Ways of studying the brain

• Invasive and Noninvasive methods (1)

  Invasive methods involve cutting away at the skin and going inside the brain but they are not used unless the person needs brain surgery or in post-mortem examinations 

  • Can directly test cause and effects relationships between the brain and behaviour
• Invasive and Noninvasive methods (2)

  Non-invasive methods do not involve cutting away at the skin and going inside the brain

  • They don't directly manipulate a person's brain or neurons to find a cause and effect relationship
  • Instead they look at the electrical activity inside the brain using brain scanning techniques and relate that back to their behaviour
  • They do not directly test cause and effect between the brain and behaviour
• Post-Mortem examinations (1)

  Examining the brain after a person has died and it is one of the oldest methods used and post mortems used to be insane but the development of brain imaging technologies have meant that post mortems can also be carried out non-invasively
• Post-Mortem examinations (2)

  Broca did a post-Mortem on patient Tan after he died to look for evidence of brain abnormalities; he found that Tan had damage to his Broca’s area 

  • If patients display strange behaviours like Tan did then doctors can conduct a post-mortem examination to look for evidence of brain abnormalities, e.g. brain damage, brain tumours or fewer cells and smaller synapses 
  • To see if the patient have brain abnormalities they have to compare the brains to a control group (brains that were healthy when they were alive)
• Post-Mortem evaluation (1) (high detail)

  In an invasive post-mortem examination a patient's brain is examined under a microscope meaning it can be examined at a high level of detail. The experimenter can look at each individual neuron and the synapses between neurons. Doing this is not possible with other brain scanning techniques as it can access areas like the hypothalamus and hippocampus. For example, Iverson found a higher concentration of dopamine in the limbic system of patients with schizophrenia which has promoted a new area of research.
• Post-Mortem evaluation (1) (high detail) 

  This means small brain abnormalities in the brain can then be deserved due to this high level of detail.