#1: Intro Lecture Flashcards
What are the three overlapping disciplines that combine to create clinical neuroscience?
Neurology
Psychiatry
Neuroscience
What is neurology?
The medical specialty encompassing diseases, conditions, and infections of the nervous system (brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves), and is usually associated with physical changes in the nervous system (obvious and can see on a scan)
What is psychiatry?
The medical specialty encompassing the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental illness, includes addiction and substance use disorders, physical changes of the nervous system not as obvious (cannot see on a scan)
What is neuroscience?
Scientific study of the brain and nervous system, includes molecular neuroscience, cellular neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychophysics and computational modeling
Describe the progression in 17th, 19/20th and 21st century of the study of the brain
17th century: beginnings of studying the brain
19/20th century: psychiatry and neurology
neuroscience comes in between the 20-21st centuries
21st century: clinical neuroscience (contains all 3)
What were the ideas about brain functioning in 300 BC?
Recognized that the brain is the major controlling center in the body (earlier ideas thought the heart was the organ for perception and feeling, and thought brain cooled the passions of the heart)
What were the major ideas about brain functioning in 100 BC?
GALEN examined brains in animals and proposed the idea of spirits (pneumata) circulating between the liver, heart and brain, and said that these animal spirits were produced in the lining of the brain ventricles and flowed into nerves to create movement
He thought that the brain was the seat of the rational soul
His ideas dominated for more than 1000 years
Who were two figures who contributed to neuroscience in the middle ages?
Al-Zahrawi: was a surgeon/physician, pioneer of neurosurgery, gave the first description of surgery to relieve hydrocephalus
Avicenna: father of modern medicine, The Cannon of Medicine (medical encyclopedia), early ID of schizo
What did Andreus Vesalius contribute to neuroscience?
Founded modern anatomy by dissecting humans, and showed that certain aspects of Galen’s anatomy was incorrect
eg. the network of fine arteries found by galen in animals was absent in humans, and galen thought that this was the connection in the transport of vital spirits to and from the brain, so clearly this is wrong
What did Rene Descartes contribute to neuroscience? (BROAD)
He proposed that spirits flowed to and fro from the pineal gland via nerves, and recognized the existence of reflexes (but did not use the word reflex)
What are the three major concepts promoted by Descartes? Are they true or false?
- Only humans have a thinking mind: animals lack abstract thought and do not experience emotions (instead they are complex stimulus response machines)
- Dualism: mind (immaterial) and body (material) are separate
- Mind and body interact in the pineal gland: movements in this gland direct the flow of spirits through the nervous system
ALL ARE FALSE
What is the Virtuosi?
A group of scholars at Oxford during the time of Thomas Willis, during the renaissance
Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Thomas Willis, Richard Lowe, Christopher Wren
Scientific thinking flourished in the Renaissance. What idea drove the Renaissance?
The idea that natural laws can explain the workings of the natural world
What did Luigi Galvani contribute to neuroscience? When was his evidence measured directly and by who?
He obtained indirect evidence for intrinsic electrical activity in the nervous system, but was hard to prove because no method for measuring electrical activity was available.
This was measured directly in the mid 1800s by Du Bois-Reymond using sensitive galvanometers
What was Jean-Martin Charcot’s contribution to neuroscience?
Founder of modern neurology, keen observer of signs and symptoms, carefully examined nervous system in post-mortems, described and classified features of many disorders (MS, Parkinsons, ALS)
