Final Material Flashcards

Question

What's habituation?

Answer 1

Reduced physiological or behavioural responding to a repeated stimulus

Answer 2

Increased sensitivity to a stimulus

Answer 3

- If its siphon is lightly touched, its gill withdraws reflexively to protect it and survive - Repeated light touching of the siphon will reduce the magnitude of the reflex until the Aplysia completely ignores this stimulus because they believe it isn’t threatening anymore

Answer 4

The sea slug’s response to an electrical shock often becomes greater with additional exposures

Answer 5

No, it depolarizes the same amount

Answer 6

Yes, fewer action potentials (1 vs 2) occur when the siphon is touched

Answer 7

Yes, could be due to: - Less presynaptic vesicles docking - Vesicles having less glutamate in them - Presynaptic voltage-gated calcium channels not opening as easily or for as long - Fewer postsynaptic glutamate receptors - Postsynaptic glutamate receptors being less sensitive to glutamate or not opening as much or for as long

Answer 8

No, it spikes the same amount when depolarized

Answer 9

No, the gill is as sensitive to an action potential in the motor neuron as before

Answer 10

They can be directly measured in brain slice recordings

Answer 11

- As soon as we kill the animal, the brain loses oxygen and sugar - Goal is to take the brain out within a few minutes and then slice the brain very thin so the oxygen and sugar can fuse within a slice and keep the brain part healthy - Putting ice cold saline in circulatory system of an animal in the heart to get a nice clean brain and being able to take the brain out and take a slice of it because the body is freezing

Answer 12

By constantly hyperpolarizing it

Answer 13

It may convert thin spines into mushroom-shaped spines

Answer 14

1. Structure 2. Objective function 3. Learning function

Answer 15

Number of nodes and layers as well as how each node gets activated

Answer 16

- The goal - Ex: to label things in the input or to predict what the next input will be or to identify the best action given the input

Answer 17

Method of adjusting the strength of each connection to better achieve the objective function

Answer 18

Input layer -> hidden layer 1 -> hidden layer 2 -> hidden layer 3 -> output layer

Answer 19

- Long-term increase in the strength of the connection between two neurons (i.e., increased synaptic strength) - Synaptic strengthening occurs when synapses are active while the membrane of the postsynaptic cell is depolarized

Answer 20

It induces it

Answer 21

LTP is often initiated on the postsynaptic side (with more neurotransmitter receptors)

Answer 22

Long-term decrease in the strength of the connection between two neurons (i.e., decreased synaptic strength)

Answer 23

- Persistent low-frequency stimulation of the inputs to a quiet neuron - Commonly used is 1 Hz stimulation for 10 minutes

Answer 24

LTD is often initiated on the postsynaptic side (with less neurotransmitter receptors)

Answer 25

- Retrograde signaling of nitric oxide - Ex: could cause creation of more vesicles of neurotransmitters

Answer 26

- Retrograde endocannabinoid signaling - Ex: could cause less calcium-influx per action potential

Answer 27

High frequency stimulation (~100 Hz) for 1 second, repeated a few times every 10 seconds

Answer 28

- Low frequency stimulation (1Hz) over 5-10 minutes - The same number of stimulations as LTP delivered at a slow rate

Answer 29

The release of neurotransmitter must coincide with a substantial depolarization of the postsynaptic cell (normally associated with an action potential)

Answer 30

- High frequency axon stimulation often causes postsynaptic neurons to spike (summation of EPSPs brings the neuron across threshold) - Low frequency stimulation on its own is often not sufficient to get a postsynaptic neuron to spike

Answer 31

In learning and memory

Answer 32

- an ionotropic glutamate receptor that has a large ion pore - a coincidence detector - a neurotransmitter- and voltage-dependent ion channel - When the receptor binds glutamate and opens, magnesium ions try to pass through its pore, but they get stuck in it and block all current flow

Answer 33

- When the postsynaptic membrane is at the resting potential, Magnesium (Mg2+) blocks the ion channel, preventing calcium (Ca2+) from entering - When the membrane is depolarized, the magnesium ion is evicted - Thus, the attachment of glutamate to the binding site causes the ion channel to open, allowing calcium ions to enter the dendritic spine

Answer 34

- If a molecule of glutamate binds with the NMDA receptor, the calcium channel can't open because the magnesium ion blocks the channel (cell at rest) - However, depolarization of the membrane evicts the magnesium ion and unblocks the channel. Now glutamate can open the ion channel and permit the entry of calcium ions

Answer 35

When the membrane potential is below threshold (< -40mV), such as when the cell is at rest

Answer 36

Then magnesium ions will not try to enter though the NMDA receptor, and thus they won’t clog the pore

Answer 37

Only when these receptors are bound to glutamate and magnesium (Mg2+) is not clogging the pore

Answer 38

Both glutamate and membrane voltage

Answer 39

- The glutamate receptor that mediates most excitatory fast synaptic currents in the brain - It's ionotropic and opens upon glutamate binding - It lets in sodium ions which cause EPSPs (excitatory postsynaptic potentials) that depolarizes neurons

Answer 40

AMPA and NMDA receptors

Answer 41

- An enzyme that's activated by calcium influx through NMDA receptors - It plays a role in the intracellular signaling cascade that establishes long-term potentiation, by increasing the number of postsynaptic AMPA receptors (in excitatory glutamatergic synapses)

Answer 42

- Perceptual learning - Motor learning - Relational learning - Stimulus-response learning

Answer 43

- Learning to recognize stimuli as distinct entities - Brain will make up patterns by paying attention to and attaching meaning to stimuli - Putting effort drives learning - Ex: learning foreign language

Answer 44

- Learning to make skilled, choreographed movements - Actively think about it and focus on it - Doing the action repeatedly - Procedural learning

Answer 45

- Learning relationships among individual stimuli across space and time - Stimulus-Stimulus learning

Answer 46

- Learning to perform a particular behavior when a particular stimulus is present - "Given what you see what’s the best movement or action to take?" - Includes classical and instrumental conditioning

Answer 47

A good part of learning is automatic but it also focuses on how much effort you put into it

Answer 48

How strong the synapse is

Answer 49

It grows in size

Answer 50

- The increase in synaptic strength that occurs in weak synapses when they are active right around the time when stronger inputs caused the postsynaptic neuron to spike - If the weak stimulus and strong stimulus are applied at the same time, the synapses activated by the weak stimulus will be strengthened - If the activity of strong synapses is sufficient to trigger an action potential in the neuron, the dendritic spike will depolarize the membrane of dendritic spines, priming NMDA receptors so that any weak synapses active at that time will become strengthened - Pairing 2 inputs together (associating)

Answer 51

- Hypothesis proposed by Donald Hebb that the cellular basis of learning involves the strengthening of synaptic connections that are active when the postsynaptic neuron fires an action potential - "What fires together, wires together" (more strongly than before) - The synaptic connection does have to initially exist

Answer 52

- When you hear a tone, the synapse isn't strong enough to cause you to blink - Weak synapse so not enough to depolarize the neuron and cause an action potential - When a 1000-Hz tone is presented just before the puff of air to the eye, synapse T (from neuron in auditory system) is strengthened - If we pair a tone with an air puff, we get action potentials in both these synapses and overtime, the weaker synapse will get stronger and stronger

Answer 53

In the hippocampus

Answer 54

When the action potential occurs, all the dendrites will be depolarized a bit

Answer 55

- Unconscious memory (implicit memory, nondeclarative memory) - Consciously accessible memory (explicit memory, declarative memory)

Answer 56

- Implicit and nondeclarative - Memories that influence behavior in an automatic, involuntary manner - Relates to automatic adjustments to perceptual, cognitive, and motor systems that occur beneath the level of conscious awareness

Answer 57

We say “show me”

Answer 58

- Procedural memories (how to ride a bike) - Perceptual memories (how to tell identical twins apart, unconsciously) - Stimulus-response memories (salivating in response to a tone)

Answer 59

- Explicit and declarative - Memories of events and facts that we can think and talk about

Answer 60

We say “tell me”

Answer 61

- Episodic memory - Semantic memory

Answer 62

- "Episodes" of your life - Personal experiences associated with a time and place - Autobiographical memory that involves contextual information and is learned all at once

Answer 63

- Encyclopedic memory of facts and general information, often acquired gradually over time - This knowledge need not be associated with the time or place in which we learned the information

Answer 64

- Implicit memory (unconscious) - The basis of recognition & categorization - Detecting the sensory irregularities in your environment - Largely dependent on the neocortex – sensory association areas/cortexes

Answer 65

- Implicit memory (unconscious) - The basis of motor skills (bike riding, ball throwing, etc.…) - Involves different brain areas involved in movement

Answer 66

- Explicit and accessible memory (conscious) - The basis of declarative memory (episodic and semantic) - Largely dependent on the hippocampus and neocortex (visual association cortex)

Answer 67

- Implicit (unconscious) and Explicit (conscious) memory - The basis of classical (Pavlovian) and instrumental (operant) conditioning - Involves different brain areas depending on the stimulus and response

Answer 68

- Perceptual memory (exactly what you perceive) that lasts only a couple seconds or less - Allows an individual to retain the experience of the sensation slightly longer than the original stimulus - Occurs in each of the senses - Ex: people often reflexively say “what?” when they hear something while distracted, but then they quickly realize they did hear what was said

Answer 69

- Lasts for seconds to minutes - Only a small fraction of sensory information enters short-term memory - Memory capacity of short-term memory is limited to a few items (e.g. digits in a phone number or letters in a name) - Length of short-term memory can be extended through rehearsal or thinking about something more - Ex: might be able to remember phone number longer if you repeat it to yourself until you write it down

Answer 70

- Persists after getting distracted and even after a nap - Information that'll be retained from short-term memory is consolidated (thought about over and over) into long-term memory - Long-term memories can be retrieved throughout a lifetime and strengthened with increased retrieval

Answer 71

Visual memories last for hundreds of milliseconds and auditory information could last for 2 seconds

Answer 72

- Enables us to recognize and identify object or situations - Pattern recognition system - With it we can recognize changes/variations in familiar stimuli and respond to those changes - Involves changes in the strength of connections between neurons and changes in excitability in primary and association sensory cortices

Answer 73

- Involves learning to make a sequence of coordinated movements - We get feedback from our movements from our joints, vestibular system, eyes, ears, etc., then use this information to improve and optimize our movements - Rapid component to motor learning as well as a slower process called between-session learning

Answer 74

Process where improvements in motor behavior are seen following a period of memory consolidation (in part during sleep)

Answer 75

- Cerebellum - Thalamus - Basal ganglia - Motor cortex

Answer 76

- Damage to regions of brain involved in visual perception not only impair ability to recognize visual stimuli but also disrupt people's memory of visual properties of familiar stimuli - Damage to the ventral stream - Trouble perceiving the world -> they can see but can’t make sense of it

Answer 77

They are able to copy drawings line by line by looking at the image (can't see it as a whole), but as soon we take the picture away and they have to draw from memory, they can't draw it as well

Answer 78

- Activation occurs in dorsal stream of parietal lobe - They have the perceptual realization and tap into parietal cortex to identify the movement

Answer 79

US: a stimulus that has inherent value, like food or a painful shock. Some stimuli in our environment trigger innate reflexive behaviours (ex: painful stimuli, fear from loud noises, food in mouth causing salivation, blinking when things fly toward your face) UR: a behavioural response that is largely innate, hard-wired (unlearned, unconditioned)

Answer 80

CS: a stimulus that was initially perceived as neutral (e.g., a tone) but now is perceived as predictive of an US. Conditioned responses are there to prepare for the stimulus (associating a tone with puff in the eye -> blinking when you hear tone) CR: a behavioural response that occurs in response to a CS. The behaviour is often similar to the UR that was elicited by the US during training

Answer 81

- The animal has no control over its environment - The animal can react to things (and we measure these reactions to infer learning), but the animal’s actions do not influence the course of events

Answer 82

- Instrumental conditioning - Reinforcement learning

Answer 83

- Learning from the consequences of your actions, from the receipt of reinforcement or punishment - The likelihood of you repeating an action depends on whether it was previously reinforced or punished - Animals are always exploring their environment and sometimes their actions have consequences - Instrumental behaviours start off as flexible, volitional exploratory behaviours

Answer 84

- In contrast to Classical (Pavlovian) learning, operant conditioning requires that the animal can move and make decisions that influence their environment (i.e., decisions that have consequences) - When we’re looking at how the animal reacts to something to figure out what happens next -> instrumental task - If we don’t need to look at animal to know what happens next -> pavlovian classical conditioning

