, without sharing information between the two.
What equipment did Sperry use?
Tachistoscope
An object is placed in the left hand and the patient is asked to name it.
The patient will not name it. The left hand is connected to the right hemisphere which is uncapable of language.
Two different objects are placed in the left and right hand, then hidden among other objects.
Each hand will search for an object, if it finds the object the other looks for it rejects it.
The hemispheres do not communicate- The left hemisphere only knows what was in the right hand etc.
Two different words are shown, they are asked to name one and pick up the other.
They will say what is in the RVF, pick up what was in the LVF.
RVF goes to left hemisphere which controls language and can say it. LVF goes to right hemisphere which can pick it up.
Strength- Standardised procedures are used.
Participants were asked to stare at a fixed point and an image was flashed for a tenth of a second.
Therefore, the procedure was well controlled and vary aspects meaning only one hemisphere received information.
Weakness- Restricted sample in research lowers population validity.
In Sperry’s research, there were only 11 participants, with a history of epileptic seizures which could have changed their brain
The findings cannot be generalised to the whole population.
