Emotion

Tags

amygdala, emotion

All information is from Cognitive Neuroscience, The Biology of the Mind, Third Edition (2009), Chapter 7, by Michael S. Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, and George R. Mangun.

• Patient SM
  • 20 year old active woman
  • Experienced seizures
  • Her amygdala (an almond-shaped area of the brain located in the medial temporal region) was severely atrophied bilaterally
  • She had a rare autosomal recessive genetic disorder, Urbach-Wiethe disease
    • It causes an accumulation of glycoprotein calcium in the medial temporal lobe and leads to the degeneration of the amygdala.
  • Performs well on the standard neuropsychological tests of cognitive function; normal intelligence
  • She was shown photographs of people expressing emotions. She did not comprehend the fearful face. She thought it was surprise, anger, or some other emotion
    • She could describe and process the concept of fear
    • She had no problem identifying fearful prosody (speech sounds that indicate emotion)
    • She could not draw a fearful face either.

Control of Action

Tags

basal ganglia, brain-machine interface, cerebellum, cognitive neuroscience, huntington's disease, motor cortex, parkinson's disease, transcranial magnetic stimulation

All information is from Cognitive Neuroscience, The Biology of the Mind, Third Edition (2009), Chapter 7, by Michael S. Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, and George R. Mangun.

• Akinesia = the inability to produce volitional movement
• Those that had injected toxic heroin had a hypometabolism of dopamine in the substantia nigra.
  • They were prescribed high doses of L-Dopa, a synthetic cousin that is highly effective in compensating for the loss of endogenous dopamine.
  • The toxic heroin was actually MPTP, a synthetic opioid that creates the sensations of heroin. It is selectively toxic for dopaminergic cells.
    • 2 treatments for Parkinson’s disease stem from research using MPTP
      • Parkinsonian animals are given brain grafts with fetal tissue in the hope of regenerating dopaminergic cells. This method has been met with some success in animals and humans.
        • Fetal grafts can survive for extended periods of time
        • PET studies indicate that the dopamine activation is enhanced in patients
      • As a result of dopamine depletion, the output from the basal ganglia ends up producing excessive inhibition on the motor structures in the cerebral cortex, thus inhibiting movement. A surgeon lesions output structures of the basal ganglia or by implanting brain stimulators within the basal ganglia.

Uhm, Excuse me, What? Publishing my First Journal Article

Tags

daily life

This is me right now. I am finalizing a paper for publication and it will be my first published journal article. Huzzah! Yet, there are a few rather interesting tidbits I should probably share. The paper is on prenatal alcohol (ethanol) exposure and was written by a graduate student that I never met. This paper was never finished because the author died of alcohol intoxication. I did not know this until just last week. Now, I feel slightly guilty when changing her paper, like I’m defiling it. I want something I will be proud of. That’s understandable, right?

Now, my lab partner and I have the task of finishing this paper. We didn’t anticipate many problems but then we read the introduction and narrative review and they were super wordy and about twice as long as it should have been. Also, there is no reference page. We have the in-text citations but not the reference page information. Today we started finding the citations and writing a proper reference page and we realized that some of her citations spelled wrong, one linked to 256 page book and didn’t include a page number, and she wrote something directly contradictory to the results of another article.

Cellular Mechanisms and Cognition

Tags

ion channels, multiple slcerosis, neuron doctrine, neuroscience, schizophrenia

All information is from Cognitive Neuroscience, The Biology of the Mind, Third Edition by Michael S. Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, and George R. Mangun.

Note : As a personal opinion, this textbook is not one I would recommend. It is not as clear and precise as other books I have used. Seriously, these notes are even reordered because the presentation of material is just jumbled.

• Schizophrenia affects nearly 1% of the population worldwide. It has a genetic component: a person who has a family member with the disorder is more likely to develop schizophrenia; the odds of developing the disorder are nearly 50% for the identical twin of a person with schizophrenia; the odds of developing the disorder are nearly 50% for the identical twin of a person with schizophrenia. (Riley & Kendler, 2006).
  • The neurobiological basis of this disorder remains unanswered.

A Brief History of Cognitive Neuroscience

Tags

Angelique Arvanitaki, anne green, Broca, Brodmann, cajal, George A. Miller, Golgi, history of cognitive neurosciene, Ida Hyde, John Huglins Jackson, Judith Graham Pool, marie-jean-pierre flourens, microelectrode, phrenology, Thorndike, Wernicke, willis

All text is taken from Cognitive Neuroscience, The Biology of the Mind, Third Edition by Michael S. Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, and George R. Mangun.

• On December 14, 1650, in Oxford, England Anne Green was to be hanged for murdering her newborn child (a crime she did not commit – her baby was stillborn). After she hung for half an hour she was pronounced dead and placed in a coffin for the physicians who had permission to dissect the bodies of any criminals within 21 miles of Oxford. Drs. Thomas Willis and William Petty brought Anne’s body back to their office and, after some medical care, she was able to drink fluids the next morning and, five days later, was able to eat normally and get out of bed (Molnar, 2004; Zimmer, 2004).
  • Authorities wanted to hang Anne again but with the help of Drs. Willis and Petty she was set free and later went on to marry and have three children.
  • Willis coined the term neurology and was the first anatomist to link abnormal human behaviors to changes in brain structure
    • He treated the richest people in England (and charged them heavily) so he could, in turn, treat the poorest in England for free.
    • He was among the first to link specific brain damage to specific behavioral deficits, and to theorize how the brain transfers information in what would later be called neuronal conduction.
    • He discovered symptoms of the neuromuscular disease myasthenia gravis, the brain abnormalities of people with congenital mental retardation, and the fact that unilateral degeneration of the cerebral peduncle (a part of the brainstem) could lead to unilateral paralysis.
    • With Christopher Wren (architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London) he drew the most accurate representations of the human brain of the time (and for at least 200 years following).