Brain

Braintastic!

A Stiles Original Production

Brain Imaging Techniques• PET Scan-reflects

blood flow; chemical activity.

• MRI-unsurpassed in anatomical detail

• fMRI-combines strategies

• CT Scan- x-ray, shows structure, not function.

• Angiography• EEG-brain waves

Lobesand I don’t mean ear lobes

• Frontal lobe is involved with personality, emotions, and motor behaviors.

• Parietal lobe is involved with perception and sensory experiences.

• Occipital lobe is involved with processing visual information

• Temporal lobe is involved with hearing and speaking.

Frontal LobeThe frontal lobe can be kind of confusing because it has such a wide range of functions (motor movements to cognitive process)

Phineas Gage’s SkullFrontal Lobotomy: 1936- Egas Moniz (Portugal) Removed about a 1/3 of the frontal lobe. This surgical procedure ended in the 1950’s because of mixed results and antipsychotic drugs.

Would you like to meet Phineas Gage?

The MOTOR CORTEX (Frontal Lobe)

The body’s parts (muscles) are individually controlled by the MOTOR CORTEX

Motor Homunculus

This bizarre drawing uses sizes of body parts to show the ability to perform complex movements. (The larger the space on the “MC” the body part occupies the more complex movement it will be able to make)

The right motor cortex controls muscles on the left side of the brain and vice versa.

PARIETAL LOBE: This model shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception.

The sensory cortex is a narrow strip located on the front edge of the parietal lobe.

Notice the size of the lips. Body parts that occupy more space on the SC are more sensitive to external stimulation.

Processes sensory info. (pressure, touch, pain)

Touch, location of limbs, spatial coordination

Temporal Lobe: involved in hearing, speaking coherently, and understanding verbal and written material.

Primary auditory cortexAuditory Association Area

The Primary Auditory Cortex (top edge) receives electrical signals from receptors in the ears.

Auditory Association Area.

Further processing—makes sense out of sensations.

Wernicke’s Area (left temporal lobe) is necessary for speaking in coherent sentences and for understanding speech.

Damage to Wernicke’s area results in aphasia, which is a difficulty in understanding spoken or written words and a difficulty in putting words into

meaningful sentences.

If you have ever been hit on the back if the head and saw “Stars”, you already know that vision is located in the OCCIPITAL LOBE.

Primary visual cortex

Visual Association Area

In visual agnosia, the individual fails to recognize some object, person, or color, yet has the ability to see and even describe pieces of parts of some visual stimulus

Neglect Syndrome

Corpus Callosum

Connects hemispheres

limbic systemEmotional link

ThalamusRelay sensoryinformation

HypothalamusControls bodyMetabolism Regulates DrivesMaintenance Duties

Pituitary Gland

Secretes hormones-growth

Connects the brainstem to the forebrain. The midbrain is responsible for controlling sensory processes.

The hindbrain functions collectively to co-ordinate motor activity, posture, equilibrium and sleep patterns and regulate unconscious but essential functions, such as breathing and blood circulation.

Survival Functions

Anencephaly: Born with little or no brain tissue. Always Fatal.

Joseph Loren, 1999

Survival is limited to days. The longest a baby has survived with anencephaly is 2 months.

One reason babies can survive for a short while with virtually no Forebrain is because they may have parts of their hindbrain. (Pons, Medulla) Medulla controls vital reflexes.

It is the functions of the forebrain that define us as human and distinguish us from other creatures.

Boy Brains and Girl Brains: Different?Problem-Solving Tasks Favoring Women

Women tend to perform better than men on tests of perceptual speed, in which subjects must rapidly identify matching items for example, pairing the house on the far left with its twin:

In addition, women remember whether an object, or a series of objects, has been displaced:

On some tests of ideational fluency, for example, those in which subjects must list objects that are the same color, and on tests of verbal fluency, in which participants must list words that begin with the same letter, women also outperform men:

Women do better on precision manual tasks-that is, those involving fine-motor coordination-such as placing the pegs in holes on a board:

And women do better than men on mathematical calculation tests:

Problem-Solving Tasks Favoring Men

Men tend to perform better than women on certain spatial tasks. They do well on tests that involve mentally rotating an object or manipulating it in some fashion, such as imagining turning this three-dimensional object

or determining where the holes punched in a folded piece of paper will fall when the paper is unfolded:

Men also are more accurate than women in target-directed motor skills, such as guiding or intercepting projectiles:

They do better on disembedding tests, in which they have to find a simple shape, such as the one on the left, once it is hidden within a more complex figure:

And men tend to do better than women on tests of mathematical reasoning: