AP psych chapter 3A

we think with our brain by firing countless millions of synapses and releasing billions of neurotransmitter molecules. Brain +body =mind.
Ex: Damage to one side of brain causes numbness or paralysis on body’s opposite side. Body’s right side wired to brains left. Body’s left to brains right.

they can detect electrical pulse in single neuron. Ex: we can detect where info goes in cat’s brain when someone strokes its whisker.

CT scan, PET, MRI, fMRI

Brain's structure. Weight means nada.
Ex: Sharks brain regultes basic survival function. Rodents have more complex brains which enable emotion, memory. In advanced mammals like us, a brain processes more info and enables foresight.

Crossover
To and from each side of brain connect with body's opposite side.

In 1949, Giuseppe Moruizzi and Horace Magoun discovered that electrictiy stimuling rf of sleeping cat almost immediately produced awake alert animal. Severing from higher regions = cat lapses into coma.

a hub through which traffic passes en route to various destinations. Also recevies some of brains replies which it directs to medulla and cerebellum.

-Older functions occur without conscious effort.
-Brain processes most info outside of awareness.
-We are aware of results of our brain's labor, but not of how we construct visual image.

Psychologist Heinrich Kluver and neurosurgeon Paul Bucy surgically lesioned monkey's brain including amgydala, resulting in very mellow monkey
-Electrically stimulating an animal produces opp effort, moving electrode within amgydala produces calm animal.

blood chemistry and takes orders from the other parts of the brain.
ex: thinking about sex stimulates hypothalamus to secrete hormones, which triggers adjacent "master gland" to influence hormones released by glands.

Tried implanting an electrode in a rat rf when they incorrectly placed it in rat's hypothalamus, and rat kept returing to location it had been stimulated by the misplaced electrode.

General reward system triggering release of dopamine and specific centers associated with pleasures.

Genetically disposed deficiency in natural brain systems for pleasure and well being leading peole to crave whatever provides missing pleasure or relieves negative feelings.

Contributes 85 percent of brain's weight-form specialized work teams enabling, perceiving, thinking, and speaking. Cerebral cortex covers this.

the cerebral cortex expands, tight genetic controls relax, and organism’s adaptability increases.
Makes us distinctively human. Cerebral cortex connects 20-23 billion nerve cells and 300 trillion synaptic connections.

worker bees compared to neurons being like queen bees.
G cells provide nutrients and insulating myelin, guide neural connections, and mop up ions and neurotransmitters.
Play role in learning and thinking.
By “chatting with other neurons they participate in info transmission and memory.

Frontal, pariental, occipital and temporal

Auditory cortex in temporal lobe.

Info processed by sensory areass by linking sensory input with stored memories.
-In frontal lobe: judgment, planning. In pariental: math, spatial reasoning. Temporal lobe: recognize faces.

personality

1. Register in visual area.
2. Relayed to second brain area, which transforms words into auditory code that is received and understood in Wernicke’s area.
3. Sent to Broca’s area which controls motor cortex as it creates pronounced word. Different form of aphasia occurs pending on what chain is damaged.

the brain operates by dividing its mental functions-speaking, perceiving, thinking, remembering-into subdivisions.

Specialization and integration

Plasticity. • Example of Plasticity: You’re blind. You have better hearing than most people. The younger you are, the greater chance remaining hemisphere can take over functions of the hemisphere you lack.
- • Severed neurons usually don’t regenerate. Some of brain’s neural tissue can reorganize in response to damage. Happens within all of us as brain repairs itself after little mishaps.

• Left hemisphere is the dominant hemisphere because brain damage causes accidents, strokes, and tumors in this hemisphere can impair reading, writing, speaking, and arithmetic reading.

• The right hemisphere: understands simple requests, easily perceives objects, more engaged when quick, intuitive responses are needed, copying drawing, recognizing faces, perceiving emotion, portraying emotion through more expressive left side of the face. Right hemisphere damage disrupts emotion processing and social conduct. (Split Brain)
• Left hemisphere is more active when a person deliberates over decisions. When the rational left brain is active, people more often discount disagreeable info.
• Sperry and Gazzaniga studied the split brain. With a split brain, both hemispheres can comprehend and follow an instruction to copy-simultaneously-different figures with the left and right hands

Perception task: brain waves, bloodflow and glucose consumption reveals increased activity in this. Makes interferences. Makes our speech clear. Orchestrate sense of self ex: people paralyzed claim they can move that limb. Perceives people. Recognizing ourselves and others.

speaking or calculating. Before brain surgery, surgeon injects sedative into the neck artery feeding blood here. Interprets language.

