Biopsychology: Brain Damage, Memory, and Disorders

• The following notes cover brain damage, neuroplasticity, learning, memory, amnesia, hunger, eating, health, sleep, dreaming, circadian rhythm, drug use, addiction, the brain's reward circuit, disorders of cognition, emotion, biopsychology, and psychiatric disorders.

Brain Damage and Neuroplasticity

• Meningiomas are tumors growing between the meninges, the three membranes covering the central nervous system.
• Neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques are defining characteristics of Alzheimer's Disease.
• The substantia nigra, a midbrain nucleus, degenerates severely in Parkinson's disease.
• Animal models are experimental tools used to recreate symptoms and understand mechanisms of human neurological diseases.
• Syphilis, a bacterial infection transmitted through contact with genital sores, can lead to mental illness in later stages.
• Neural regeneration refers to the regrowth of damaged neurons.
• Phantom limb refers to the phenomenon where amputees continue to feel sensations in their missing limbs.
• A tumor is a mass of cells growing independently.
• Multiple Sclerosis (MS) attacks axons not dendrites.
• Excessive apoptosis can contribute to diseases such as neurodegeneration.
• The MPTP Model of Parkinson's Disease does not use mice.
• Individuals inheriting one abnormal recessive gene do not typically develop the related neuropsychological disorder.
• Blind people can recognize objects by touch and locate sounds easily because their brain uses the part meant for vision to help with touch and hearing.
• An individual's ability to perform well despite brain damage does not mean the brain has fully recovered to its previous state.
• A metastatic tumor has spread to the brain from another organ.
• An aneurysm is a congenital defect in an artery wall, causing a balloon-like bulge.
• Huntington's disease is inherited through a dominant gene, giving a 50-50 chance of inheritance even if one parent contributes a non-affected gene.
• Alzheimer's disease involves frequent forgetting of recent events, confusion, misplacing belongings, and struggling to find them.
• A tonic-clonic seizure involves loss of consciousness, muscle rigidity, shaking, tongue biting, and no memory of the event upon waking.
• Necrosis, where neurons swell, rupture, and release cellular contents post-stroke, triggers inflammation and further neuronal damage.
• The MPTP Model of Parkinson’s Disease uses chemicals to damage the substantia nigra and lower dopamine levels to cause tremors, rigidity, and bradykinesia.
• The kindling model of epilepsy involves repeated brain stimulations to induce progressively intense convulsions.
• Endogenous neurotoxins, where the immune system produces antibodies that damage the nervous system, are responsible for nervous system damage.
• A virus contributing to a neuropsychological disorder may remain dormant for years before symptoms appear, making it difficult to diagnose.
• Enriched environments lead to improved learning, memory, and brain plasticity in mice, due to opportunities for physical activity and mental challenges.

Learning, Memory, and Amnesia

• The striatum stores stimulus-response relationships or habit formation.
• The cerebellum helps with motor skills and coordination.
• The prefrontal cortex assists with working memory and planning.
• The amygdala is essential for storing emotional memories.
• The inferotemporal cortex helps in visual memory.
• The hippocampus, shaped like a seahorse, is primarily located deep within the medial temporal lobe.
• The amygdala is involved in emotion processing, fear responses, social behavior, and memory formation.
• The lesion method studies memory storage by examining the effects of brain lesions (damage to specific areas) on memory recall.
• A synapse is the junction between two neurons that allows signals to pass.
• The resting state is when neurons are inactive and calcium levels are kept low.
• The Prefrontal Cortex is crucial for working memory, decision-making, and executive functions, including manipulation, retrieval, and organizing/planning actions.
• The Block-Tapping Memory Test tests performance of spatial memory.
• The Digit Span Test assesses short-term memory retention and long-term encoding abilities.
• Wernicke encephalopathy is a sudden and severe (acute) brain disorder.
• Posttraumatic amnesia refers to a coma following a severe head blow, lasting seconds or minutes, and sometimes weeks.
• Korsakoff syndrome is a long-term (chronic) memory disorder.
• A concussion is when a bump to the head rattles the brain, damaging delicate tissue.
• Anterograde amnesia is when one has difficulty forming new memories after an injury or disease.
• The Perirhinal cortex helps in recognizing and distinguishing between objects and in familiarity-based recognition.
• Reconsolidation is a theoretical construct which has recently attracted researchers' attention.
• The Striatum is believed to store memories involving consistent patterns between stimuli and responses.
• A lesion is damage or destruction of a specific structure in the brain.
• Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to form, change, and reorganize neural pathways and synaptic connections due to learning, experience, or injury.
• Electroconvulsive Shock (ECS) involves administering an intense, brief, diffuse, seizure-inducing current to the brain through large electrodes attached to the scalp.
• The Mumby Box is a similar version as the delayed nonmatching-to-sample test for rats that resembles that for monkeys.

Hunger, Eating, and Health

• Digestion is the gastrointestinal process of breaking down food and absorbing constituents into the body.
• Most nutrients are absorbed into the blood in the pancreas.
• The Cephalic Phase of energy metabolism involves salivating and stomach growling when smelling food.
• Amino acids are from proteins like meat, fish, and beans.
• Fat is the best energy storage because it stores twice as much energy as glycogen.
• Anorexia nervosa is a disorder where individuals eat very little, leading to severe weight loss.
• Bulimics typically attempt to eliminate consumed calories by voluntary purging, excessive laxative use, or extreme exercise.
• Bulimia nervosa involves avoiding meals for long periods, consuming large amounts sometimes, and then self-vomiting or using laxatives to prevent weight gain.
• Anorexia nervosa is often linked with excessive concern about body weight and seeing oneself as overweight despite being underweight.
• Leptin is a peptide hormone released actively by fat.
• Gastric surgery is irreversible surgical treatment that involves short-circuiting the normal, digestive tract path to reduce food absorption because of the surgical treatment for obesity.
• Receptors for peptide hormones such as neuropeptide Y and melanocortins are located in the hypothalamus, specifically in the arcuate nucleus.
• Obesity is associated with frequently consuming high-calorie foods, leading a sedentary lifestyle, shortness of breath, and difficulty sleeping.
• Premeal hunger is when the body defends its homeostasis against influxes into the bloodstream before a meal.
• Sensory-specific satiety is when subjects rate the palatability of food.
• Sham eating indicates that satiety signals from the gut or blood are unnecessary to terminate a meal.
• Pavlovian conditioning of hunger is when hunger is triggered by the expectation of food, not energy deficit.
• Prader-Willi syndrome is an uncommon genetic condition that results in insatiable hunger and exceptionally slow metabolism.
• Satiety, controlled by hormones like leptin and insulin, signals the body when to stop eating.
• Peptides release chemical signals to the brain from the gastrointestinal tract and can function as hormones and neurotransmitters.
• Miss A began to display voracious appetite and weight gain at 3 1/2 years old.
• Hunger and eating are thought to be controlled by a setpoint.
• The set point mechanism defines one's ideal level of energy.
• The detector mechanism detects changes in energy level.
• The effector mechanism initiates or stops eating to return to the set point.

Sleep, Dreaming, and Circadian Rhythm

• The circadian rhythm's primary function controls the body's sleep-wake cycle.
• The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) regulates the circadian rhythm.
• Exposure to bright light at night can disrupt the circadian rhythm.
• Sleep deprivation is the condition when an individual fails to get the necessary amount of sleep.
• Microsleep refers to a very short period of sleep measured in seconds.
• Slow waves is the deepest non-rapid eye movement sleep stage.
• Economo observed sleep abnormality from the spreading disease during World War I.
• Reticular REM-Sleep Nuclei is the fourth brain area involved in sleep.
• Encephalitis lethargica was the disease known as "sleepy sickness" that spread during World War I.
• Recuperation theory believes that being awake disrupts homeostasis and that sleep restores it.
• Adaptation theories focuses on where we sleep more than how; we sleep at night because of evolution.
• There is no relationship between a species' sleep time and its level of activity, body size or body temperature according to recuperation theories.
• Each species' daily sleep time relates to its vulnerability and time needed for primary necessities
• Adaptation theory suggests that we are highly motivated to engage in sleep but do not require it to stay healthy.
• Melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone regulating the sleep-wake cycle and is used as a sleep aid.
• Antihypnotic drugs counteract excessive sleepiness or promote wakefulness.
• Hypnotic drugs induce and maintain sleep.
• Fichten's 2004 study on short and long sleepers showed no significant differences in well-being between the two groups.
• Polyphasic sleep can eventually lead to balance, making it a viable alternative to monophasic sleep.
• Sleep disorders involve problems with the quality, timing, and amount of sleep, resulting in daytime distress and impaired functioning.
• Insomnia is a persistent difficulty falling or staying asleep, or waking up too early.
• Obstructive sleep apnea occurs when the airway gets blocked during sleep, causing breathing to stop and start repeatedly.
• Vivid dreaming occurs during REM sleep.
• Delta waves are dominant brain waves during deep sleep.
• A sleep cycle repeats every 90 minutes.
• Stage 4 is the deepest sleep stage and the hardest from which to wake up.
• Stage 2 has sleep spindles and K-complexes.

