HD 3700 1st Edition Lecture 11 Outline of Last Lecture I Projectives and Self Reports II Guide to the Prelim Outline of Current Lecture I Hamlet meets his father II Approaching the brain III Thinking about the brain a Mind body duality b How not to think about brain scans Current Lecture I Hamlet meets his father Every time the king drinks at night everyone applauds Horatio is saying you might temporarily lose your mind and fall has an extraordinary ability to remain dispassionate while helping Hamlet Trying to stop Hamlet from going protecting him Father and Hamlet both ramble King Hamlet killed before confession if you die before confession you go to purgatory where they burn the sins out of you then you can go to heaven Hamlet says that he will revenge his father s death Watch Hamlet s reaction to this traumatic event seen his father s ghost learned his uncle murdered his father and seduced his mother Hamlet s response is to become cognitively disorganized and hypomanic o He starts realizing that he s in a play while memory still holds a seat in this distracted globe theater o Smile and be a villain o Hamlet calls the guard with a bird call o If there s a jerk in Denmark then he s a terrible person redundant o I might act crazy II Approaching the Brain Species Specific Behavior o Here are the tasks of the brain for all animals Eating and drinking Fighting Courting Mating Caring for offspring Brain areas o We understand the brain through animal models and through autopsies brain scans o Brain stem Medulla regulates heart rate blood pressure rate of respiration Basic essential functions The pons switch for sleep and wakefulness Midbrain controls body movement in fighting sex and lowers pain when doing both Carries our orders from the cortex in lower mammals essentially calls the shots Cerebellum takes sensory information from the nervous system but also communicates with the frontal lobes so that physical motion in fighting sex and everything else can be precise and nuanced When the cerebellum is damaged by a stroke the patient s motions become jerky and gross Basal ganglia higher level of motor control that is involved with the control of slow movements and the large muscles of the body Involved with learning specific actions o Thalamus and Hypothalamus Thalamus Evolved to process more deeply and with more detail sensory information before sending it on the frontal lobes Has two parts one for each hemisphere The hypothalamus Little Thalamus Takes information from the sensory organs Regulates the pituitary gland which has a powerful influence on the body through the release of hormones Involved with eating drinking sexual behavior o Limbic system Found on the border of the cerebral hemispheres and the brain stem brings information from the cerebellum routing it to the centers of the brain generating conscious thought while also contributing to awareness emotion aggression and memory The hippocampus responsible for episodic memory presumably directing its storage and retrieval Also encodes spatial memories The amygdala perhaps the center for instinctive aggression it controls fight or flight in lower mammals and plays a role in our response to threats or trauma Patients with PTSD often show increased activation of the amygdala o Cerebral cortex Structure two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum Each hemisphere has four areas or lobes Occipital lobe this includes the visual cortex which generates images from the information sent up through the brain stem and the visual association cortex where visual memories categories and focus are generated Temporal lobe the primary auditory cortex and its association area Parietal lobe includes the primary somato sensory cortex and the somato sensory association area The frontal lobes where language thought and judgment are generated The prefrontal cortex rewires during adolescence resulting in abstract thinking and higher orders of analysis and creativity This region also controls fine movement Contemporary ways to image the brain o Computed Tomography CT images from narrow x rays passed through the brain o Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI a magnetic field around the brain is then agitated by radio waves the scanner measures the rate by which the molecules return to their resting state resulting in a high resolution image o fMRI a major improvement on the MRI because it detects levels of oxygen in the brain s blood vessels o Micro electrodes can measure the electrical charges of individual neurons o Electroencephalogram EEG with sensors placed on a patient s forehead can measure seizure activity and stages of sleep o Positron Emission Tomography PET imaging brain activity by measuring positrons emitted by radioactive particles injected into the brain Scientists can combine specific chemicals along with the radioactive material to observe specific brain activity III Thinking about the brain Dualism imagining the mind and body as separate entities o The mind and the body are not separate but we don t experience our neurons firing we have thought o Where are you in your body o Can you imagine yourself dead o What do we tell children when someone they know has died o Is there a spiritual realm beyond this one o Are there ghosts angels demons o Fundamentalist believers vs mainstream believers o It is hard for us to think about consciousness as a rapid series of brain events This contemporary belief fantasy about the afterlife Ghost Whisperer o In this Hollywood genre our spirits can be trapped on earth until we work out the psychological issues or conflicts left unresolved in our lives A living person with the ability to speak to ghosts ends up playing psychotherapist holding sessions with the departed and the ones they left behind o Combination of psychotherapy the wish to understand the need to resolve personal issues with the general spiritual belief that our spirits separate from our bodies continue after our death heading to a reward or to punishment Ways to misuse brain imaging o First Use the imaging data to reverse mind body dualism by using it to prove the brain theory Example When writers write when scanned by an fMRI certain parts of their brain light up So what s the point What does proving the brain theory mean Showing one more time the entirely proven well known fact that every movement sensation emotion thought or dream is associated with concurrent with causally intertwined with activity in the brain It needs no more