Brain Braintastic! A Stiles Original Production

Brain Facts Male brains are slightly larger than female brains. Brain Tissue has no pain receptors. Adults can generate new brain cells and make new connections. Your brain uses about 20% of your body’s energy and makes up only 2% of your weight. The Cerebral Cortex has the surface area of a pillow case.

How much of our brain do we actually use? All of it!! Brain imaging techniques have debunked the alluring 10% Myth

Brain Imaging Techniques PET Scan- reflects blood flow and metabolic activity. MRI-shows brain structure (radio frequency) fMRI-combines strategies of PET and MRI CT Scan- x-ray Angiography-dye, shows blood vessels EEG- measures brain waves

Lobes and I don’t mean ear lobes

Frontal Lobe The frontal lobe can be kind of confusing because it has such a wide range of functions (motor movements to cognitive process) Thinking, Reasoning, Decision Making, Personality, Planning, Judgment

Would you like to meet Phineas Gage? Phineas Gage’s Skull

The MOTOR CORTEX (Frontal Lobe) The body’s parts (muscles) are individually controlled by the MOTOR CORTEX Motor Homunculus This bizarre drawing uses sizes of body parts to show the ability to perform complex movements. (The larger the space on the “MC” the body part occupies the more complex movement it will be able to make) The right motor cortex controls muscles on the left side of the brain and vice versa.

Parietal Lobes Processes sensory info. (pressure, touch, pain) Receives sensory input for touch and body position. Processes information about size, shape, and texture.

Sensory Cortex This model shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception. The sensory cortex is a narrow strip located on the front edge of the parietal lobe. Body parts that occupy more space on the SC are more sensitive to external stimulation. Sensory Homunculus Touch, location of limbs, spatial coordination

Gate-Control Theory of Pain Gate open = Pain, Gate closed = No pain Experience of pain depends (in part) on whether the pain impulse gets past neurological “gate” in the spinal cord and thus reaches the brain. Different nociceptors detect hurtful temps, pressures, or chemicals. The spinal cord contains small nerve fibers that conduct most pain signals, and larger fibers that conduct most other sensory signals.

Neuromatrix Theory of Pain Theory that the matrix of neurons in the brain is capable of generating pain (and other sensations) in the absence of signals from sensory nerves. Phantom Limb Pain clip.

DID YOU HEAR THAT?

Auditory Localization The brain calculates a sound’s location by using these differences. –Timing ( sec. Diff) –Sound 750 mph Sound Waves –Loudness (amplitude) –Pitch (frequency) Long waves; low frequency/low pitch Short waves; high frequency/high pitch

Auditory Process: Perceiving Pitch Place Theory: Links the pitch we hear with the place that is stimulated in the cochlea Frequency Theory: Measures neural impulses travelling the auditory nerve.

Temporal Lobe: involved in hearing, speaking coherently, and understanding verbal and written material. Primary auditory cortex Auditory Association Area The Primary Auditory Cortex (top edge) receives electrical signals from receptors in the ears. Auditory Association Area. Further processing—makes sense out of sensations. Wernicke’s Area (left temporal lobe) is necessary for speaking in coherent sentences and for understanding speech. Damage to Wernicke’s area results in aphasia, which is a difficulty in understanding spoken or written words and a difficulty in putting words into meaningful sentences.

Let’s Get Visual!

Cones are clustered near the fovea. Cones are used in daylight vision. Cones produce high resolution vision, helps us see detail and color. Rods are denser in the peripheral of the retina. Rod adaption process is much slower than that of the cones. They are responsible for our dark-adapted, or scotopic, vision. scotopic We have many more rods than cones.

What’s Happening? In the retina of your eyes, there are 3 types of color receptors (cones) that are most sensitive to either red, blue or green.retinaeyes When you stare at a particular color for too long, these receptors get "tired" or "fatigued." When you then look at the white background, the receptors that are tired do not work as well. Therefore, the information from all of the different color receptors is not in balance and you see the color "afterimages." You can see that you vision quickly returns to normal.

If you have ever been hit on the back if the head and saw “Stars”, you already know that vision is located in the OCCIPITAL LOBE. Primary visual cortex Visual Association Area In visual agnosia, the individual fails to recognize some object, person, or color, yet has the ability to see and even describe pieces of parts of some visual stimulus Neglect Syndrome

Group A You are going to look briefly at a picture and then answer some questions about it. The picture is a rough sketch of a poster promoting an upcoming event, a costume ball. Do not dwell on the picture. Look at it only long enough to “take it all in” once. After this, you will answer YES or NO to a series of questions.

Group B You are going to look briefly at a picture and then answer some questions about it. The picture is a rough sketch of a poster for a trained seal act. Do not dwell on the picture. Look at it only long enough to “take it all in” once. After this, you will answer YES or NO to a series of questions.

Picture

In the picture was there.. 1.A car? 2.A man? 3.A woman? 4.A child? 5.An animal? 6.A whip? 7.A sword? 8.A man’s hat? 9.A ball? 10.A fish?

Top Down processing – you go beyond the sensory information to try to make meaning out of ambiguity in your world What you expect (your experiences and your perceptual set) drives this process Bottom Up processing- digesting raw sensory information to make sense of something.

Perceptual Ambiguity Your brain tries to make sense of what you are looking at based on the region you are focusing on.

Corpus Callosum Connects hemispheres limbic system Emotional link *amygdala *hippocampus Thalamus Relay sensory information Hypothalamus Controls body Metabolism Regulates Drives Maintenance Duties Pituitary Gland Secretes hormones- growth

Connects the brainstem to the forebrain. The midbrain is responsible for controlling sensory processes.

The hindbrain functions collectively to co- ordinate motor activity, posture, equilibrium and sleep patterns and regulate unconscious but essential functions, such as breathing and blood circulation. Survival Functions

Anencephaly: Born with little or no brain tissue. Always Fatal. Joseph Loren, 1999 Survival is limited to days. The longest a baby has survived with anencephaly is 2 months. One reason babies can survive for a short while with virtually no Forebrain is because they may have parts of their hindbrain. (Pons, Medulla) Medulla controls vital reflexes. It is the functions of the forebrain that define us as human and distinguish us from other creatures.

Boy Brains and Girl Brains: Different? Problem-Solving Tasks Favoring Women Women tend to perform better than men on tests of perceptual speed, in which subjects must rapidly identify matching items for example, pairing the house on the far left with its twin: In addition, women remember whether an object, or a series of objects, has been displaced: On some tests of ideational fluency, for example, those in which subjects must list objects that are the same color, and on tests of verbal fluency, in which participants must list words that begin with the same letter, women also outperform men: Women do better on precision manual tasks-that is, those involving fine-motor coordination-such as placing the pegs in holes on a board: And women do better than men on mathematical calculation tests:

Problem - Solving Tasks Favoring Men Men tend to perform better than women on certain spatial tasks. They do well on tests that involve mentally rotating an object or manipulating it in some fashion, such as imagining turning this three- dimensional object or determining where the holes punched in a folded piece of paper will fall when the paper is unfolded: Men also are more accurate than women in target- directed motor skills, such as guiding or intercepting projectiles: They do better on disembedding tests, in which they have to find a simple shape, such as the one on the left, once it is hidden within a more complex figure: And men tend to do better than women on tests of mathematical reasoning: