STUDY GUIDE CHAPTER 8: IMAGINATION Definition of imagination: Imagination is the subjective experience that arises from neural representations of sensory stimuli and actions. Your subjective experience activates similar pathways in the brain as directly experiencing stimuli or engaging in actions. From Doidge: “One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound.” “... imagining an act engages the same motor and sensory programs that are involved in doing [that act].” What does the lecture tell us about the purpose of imagination? Imagination is the product of the interaction between our brain and our body. What is meant by “The brain spills out into the body”? What experiments (including their results) illustrate this idea? What is meant by “The body spills in and affects cognition”? What experiments (including their results) illustrate this idea? Imagining our location in space. (Hey Dude, where’s my car?) Place cells: Place cells are in the hippocampus. They fire when we are in a particular spot in our immediate environment. Grid cells: Grid cells are in the entorhinal cortex (just outside the hippocampus. They lay out a map encompassing a large area of your immediate location. The hippocampus and entorhinal cortex connect to each other, so you can think of these two regions as constantly talking to each other. As you move around (e.g., from one class to another) the grid cells record your general location (e.g., which class room) and different place cells fire when you are in different parts of that classroom. So the area activating grid cells is constantly changing as you move through the world and the place cells fire when you are in a single location in that grid. What would happen if you were just thinking about a classroom and your seat in it? Memories and the Hippocampus: The story of Henry Molaison (patient H.M.) Henry died in 2008 at the age of 82. He was a pretty happy guy with a good senseof humor, though he had to live in a care facility for all of his life after the surgery. He was referred to as H.M. to protect his identity until his death when his name was revealed. What was wrong with Henry and what did surgeons do to try to fix his condition? The surgery worked, but what was the unfortunate outcome of the surgery? Since the hippocampus is used to make memories, but not store them, how does this explain Henry’s condition? What is meant by thinking about the future? What are some experiments that demonstrate this process? Face perception and pattern recognition will not be on the exam. Neither will Mirror Neurons. However, you will all be better people for knowing about these
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