• Almost all righties process primarily in left hemisphere, which is the slightly larger hemisphere. Seven in 10 lefties process speech in the left hemisphere, as righties do.
The rest either process language in the right hemisphere or use both hemispheres.

• Cognitive neuroscience is taking the first step by relating specific brain states to conscious experiences. Ex: Women in car accident. Doctors told her to imagine playing tennis. fMRI scans revealed brain activity like that of healthy people. Parts of brain involved in playing tennis became active. They concluded that even in a motionless body, the brain and mind may still be active.
• Perception, memory, thinking, language, and attitudes all operate on two levels-a conscious deliberate “high road” and an unconscious, automatic “low road.” (Dual Processing)

• Cognitive neuroscientists Melvyn Goodale and David Miller knew a girl named D.F who couldn’t recognize and discriminate objects visually, but was only partly blind, because she could slip a postcard through a small window without problem.

Visual perception track enables us “to create the mental furniture that allows us to think about the world”- to recognize things and to plan future actions.
-Visual Action Track guides our moment to moment actions.

.35 seconds

96%

• Identical twins have the same genes, they don’t always have the same copies of those genes
-They share a placenta during prenatal development, but one of three sets has 2 separate placentas.

remarkable similarities in the life choices of separated identical twins, lending support to the idea that genes influence personality. Many other identical twins share the same qualities.

• Ppl who grow up together, whether biologically related or not, do not resemble one another in personality. Environment shared by fam’s children has no impact on personalities.
• In traits such as outgoingness and agreeableness, adoptees are more similar to their biological parents than to their caregiving adoptive parents.

• Example of heritability: All families equally loving, neighborhoods equally healthy, then heritability will increase.
- Person raised in barrel, other in house- heritability will decrease.
• Individual differences in height and weight are highly heritable.

Group
Putting people into a new social context can change their aggressiveness

Gene Activity
Genetically influenced traits also evoke significant response in others.
Ex: Student’s impulsivity and aggression may evoke an angry response from a teacher who otherwise reacts warmly to the student’s model classmates.

How people react to and influence us.

• It seeks to identify specific genes influencing behavior.
• Molecular behavior genetics: find some of the many genes that influence normal human traits, such as body weight, sexual orientation, and extraversion. Seek links between certain genes or chromosome segments and specific disorders by finding fams that have disorder across several generations, then they draw blood or take cheek swabs from both affected and unaffected family members and examine DNA.

• Our shared human traits were shaped by natural selection acting over the course of human evolution. Our bevioral and biological similarities arise from our shared human genome.
• No more than 5% of genetic differences among humans arise from population group differences. Some 95% of genetic variation exists within populations.

• As biologists use natural selection to explain the mating behaviors of many species, so evolutionary psychologists use natural selection to explain a worldwide human sexuality difference: Woman have a relational approach to sex. Men have a recreational approach to it.
• Women nurse one infant at a time. Men: Spreading genes through other females.
• Men mating preferences: Youthful appearance, healthy, fertile-appearing, muchos babies! Narrow waists. All men (teen to elder) prefer women in mid twenties.
• Women mating preferences: Dadies that say, mature, dominant, bold, and affluent, long term mating (baby pictures).
• Nature selects behaviors increasing likelihood of sending one’s genes into the future

• It often starts with an effect (such as gender sexuality differences) and works backward to propose an explanation.
• Does it suggest a genetic determinism that strikes at the heart of progressive efforts to remake society?
• Does it undercut moral responsibility?
• Could it be used to rationalize a high-status man marrying a series of women?
• A science of behavior will destroy our sense of beauty, mystery, and spiritual significance of the human creature. ( Claim by half of adults who don’t believe in evolution.

• reassuring us that the sexes, having faced similar adaptive problems, are more alike than different. Humans have great capacity for learning and social progress.
Coherence and explanatory power of evolutionary principles, especially those offering testable predictions

• Culture has tendency to magnify genes and hormone traits. Ex: strong men, nurturing women. As roles we play change over time, we change with them.

We change with them.

Paul Sartre, attributing responsibility for one’s fate to bad genes or influences.

• Darwin offers a coherent view of natural history in his theory, Galileo offers coherent reasoning in his claim that Earth revolved around sun.
• Catholics such as Pope John Paul II have respected and acknowledged Darwin’s theory is growing.
• Rather than fearing science, we can welcome its enlarging our understanding and awaken our sense of awe