Psychologists

• Broca


  1880s

  Surgeon

  Identified small area in the left frontal lobe responsible for speech production

  Damage to the area causes Broca's aphasia which is characterised by speech that is slow, laborious and lacking fluency

  Struggle with prepositions and conjunctions

  Tan famous patient, only say Tan
• Wernicke


  1880s

  No problem producing language but severe difficulties understanding it

  Speech fluent but meaningless

  Wernicke's area in the left temporal lobe responsible for language understanding

  Wernicke's aphasia produces neologisms as part of the content of their speech
• Darin Dougherty et al.

  2002

  44 people with OCD had undergone cingulotomy

  Cingulotomy isolates the cingulate gyrus which has been implicated in OCD

  Post-surgical follow up after 32 weeks

  30% met the criteria for successful response to the surgery

  14% partial response
• Steven Peterson et al.

  1988

  Brain scans to demonstrate how Wernicke's area was active during a listening task and Broca's area was active during a reading task
• Endel Tulving et al.

  1994

  Semantic and episodic memories reside in different parts of the prefrontal cortex
• Karl Lashley


  1950

  Removed between 10 to 50% of the cortex in rats

  Learning the route through a maze

  No area proved to be more important than any other areas in terms of the rats ability to learn the route

  Process of learning seemed to require every part of the cortex rather than being confined to a single area
• Anthony Dick and Pascale Tremblay

  2016

  Only 2% of modern researchers think language in the brain is completely controlled by Broca's and Wernicke's area

  Brain imaging techniques advanced so brain can be studied with more clarity

  Language function distributed more holistically in the brain than first thought

  Language streams identified across the cortex including regions in the right hemisphere as well as subcortical regions like the thalamus
• Roger Sperry


  1968

  11 split brain individuals studied

  Image or word to RVF and same or different to the LVF

  If shown to RVF participant could describe what they had seen

  If shown to LVF there was nothing there or a flash of light, could select matching object most closely associated out of sight using their left hand, emotional reaction
• Gereon Fink et al.

  1996

  PET scans to identify which brain areas were active during a visual processing task

  Normal looked at global elements of an image, regions of the RH were much more active

  Finer details LH dominated
• Jared Nielsen et al.

  2013

  Analysed brain scans from over 1000 people aged 7 to 29

  People use certain hemispheres for certain tasks

  No evidence of a dominant side
• Michael Gazzaniga 


  Split-brain participants perform better than normal controls on certain tasks

  Faster identifying the odd one out in array of similar objects

  Normal brain's LH better cognitive strategies are watered down by inferior RH
• Eleanor Maguire et al.

  2000

  Studied the brains of London black cab drivers

  Significantly more grey matter in the posterior hippocampus than a matched control group

  Associated with development of spatial and navigational skills

  London cabbies take a complex test called The Knowledge which assesses their recall of the city streets and possible routes

  Learning experiences alters the structure of the taxi drivers' brains

  Longer taxi drivers in job more pronounced structural difference
• Bogdan Draganski et al.

  2006

  Imaged the brains of medical students 3 months before and after their final exams

  Learning induced changes were seen to have occurred in the posterior hippocampus and the parietal cortex
• Ladina Bezzola et al.

  2012

  40 hours of golf training produced changes in the neural representations of movement in participants aged 40-60

  fMRI

  Observed increased motor cortex activity in the novice golfers compared to a control group

  More efficient neural representations after training
• Eric Schneider et al.

  2014

  More time people with a brain injury had spent in education the greater their chances of a disability-free recovery

  Time in education = Indication of cognitive reserve

  40% of those who achieved DFR had more than 16 years of education

  10% had less than 12 years of education
• Soma Banerjee et al.

  2014

  Treated people who had a total anterior circulation stroke with stem cells

  All participants in this trial recovered compared to the more typical level of just 4% recovery

  Only five participants

  No control group
• Sara Lazar et el.

  2005

  MRI scans

  Experienced meditators had a thicker cortex than non-meditators

  Particularly in areas related to attention and sensory processing

  Individuals who took part in an 8 week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction showed an increase in grey matter in the left hippocampus

  Left hippocampus strongly associated with learning and memory
• Yi-Yuan Tang et al.

