Brain Structure and Function

Brief History
- Beginning of the scientific study of mental activity in modern psychology was headed
by Wilhelm Wundt
- He focused on the nature of consciousness
- Concepts: mental activity can be broken down into components and objective
methods to measure mental
- Approached by an analogy to how chemists approach the structure of molecules: (1)
by characterising basic sensations and feelings. (2) by finding rules whereby such
elements are combined
- Edward Titchener extended the approach to cover sensations, feelings, AND all
mental activity

Functionalists
- Didn’t focus on the nature of mental activity but rather the functions of specific
mental activities
- Produced firm foundations for future studies
- Proposal for theories of the functions of behaviours and mental activity were linked
to evolution
- Lead to method and culture of conducting animal studies

Behaviourism
- No such thing as hidden mental activities
- Stimulus  response  consequence
- Theories specify ways for stimuli lead to response, and ways in which the
consequences of responses set up associations between stimuli and responses
- Clark L. Hull proposed internal events that are inferred directly from behaviour such
as motivation even though these events were not immediately observable
- B. F. Skinner rejected all discussion of internal events
- Severe limits: it couldn’t explain interesting human behaviours
- Failed to provide insights into the mature of perception, memory, and decision
making

Cognitive Revolution
- Limitations of behaviourism lead to a new way to envision mental activity
- Development in the 1950s and 1960s was tied to the development of the computer
- Computer became a tool that allowed researchers to specify the internal
mechanisms that produce behaviour
- Herbert A. Simon, Alan Newell and Noam Chomsky played a central role in the
revolution
- New methods to test predictions from computational models which specified the
order of specific mental activities purportedly take place
- These methods were an important part of the cognitive revolution as they allowed
mental activity to be studied more objectively than introspection
- In recent years biology became a major part of the mix
Mind and Brain
- Software and hardware analogy, focuses on how computers operate and not simply
on their physical nature
- Has some limitation, i.e., if software is changed into a chip, the program no longer
exists, and you can’t identify parts of the chop with the different instructions in the
computer program

Mental Representation
- Physical state that conveys info specifying an object, event or category, or its
characteristics
- 2 distinct factors:
 Conveys information: actual format
 Content: meaning conveyed by a particular representation

Mental Processing
- No brain, no experience
 Brain necessary to register experience
 Information process: principled info transformation
 Mental representation needs processing system
 Algorithm as a kind of process – serial and parallel

The Cognitive Brain

- Human nervous system consists of the brain, spinal cord, nerves, ganglia
- Controls the bodies response to stimuli

Neurons carry information from Glia are support cells – transfer

one place to another by means of nutrients to neurons
of electrical and chemical signals
Neurons
- Sensory neurons: bring info to the CNS
- Interneurons: associate info within the nervous system
- Motor Neurons: send info from brain and spinal column to the muscles
 - 3 main parts
 Dendrites: receive input from other cells
 Cell body: contains the nucleus and other cellular apparatus – manufactures
proteins and enzymes that sustain cell functioning
 Axon: the appendage of the cells along which info is carried

Glia: Support cells

- Outnumber neurons by at least 10 to 1
- Transfer nutrients to neurons
- Repair damage to nervous system: remove dead neurons
- Guide neurons during development
- Maintain Blood Brain Barrier: keeps toxins out
 -

How info is transferred within a neuron

- Action potential
 Depolarisation: electrical charge reaches peak (-55mV to + 40 mV)
 Repolarisation: electrical charge retreats toward baseline resting state
 Hyperpolarisation: the voltage briefly becomes even more negative than the
resting potential – the neuron returns to resting potential

- Presynaptic neuron and postsynaptic neuron

- Electricity travels length of neuron to terminal bouton where it gets transformed
into a chemical message
 - Terminal bouton contains synaptic vesicles: little balloons filled with
neurotransmitter
- Action potentials cause the vesicles to burst open pouring neurotransmitters into the
synaptic cleft
- Presynaptic side releases the transmitter to the synaptic cleft next to the
postsynaptic side
- Region of contact between neurons = synapse
- Neurotransmitter fits into a binding site (receptor) like a lock and key
- Changes the configuration of the receptor  in turn changes the electrical charge of
them postsynaptic neuron
- Transforms the chemical signal back into an electrical one

How postsynaptic potentials can cause an action potential

- EXCITATORY POSTSYNAPTIC POTENTIAL makes the cell’s electrical charge a bit
more positive – closer to the threshold at which the cell will fire
- INHIBITORY POSTSYNAPTIC POTENTIAL makes the inside of the cell a bit more
negative than the outside- cell farther away from threshold at which it will fire
- Whether a neurotransmitter has an excitatory or inhibitory effect depends on the
receptor type to which it binds

Brain Structure
- 3 Planes when viewing the brain
 Axial plane: horizontal slice through the brain
 Coronal plane: imagine a crown on someone’s head
 Sagittal plane: medial section of the brain
Major Subdivisions
- CNS: brain and spinal cord
- PNS: all neural tissue beyond the CNS
- Brain: meninges, blood vessels, cortex vs subcortical, ventricles

Cerebral Hemispheres
- Divided into 2 cerebral hemispheres textured by gyri
 Hemispheres joined by corpus callosum
 Each valley between these bumps is called a sulcus and if its deep it’s called a
fissure
- Lobes: frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital
Frontal Lobe
- Primary motor region, premotor region, and prefrontal region

- Prefrontal regions: divided into

 Dorsolateral – memory and attentional processing
 Orbital – emotional processing
 Medial – judgement, decision making, and detection of errors
 Broca’s area

- The primary motor cortex resides directly in front of the central fissure in a long
narrow band called the motor strip
 - Frontal lobe damage:
 Perseveration – perform a behaviour repeatedly
 Disinhibition and socially inappropriate behaviour
 Personality change – Phineas Gage
 Judgement and decision-making difficulties
 Difficulties with moral reasoning and self-monitoring

Parietal Lobe: somatosensory cortex

- Receives information about tactile stimulation
- Proprioception (the perception of the position of body parts and their movements)
- Pressure and pain sensations from internal organs and muscles
- Directly posterior to the central fissure
- Integrates information
 From various sensory modalities
 From the sensory world with info stored in memory
 About an individual’s internal state with information from the external
sensory world
 Important for symbolic space: constructional abilities and maths
- Multimodal in nature
- Alexia, Agraphia and Apraxia (inability to link skilled motor movement to ideas and
representations)
- Difficulty localising points in space, to know the angle of lines and to understand the
spatial relationship between items

Temporal Lobe
- Some dominant functions
 Memory
 Visual item recognition
 Auditory processing and emotion
 Wernicke’s area

Occipital Lobe
- Exclusively for vision: basic perception, higher order thinking, and visual fields
- Damage: cortical blindness and Agnosia

Subcortical Areas
- Thalamus
 Giant relay station
 Critical for arousal and attention – pulvinar nucleus
- Hypothalamus
 Central command of bodily functions
- Hippocampus
 Key for memory – encoding, consolidation and retrieval
- Amygdala
 Appreciate and express emotion
 Fear
 Near hippocampus
 Connect CNS and PNS
 Fight or flight
- Basal Ganglia