Penfield

• Study design


  • Clinical case studies - an investigation of brain function in a number of patients who were undergoing open brain surgery
• Method

  1. Some types of brain surgery require the patient to be conscious, so the surgeon can be confident that any actions occur in the right place

  2. Brain has no sense receptors, so it is painless

  3. Surgeon probed different areas of the cortex using gentle electrical stimulation

  4. Asked the patients to say what they experienced
• Why the study is important

  • The study shows how certain areas of the cerebral cortex may be involved in particular functions of the brain
  • The study investigated living brains instead of just looking for damage in dead brains during post mortems
  • The study showed that even complex memories, such as conversations, are stored in the brain
• The patients were having brain surgery because they were severely epileptic. Therefore, they may not have been typical of the general population
• The findings were different for each individual, so it is hard to make generalisations, for example about memory storage
• People may have found it difficult to put some of their experiences into words