Week 1 Flashcards
ACE- Adverse Childhood experiences
10 different types
-Neglect
-Emotional abuse
-Physical abuse
-Psychological abuse
People who have experienced 4 or more have higher risk of substance abuse/psychosis later in life
-But this can create a false link between the 2 (implied causation)
Psilocybin
Mushrooms- Above surface
Truffles- Below surface
Dosage is v important- Dried mushrooms (no water) are much lighter than fresh despite having same amount of psilocybin
Reason for truffles over mushrooms
Safer
Allows for safety regulation
How many neurons in the brain
Around 86 billion
Who was first to question whether there was 100 billion neurons in the brain
Suzana- Herculano- Houzel
She coloured neurons to estimate roughly 86 million
Do females have smaller brains?
Yes
But same amount of neurons (More full, more efficient use of brain)
What part of brain has more neurons?
Cerebellum
-Important for movement, balance and possibly cognitive functions
-Higher density of neurons
-More simple structure of neurons than cortex
Is fMRI so precise that you can investigate what assemblies of 10 to 20 neurons are doing?
False
ECoG
Improvement of EEG
Electrodes put on brain instead of skull
Better spatial and temporal resolution
How many brain areas
In reality- 72
Brodmann proposed- 43
Are fMRI and other neuroimaging methods better than other psychological methods at predicting behaviour
No
Suzana-Herculano-Houzel study
Questionnaires were distributed to understand beliefs of the brain amongst the general population
APT
Augmented psychotherapy
EEG
Measures electric currents on the skull
Subject to eye related effects- Blinking
Fluid in fMRI helps to increase signal to noise ratio
Advantage of fMRI
Can measure the whole brain volume
Can globalise the signal
Problem of fMRI
Not measuring cell activity directly
Slow
Corpus callosum
Barrier that connects 2 hemispheres
Sometimes cut in severe epilepsy patients to prevents seizures from spreading through whole brain
Cingulate cortex
In front of corpus callosum
Active in cognitive control
3 goals of Herculiano-Houzel’s study
Quantitative comparison of different segments of the public to identify factors that might influence neuroscience literacy
Identify which themes the public are informed/misinformed about
Compare how neuroscientists and the public see the functioning of the brain and its relationship to the mind
Effect of reading books on science knowledge
People who read no books/1 a month got a lower score than those who read 2/3
Reading more than 3 books didn’t increase scores
Who first investigated consciousness empirically
Crick and Coch
Focused on visual awareness
Start of consciousness research
-Late 19th century
-Animal studies to reveal brain organization and function
-Early psychologists were introspectionists and prized consciousness
Consciousness and behaviorists
Behaviourists banned consciousness from the field
David Ferrier and consciousness
Stimulations of parietal and temporal lobes caused animals to behave as if they were having sensory sensations but stimulation to the subcortex did not- Cerebral cortex may be sufficient for eliciting conscious experiences
Hughlings Jackson and consciousness
Seizures in focal regions can alter conscious experience
-Consciousness is the highest level of cerebral organization
-Mind involved interactions between conscious and unconscious processes
Gustav Fechner and consciousness
Introduced psychophysical methods for relating physical properties of stimuli with psychological experiences
Von Helmholtz and consciousness
Said conscious perception involves unconscious inferences
-Foreshadowed idea that consciousness depends on nonconscious processing
Early 20th century and consciousness
Consciousness was simply assumed to underlie behaviour
Penfield and consciousness
Applied stimulation to patients brains to localize language areas
-Patients reported subjective experiences from these stimulations showing the role of cerebral cortex in conscious experiences
New approach to brain and behaviour
Lashley
Emphasised how consciousness emerges from nonconscious info processing
Yerkes and animal neuropsychology
Studied effects of lesions within all major lobes of the cerebral cortex and subcortical areas
Animal neuropsychology in the 1970s
People believed that consciousness comes from short term memory or executive planning system- Working memory and prefrontal cortex have also been added
Mishkin and animal neuropsychology
Distinguished between ventral and dorsal streams of processing- Crucial for contemporary consciousness processing
Human neuropsychological research and consciousness
Patients with neuropsychological issues have dissociations between what they can behaviourally do and what they can consciously report
Amnesia and consciousness
-First half of 20th century: Memory is widely distributed in the brain- This shifted in the 50s
-Milner: Tested temporal lobe patients and cognitive functions- Plays a large role in visual learning- Later research suggests damage only affects declarative memory (memory that can be consciously experienced)
-Prefrontal cortex plays a role in the retrieval of memories and the conscious experience of these retrieved memories
-Explicit memories are used to construct conscious simulations of the future
Split brain syndrome and consciousness
-Remarkable recovery after procedure
-Each hemisphere has separate behavioural capacities and 2 separate mental systems
-Isolated right hemisphere may have a separate conscious awareness of self and a vision of the future
Blindsight and consciousness
-Damage to primary visual cortex produces a blindness in the visual field opposite the lesion-People can guess the identity of an object in their ‘blindside’ better than chance but this choice is unconscious
-People can unconsciously detect emotional expressions of faces presented in the blind field
-Signals to the prefrontal cortex may be necessary for awareness (rather than visual cortex)
Korper-LeibDistinction
Korper- Body as an object which physical attributes can be attributed to (objective)
Leib- Body as a subject, zero point for perception and action (lived body)- Phenomenological (subjective)
Korper is in line with the instrumental worldview that the body can be manipulated
KorperLeib and how the body appears to consciousness
Leib- Sensations that are localised in the organ of perception (touch sensations appearing in the touch organ)
Korper- Nonlocalized sensations (visual sensations)