Drug Use, Addiction, and the Brain's Reward Circuit

• Four ways drugs can be administered are oral ingestion, injection, inhalation, and absorption through mucous membranes.
• A hallmark of phase of alcohol withdraw is Delirium Tremens.
• Contingent tolerance depends on experiencing a drug's effects, while conditioned tolerance depends on the environment where the drug is taken.
• Conditioned compensatory responses refer to how the body prepares for a drug by triggering responses that counteract its effects.
• Drug sensitization is when a person in their living room while listening to a specific playlist starts to notice that the drug is stronger in that environment.
• Thinking about a drug causes a person's heart rate to increase.
• Negative mood swings and insomnia is least likely to be a long-term effect of stimulants.
• The Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914 made it illegal to use opium, morphine, or cocaine in the United States.
• Heroin rush refers to the wave of intense abdominal, orgasmic pleasure that evolves into a state of serene, drowsy euphoria.
• Cocaine psychosis is one of the effects of cocaine sprees and sometimes mistaken for schizophrenia.
• Global death rates of alcohol is 2 million.
• Global death rates of Tobacco is 5 million.
• The Nigrostriatal Pathway is where degeneration leads to Parkinson's Disease.
• The nucleus accumbens is primarily the central hub for processing reward and pleasure in the brain.
• Positive-incentive value refers specifically to anticipation.
• Hedonic value refers to the amount of pleasure actually experienced and is different to positive-incentive value.
• Changes to long-lasting Brain Reward circuitry results in dopamine releases and reinforces craving.
• Cocaine and other stimulants can lead to tolerance, dependence, and severe health consequences like anxiety and heart problems.
• Sigmund Freud had personal experiences with addiction to both cocaine and nicotine.

Disorders of Cognition and Emotion

• Phonological Analysis focuses on analyzing language sounds.
• Bavelier and colleagues (1997) recorded brain activity during the reading of sentences rather than simpler, unnatural tasks in studying brain activity during reading.
• Damasio and colleagues' (1996) PET study of naming presented famous faces, animals, and tools to participants to study temporal-lobe activity.
• Dyslexia refers to a pathological difficulty in reading not caused by general visual, motor, or intellectual deficits.
• The Phonetic Procedure looks at identifying letters, sounding them out, and then saying the identified word.
• The Lexical procedure looks at words and recognizes it based on stored information prior to saying them.
• Surface dyslexia is characterized by the inability to pronounce words based on specific memories of the words but they can still apply general pronunciation rules.
• Deep dyslexia is characterized by the inability to apply pronunciation rules while retaining the ability to pronounce familiar words.
• The corpus callosum, is the most sizable cerebral commissure and links the brain's left and right hemispheres.
• The right hemisphere understands simple instructions but cannot speak and can only feel sensations from the left visual field/hand.
• The left hemisphere is verbally skilled, receives sensory information from the right visual field/hand, and controls the fine motor responses.
• Conduction aphasia formed through damage to the arculate fasciculus that connects Broca and Werincke's area, causes patients to struggle repeating words with having generally intact comprehension.
• Comprehension and language-related visual input comes from visual cortexes via the left angular gyrus.
• Electrical stimulation of the cortex suggests that conscious neurosurgical patients' speech can be blocked through a large are of the front, temporal and parietal cortexes.
• The phonetic procedure decodes unfamiliar words by analyzing letters, identifying them, sounding words out to construct a word.
• Broca's aphasia develops after the Broca's Area is damaged.
• Carl Wernicke discovered that there is a language area in the left temporal lobe just posterior to the primary auditory cortex.
• Both statements are incorrect relating to ipsilateral and contralateral.
• Ispilateral movement is synonymous with same-sided.
• Ipsilateral movement refers to a movement on the same side of the body.
• Arcuate fasciculus links Broca and Wernicke's aphasia.
• Acquired dyslexia develops after a car accident.
• Developmental dyslexia begins in childhood.
• Semantic analysis is used to decode deeper meanings behind language patterns.

Biopsychology of Emotions and Psychiatric Disorders

• The Wernicke-Geschwind model suggests the right cerebral cortex is dedicated solely to speech and comprehension but it is also responsible for reading.
• Dyslexia prevents people from recognizing the meanings and sounds of words.
• Opposite postures and movements are signaled by opposite messages, the premise is false as it is a principle of antithesis.
• The premise is false as it is the Cannon-Bard Theory of the mind.
• Kluver-Bucy Syndrome (KBS) is caused by brain injury, infections, or degenerative diseases.
• Facial expressions are universal across cultures.
• Ekman and Friesen identified six non five primary facial expressions.
• Freezing and flight responses are used by animals to avoid attacks.
• Fear Condtioning is used to establish fear in an unconditioned response by presenting a conditional stimulus.
• The prefrontal cortex suppresses conditioned fear by acting on the lateral nuclues in the amygdala.
• The prefontal cortex is thoght to act on the lateral ucleus of the amygdala to suppress coneitioned fear.
• The Hippocampus (involved in spatial memory) plays a key role in contextual fear conditioning.
• Stress is a cluster of physiological changes when the body is exposed to harm or threat.
• Hans Seyle attributed the stress response to the activation of the anterior pituitary adrenal cortex sustem.
• Gastric Ulcers cause painful lesions to the lining of the stomach and duodenum, threateing life in extreme cases.
• Adaptive immune is caused by the body's innate first response which directs the systems.
• Chronic stress suppresses immune cell function by increasing cortisol levels.
• Baby rats that are more maternal groomed cause adults to have less stress hormone levels.
• The model emotions handles left and right henispherios differently. Valence Model
• The amygdala is the human emotion that can be more particularly felt in fear and emotions.
• The right hemisphere processes emotions.
• The left side of our face shows stronger expressions.
• Mirror neurons make it base for human empathy.
• Ekman's primary facial expressions of emotion include anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and suprise.
• Tourette disorder is defined has caused by disorder of tics.
• childhood/early adolescence occurs primarily when this disorder typically begins .
• Hitting, touching objects, squatting, hopping, twirling can be linked to gestures. hit ting
• Complex motor tics are hitting, touching, objects and squatting, hopping twirling.
• Changes in the size of the amygdala, cingulate cortex, and prefrontal cortex are structures that has commonly be observed and has change in that area. M. R. began an arguement with her.
• anxiety disorders are at some point in their lives as the populatiopn increases at around 17%.
• Amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex are the two brain structures that affect affective disorders .
• Buspirone primarily targets serotonin receptor subtype 5-HTIA.
• Lower risk of sedation and muscle reloxation is significant.
• Dizziness is a common side affect.
• Comorbidity is the individual for there same that there is anxiety and depression.
• Schizophrenia means PSYCHIATRIC.
• Schizophrenia is the disease that is must and commonly associated with a disorder.
• Lena's mother PYSCHIATRIC.
• Schizophrenia can be categorized as PSYCHIATRIC.
• Reduction or Loss of function for both the disorder and psychiatric patients is a sign.
• Psychotic causes disorders and are linked to genetic factors and is both genetic and psychiatric.
• The main purpose is psychology with the help of real treatment.
• Ensuring neither know or recieve treatments can help.
• Fake treatments can cuase both affects.