ways of studying the brain

• Spatial resolution


  How accurate it can be about the exact position of a brain structure or activity
• Temporal resolution


  How accurate in time it can be about when the brain activity took place
• Post-mortem dissection


  • Oldest way to study the brain
  • Brains are usually treated chemically or fixed to give them a thermo texture so they can be caught precisely
  • Brains of people who may have had or neutral brains such as people with mental illness, trauma to the brain, or have shown unusual behavior in life are compared to neurotypical brains
• Paul Braga studied the brain of a patient called Tan who in life could only say "tan", and found significant damage in the area of the brain in the frontal lobe just above the temporal lobe, which is now associated with Broca's or expressive aphasia
• Advantages of post-mortem brain research

  • Can study the brain and its structures in microscopic detail, even studying individual nerve cells
• Disadvantages of post-mortem brain research

  • No way of seeing the brain in action
  • Damage revealed in post-mortem may not be the true cause of the observed unusual behavior
• fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)


  Uses large magnets to detect the blood flow in the brain, with the more active parts needing more oxygen and having increased blood supply
• Advantages of fMRI


  • Creates a very detailed spatial image of the brain with a resolution of up to 1 millimeter
  • Can see how the brain is working and changing over time as the participant completes an activity
  • Safe for experiments as it uses magnets rather than radiation
• Disadvantages of fMRI


  • Less good at identifying the exact time of brain activity due to the delay between neuron activation and increased blood flow
  • Very expensive to build and operate
  • Participants must be perfectly still
• EEG (electroencephalogram)


  Uses electrodes placed on the scalp to measure the electrical activity of the brain
• Advantages of EEG


  • Non-invasive and non-surgical way to investigate the living brain
  • Can distinguish between different general patterns of brain activity
  • Significantly cheaper than other brain scanning techniques
  • Portable and can be used outside the lab
  • Fantastic temporal accuracy, measuring brain activity in milliseconds
• Disadvantages of EEG


  • Lacks spatial accuracy, can only assume activity from a general region under each sensor
  • Can only detect activity on the cortex, not deep within the brain
  • Takes a long time to carefully place the electrodes and conductive gel
• ERP (event-related potentials)


  Uses similar equipment to EEG, but looks for the brain's response to a particular stimulus by presenting the stimulus hundreds of times and averaging the data to remove electrical noise
• Advantages of ERP over EEG

  • Allows researchers to isolate and study individual neurocognitive processes in the brain
• Researchers have used a combination of EEG and fMRI to get a deeper understanding of the brain's activity in response to a stimulus