The brain and neuropsychology

• Cerebellum


  Functions: Perform everyday tasks, coordination, balance, taues information from different senses
• Cerebral lobes


  • Frontal lobe: important role in decision making, impulsive control, problem solving, skills, concentrating, paying attention
  • Parietal lobe: involved in attention, motor control, understanding the world, recognising faces, processing touch
  • Temporal lobe: language processing, memory, understanding sounds
  • Occipital lobe: ability to see, processing visual information
• Lateralisation of function


  The different jobs that are done by each half of the brain
• Asymmetrical function


  The two halves of the brain are not mirror images of each other and are not equal in terms of what they do
• Left hemisphere


  • Controls right hand, processes written language, logical thinking
• Right hemisphere


  • Controls left hand, spatial awareness, creativity, recognising faces, musical ability
• Corpus callosum


  A thick bundle of nerve fibres connecting the two hemispheres, allows communication between them and transmits neural messages
• Strengths and weaknesses of lateralisation as an explanation of sex differences
• Supporting evidence: GCSE results show differences in performance between girls and boys in different subjects
• Conflicting evidence: Males don't always do better than females on spatial tasks
• Reductionist vs holistic: This explanation is reductionist and doesn't consider environmental factors
• Useful for society: Females have slightly bigger brain areas for processing and producing language, which explains why they are better at language skills tasks
• Females


  • Better at language skills (left brain tasks), thicker corpus callosum, greater connectivity between hemispheres, equal spread of activity across hemispheres
• Males


  • Better at spatial skills (right brain tasks), show dominance in one hemisphere during tasks, activity not spread equally across hemispheres
• Neurons


  Specialised cells that conduct electrical impulses through the body
• Sensory neurons


  Transmit messages from sense receptors to the brain or spinal cord
• Motor neurons


  Transmit messages from the brain and spinal cord to the muscles and glands
• Neurotransmitters


  Chemical messages that act between neurons in the brain
• Synapse


  Junction between two neurons where electrical signals pass
• Central nervous system (CNS)


  Consists of the brain and spinal cord, relays messages from the brain to the rest of the body, roles are decision making, coordination, and generating simple reactions
• Neurological damage


  Damage to the body's central and peripheral nervous system
• Visual agnosia


  Inability to recognise things that can be seen, the brain cannot make sense of the information
• Prosopagnosia


  Face-blindness, inability to recognise faces, the brain is unable to recognise whose face it belongs to
• Damage to the pre-frontal cortex


  Reduces ability for social emotions but leaves logical reasoning intact
• Sperry (1963) - Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness


  Aimed to see how split-brain patients process information compared to a 'normal' brain
• Sperry's procedure


  Used a laboratory and independent measures design, presented pictures to left or right visual field and placed objects in left or right hand of split-brain patients
• Strengths of Sperry's study: High reliability, standardised procedures and equipment
• Weaknesses of Sperry's study: Lacks ecological validity, small sample size of 11 patients