Week 3

• what is the multidisciplinary field of study that focuses on the scientific exploration of the nervous system, including the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral?

  neuroscience
• which method of neuroscience looks at the effects of brain damage due to stroke, head trauma or other injury?

  case study
• which method of neuroscience is an electrode that is used to selectively destroy a specific brain area of an animal where the resulting behavioural deficits are examined?

  lesion
• what is the top of the brain?

  dorsal
• what is the bottom of the brain?

  ventral
• what is the front of the brain?

  anterior
• what is the back of the brain?

  posterior
• what is the middle of the brain?

  medial
• what is the side of the brain?

  lateral
• which hemisphere is more analytic, serial and logical reasoning (language function)?

  left
• which hemisphere is more synthetic, parallel and relational thought processes (spatial ability)?

  right
• corpus callosum nerve fibers join the two hemispheres
• a gyrus is a fold of cortical tissue
• a fissure is a deep cleft or separation between gyri, the shallow ones are the sulci
• which lobe focuses on attention, abstract thinking, behaviour, problem-solving, language production, emotions and personality (located to the anterior)?

  frontal
• which lobe focuses on somatosensation, hearing, language, attention and spatial cognition (posterior to the central sulcus)?

  parietal
• which lobe focuses on auditory and visual memories, language, some hearing and speech, auditory processing, pattern recognition and language comprehension (posterior to the lateral fissure)?

  temporal
• which lobe focuses on visual reception, visual-spatial processing, movement, and colour recognition?

  occipital
• primary motor cortex initiates behaviour via the activation of different muscle groups and consists of a spatial representation or map of the body's parts
• primary somatosensory cortex processes sensory information arriving from the body's surface
• hippocampus plays an important role in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory and spatial navigation
• H.M was a patient that suffered from epilepsy and to stop seizures, portions of his medial temporal lobes (hippocampus) were removed which left him with the lacked ability to learn new information
• anterograde amnesia: inability to retain new information following the traumatic incident that caused the damage
• retrograde amnesia: inability to remember information acquired prior to the damage-inducing event
• executive function: cognitive operations such as planning, sequencing of behaviours, flexible use of information and goal attainment
• automatic attentional processes: do not require conscious control
• controlled attentional processes: require conscious control
• patients with damage in the frontal lobe suffer from executive dysfunction and have difficulty starting/stopping behaviours and problem-solving
• psychological inertia: inability to stop an action once started
• environmental dependency syndrome (EDS): demonstrate a tendency to imitate behaviours and actions in response to specific environmental stimuli, even if the actions are irrelevant or inappropriate 
• information from one side of the environment is mapped onto the contra-lateral side
• in split-brain patients, the corpus callosum is severed (two hemispheres are disconnected) to prevent the spread of epileptic seizures
• visual agnosia: inability to recognize a visual object, even though the person’s basic visual functions may be intact
• apperceptive agnosia: cannot assemble the parts or features of an object into a whole (involve a disruption of the formation of an object representation and is more perceptual)
• perceptual categorization deficit: difficulty recognizing objects when they are viewed from unusual angles or lit unevenly 
• associative agnosia: perceive the whole, but have difficulty assigning a name or label (involves a disruption of the ability to categorize or identify objects and can be considered more cognitive)
• prosopagnosia: patients have difficulty recognizing faces
• hemispatial neglect: inability to attend to, perceive, or be aware of stimuli on one side of their visual field or space
• single-cell recording: an electrode is inserted into or adjacent to a neuron
• multiple-unit recording: larger electrode is used to measure the activity of a group of neurons