Tools for Learning

• Patient HM


  Epilepsy patient who had their hippocampus removed in an effort to treat him. Case study that showed us how essential the hippocampus is for taking short term memory and bringing it into long term memory
• Patient Tan


  Louis Victor Lebourgne
• HM

  Henry Moliason
• Patient Tan


  Patient who suffered a stroke at 30 and could only say the word "tan" to express himself after. Right side of his body didn't work, so we saw that the left region was damaged. That region of the brain was examined by Paul Broca after his death, so it got named "Broca's area"
• Broca's aphasia


  Inability to select words and speak the way you want to
• Phineas Gage


  Guy who had a tamping iron through his brain and was pretty much fine. Got severe damage to his prefrontal cortex and had severe personality changes for the worse. He was also severed from his limbic system so he couldn't regulate his emotion
• Case studies


  Studies on individuals that cannot be ethically replicated but helped us learn a lot about the brain
• Split brain patient


  Patient who has had their corpus callosum severed, usually to help with epilepsy
• Corpus callosum


  Main bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain
• Split brain patients could only describe what they saw when it was put into their left hemisphere, because that's the only part with language. Were still able to draw what they saw with their right hands, despite not being able to know they saw something
• Left hemisphere: language and logic

  Right hemisphere: spatial and facial recognition
• Sperry and Gazzaniga


  Two scientists that did research on split brained patients and figured out which sides of the brain did what in isolation
• EEG (electroencephalogram)


  Involves placing electrodes on a person's head in order to study the brain by picking up on the electrical activity
• PET (positron emission tomography)


  Involves injecting an individual with trace amounts of radioactive glucose, and are then picked up on a scanner. The more active a region, the more glucose they consume, so the more radioactive glucose there is
• MRI (magnetic resonance imaging)


  Sends pulses which mess with your magnetic field, and as it returns to normal, they take slides of slices of your brain
• fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)


  Like an MRI, but also measures oxygen flow (blood flow) which can detect brain activity hotspots as more active parts tend to use more blood and need more oxygen