  2012

  Four weeks of meditation resulted in an increase in white matter in the anterior cingulate cortex

  Part of the brain that contributes to self-regulation and control
• Michel Siffre


  Spent extended periods of time underground to study the effects on his own biological rhythms

  Deprived of natural light and sound

  Access to adequate food and drink

  Resurfaced in mid-September 1962

  Two months in the caves of Southern Alps

  Believed it was mid-August

  Decade later performed similar feat for six months in a Texan cave

  Biological rhythms settled down to one that was just beyond the usual 24 hours, around 25

  Continued to fall asleep and wake up on a regular schedule

  1999, sleep wake cycle slowed down from when he was young
• Jurgen Aschoff and Rutger Wever

  1976

  Convinced a group of participants to spend 4 weeks in a WW2 bunker

  Deprived of natural light

  All but one participants' displayed a circadian rhythm between 24 and 25 hours
• Simon Folkard et al.

  1985

  Studied a group of 12 people who agreed to live in a dark cave for 3 weeks

  Go to bed when the clock said 11:45pm and wake up at 7:45am

  Researchers gradually sped up the clock so the day only lasted 22 hours

  Only one participant able to comfortably adjust to the new regime
• Charlene Solomon 


  1993

  High divorce rates in shift workers might be due to the strain of deprived sleep and other influences such as missing out on important family events
• Charles Czeisler et al.

  1999

  Individual differences in sleep/wake cycles varying from 13 to 65 hours
• Jeanne Duffy et al.

  2001

  Some people have a natural preference for going to bed early and rising early and vice versa
• Kathleen Stern and Martha McClintock

  1998

  Menstrual cycles may synchronise as a result of the influence of pheromones

  Studied 29 women with a history of irregular periods

  Samples of pheromones

  9 of the women at different stages of their menstrual cycles via a cotton pad placed in their armpit

  Pads worn for at least 8 hours

  Pads treated with alcohol and frozen to be rubbed on upper lip of participants

  Given pheromones of first day of menstrual cycle on the first day of the experiment and so on

  68% of women experienced changes to their cycle which brought them closer to odour donor
• Kelly Rohan et al.

  2009

  Light therapy to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder

  Recorded a relapse rate of 46% over successive winters

  Compared to 27% in a comparison group receiving CBT
• Eve van Cauter et al. (2000)

  Slow wave sleep reduces with age

  Growth hormone is mostly produced during SWS so deficient in older people

  Resulting sleep deficit may explain various impairments in old age

  To increase SWS relaxation and medication may be used
• Adrienne Tucker et al.

  2007

  Large differences between participants in terms of duration of each sleep stage

  Particularly stages 3 and 4

  Differences are more likely to be biologically determined
• Nathaniel Kleitman 


  1969

  90 minute rhythm cycle continues during waking hours

  Basic rest-activity

  Period of alertness followed by a spell of physiological fatigue

  Recurs throughout the day

  Anecdotal evidence

  Students struggle to concentrate longer than 90 minutes at a time
• K. Anders Ericsson et al.

  1993

  Best performers tended to practice for 3 sessions during the course of the day

  Each session lasted no more than 90 minutes

  Break between each in order to recharge
• Patricia DeCoursey et al.

  2000

  Destroyed the SCN connections in the brains of 30 chipmunks who were returned to their natural habitat and observed for 80 days

  Sleep/wake cycle disappeared

  Significant proportion killed by predators
• Martin Ralph et al.

  1990

  Mutant hamsters with 20 hour sleep/wake cycle

  SCN cells from foetal tissue of mutant hamsters transplanted into the brains of normal hamsters

  Cycles of second group defaulted to 20 hours
• Scott Campbell and Patricia Murphy (1998)

  Light may be detected on skin receptor sites on the body even when the same info is not received by the eyes

  15 participants woken at various times and lightpad shone on the back of their knees

  Produced a deviation of up to 3 hours in sleep/wake cycles in some cases
• Francesca Damiola et al.

  2000

  Demonstrated how changing feeding patterns in mice could alter the circadian rhythms of cells in the liver by up to 12 hours whilst leaving SCN unaffected
• Laughton Miles et al.

  1977

  Recount the study of a young man

  Blind from birth who had an abnormal circadian rhythm of 24.9 hours

  Despite exposure to social cues sleep/wake cycle could not be adjusted
• Bernadette Hood et al.

  2004

  Management of insomnia was improved if elderly people were generally more active and had more exposure to natural light