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• Psychology study notes

Frontal lobe

• Controls voluntary movement, language, problem solving, planning, and judgment.
• Located at the front of the brain.
• The largest lobe.

Broca's area

• Located in the frontal lobe of the dormant hemisphere, typically the left side of the brain.
• Essential for speech production.

Primary motor cortex

• Located at the back of the frontal lobe.
• Sends signals to muscles to facilitate movement.

Parietal lobe

• Enables individuals to perceive their own body and the location of objects in their environment.
• Positioned in the middle of the brain.

Primary sensory cortex

• Detects sensory information concerning temperature, perception, touch, texture, and pain.
• Situated at the front of the parietal lobe.

Occipital lobe

• Controls visual processing.
• Located at the back of the brain.

Primary visual cortex

• Processes visual information from the eyes.
• Identifies basic features such as shape, color, and motion.
• Located near the back of the occipital lobe.

Temporal lobe

• Processes auditory information, memory, language comprehension, emotion, and facial recognition.
• Located near the back of the brain where the ears are situated.

Wernicke's area

• Responsible for understanding spoken and written language.
• Aids in processing and interpreting full speech and communication.
• Located in the left temporal lobe.

Cerebellum

• Responsible for balance and non-voluntary actions like blood pressure and heart rate.
• Located at the back of the brain, under the occipital lobe.

Primary auditory cortex

• Processes sound information, including pitch, volume, and rhythm.
• Interprets auditory signals for speech, music, and environmental sounds.

Left hemisphere

• Controls language, word processing, sentence construction, logic, numbers, science, analytical thinking, and responding.
• Is more logical.
• Controls the right side of the body.

Right hemisphere

• Controls creativity, imagination, holistic thinking, rhythm, feeling, visualization, and musicality.
• More creative.
• Controls the left side of the body.

Corpus Callosum

• Thick bands of nerve fibers join the left and right hemispheres, enabling communication.

Broca's Aphasia

• Partial loss of the ability to produce language.
• Affects the ability to speak properly.

Wernicke's Aphasia

• A language disorder that makes understanding words and communication difficult.

Brain scans

• Imaging techniques that help scientists and physicians see tissue and areas of the brain and gather health data.
• Still scans take pictures of the regions of brain, using CT scans and MRIs.
• Dynamic scans create moving images of the brain, using PET and fMRI.

Difference between scans

• Judged on temporal, spatial, resolution, and possible side effects.
• Resection refers to the quality of the image.
• Temporal refers to the time taken to capture images.
• Spatial details the anatomical features.

EEG (electroencephalogram)

• Non-invasive diagnostic test.
• Able to distinguish between sleep levels, brain damage, Alzheimer's, and epilepsy.
• Has high temporal resolution.
• Detects millisecond changes in activity.
• Poor spatial recognition.
• Most sensitive in superficial layers.
• Measures activities of billions of neurons.

(CT) CAT (computer-adaptive test)

• Uses X-ray rotation for cross-sectional brain pictures.
• Detects tumors, strokes, and injuries.

fMRIs (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)

• Creates dynamic brain pictures with moving colored visualizations.
• Shows metabolic activity second by second without tracer injections.
• Uses paramagnetic properties of oxygenated/deoxygenated hemoglobin to view blow flow with neural activity.
• Shows brain structures/processes relation to perception, thought, action.
• High resolution.
• Sensitive to changes in blood flow.
• No radiation exposure.
• Can't identify specific neurotransmitter receptors.

Experimental studies using fMRI

• Aims to further understand normal brain functions.
• Relates specific brain areas to cognitive tasks (language, reading, memory).
• Applies knowledge to understand differences in functioning skills (reading/mathematical ability).

Phineas Gage (the accident)

• While packing explosives with an iron rod the power detonated and launched into the face.
• Rod (43 inches long, 1.24 inches thick) penetrated his cheek and brain exiting his skull 80 feet away.
• After the accident, Gage had brief convulsions.
• Minutes later, Gage got up, spoke, walked to his cart, and traveled to seek medical attention.

Gage (the aftermath)

• Gage recovered physically within a month, his personality was altered.
• Before the accident, energetic/persistent small business owner who was well-respected.
• After the accident, he became rude, disrespectful, and rejected advice.

Gage (what cause the change)

• Studied in recent years to determine the damage.
• The damages involved both left and right prefrontal cortices.
• Cortices are used for emotional processing and rational decision making.

Gage (the influence)

• Important neuroscience case.
• Changes showed specific areas of brain are responsible for differing functions.
• Proved that the frontal cortex is responsible for language, decision making, intelligence, and reasoning.
• One of the first pieces of evidence that the frontal lobe was involved directly in personality.

Lateralization

• Two halves of the human brain are not alike, each hemisphere has functional specializations.
• Being left or right brained does not affect left or right-handedness.

Split Brain research

• Work by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry greatly enhanced functional laterality understanding.
• Split patients undergo corpus callosotomy surgery between hemispheres used for epilepsy treatment.
• Treatment reduced the capacity of each half to communicate.
• weird behavior showed Sperry to study contributions of each perceptible findings.
• The right hemisphere showed basic language processing but often without any grammatical abilities.
• Corpus callosotomy patients struggle communicating, not identifying words or images on the right.

Henry Molaison (HM) (split brain patient)

• HM underwent split-brain experimental surgery help severe epilepsy.
• The surgery was to control the epilepsy, and it seemed to help.
• The surgery had adverse side effects, and left HM unable to create certain kinds of new memories.
• HM was still able to apply procedural memories.
• HM could no longer form new semantic or declarative memories.

London cab drivers (Eleanor Magurie)

• This study was to find out how London cab drivers memories the streets.
• London cab drivers earned their license when they complete training.
• Training is called "The knowledge" and has memorising 25000 streets and 10 am radios within the town/city.
• The study compared inspiring cab drives/ cab drivers to people of similar intellect and age.
• Passing ‘The knowledge' had larger hippocampi that had grown from when the case originally started.