Answer 85

- Appetitive stimulus - When it follows a particular behavior, it increases the likelihood the animal will repeat the behaviour - Reinforcement makes the behavior more likely to occur

Answer 86

- Aversive stimulus - When it follows a particular behavior, it decreases the likelihood the animal will repeat the behaviour - Punishment makes the behavior less likely to occur

Answer 87

Strengthens a connection between neural circuits involved in perception (sight of the lever) and those involved in movement (the act of lever pressing)

Answer 88

- Yes, you can be thinking thoughts and then do a behaviour and in your head and can decide whether this was good or this was bad - Perceptual system doesn’t have to be something you see it could be generated by your own thoughts

Answer 89

- Instrumental conditioning - When people start taking drugs, they’re initially in control and it’s acting as a reinforcement system, people think they’re consciously making this decision to take drugs - What happens unconsciously is the dependency to this reinforcement system and people are often caught off guard about their addiction to it - This builds up naturally in these neural circuits

Answer 90

- Direct transcortical connections - Basal ganglia

Answer 91

- It integrates sensory and motor information from throughout the brain - At first the basal ganglia is a passive “observer” - As behaviors are repeated again and again, the basal ganglia begins to learn what to (actions become more and more habitual, more ingrained and automatic) - Different circuits within the basal ganglia become involved in the action selection and action execution processes - Eventually, the basal ganglia takes over most of the details of the process, leaving the transcortical circuits free to do something else - At this point, we don’t need to consciously think about what we are doing

Answer 92

Dopamine signaling

Answer 93

- The striatum (or neostriatum) - Consists of the caudate, putamen, and nucleus accumbens

Answer 94

Involves the whole cerebral cortex

Answer 95

- Connections from one area of the cerebral cortex to another - Involved in acquiring complex motor sequences that involve deliberation or instruction

Answer 96

- Dopamine neurons in the midbrain (substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area) project to the striatum and seem to signal reinforcement and punishment - The overall amount of dopamine in the striatum seems to correspond to motivation and the value of moving in and engaging with the environment - Transient fluctuations in dopamine signaling seem to drive learning by signaling how unexpectedly good or bad the current moment is - People think the overall dopamine levels relates to the animal’s ability to engage with the environment (when dopamine levels are low, animals aren’t engaging with environment and aren’t seeking rewards)

Answer 97

- Caudate - Putamen - Nucleus accumbens (ventral striatum)

Answer 98

- It receives input from limbic areas such as the hippocampus, amygdala, and parts of PFC - It seems to regulate people’s priorities ("I’m craving this thing or obsessing over this thing")

Answer 99

It's getting motor sensory information that’s related to planning sequences of motor actions

Answer 100

- Reinforcement learning and habit learning - Don't strongly affect perceptual learning or stimulus-stimulus learning

Answer 101

- He had epilepsy - Doctors cut out his hippocampus bilaterally to cure his epilepsy - It worked, but he lost the ability to form new explicit memories (severe anterograde amnesia) - He also suffered from a graded retrograde amnesia (events that occurred within 1 or 2 years were lost as well as some events that happened even longer ago than that) - He still had a brief working memory and a high IQ, but he could not learn new words or names or learn to navigate a new space - Every day he woke up, he thought he was late for high school or football practice -> everyday he woke up, he thought he was a kid - As soon as he was distracted, he would forget what he was doing (couldn’t remember what he was saying, what he was doing, what he ate that day or the day before)

Answer 102

- You disrupt the animal’s ability to create/store memories - Makes it so that you can remember things from 2 years ago (will forget the last year)

Answer 103

- Permanent anterograde amnesia caused by brain damage, usually resulting from chronic alcoholism - Caused by severe lack of vitamin B1 - Tends to be found in homeless alcoholics - Patients are unable to form new memories but can still remember old ones before the brain damage occurred - Confabulation is common for these patients -> if they think they know something but they don’t due to this syndrome, they make up an event - Similar to what we see in split brain patients -> people think this is related to damage in one side of the brain

Answer 104

Reporting of memories of events that did not take place without intention to deceive

Answer 105

- Animals cannot form new episodic or semantic memories - Their short-term, working memory is generally fine - They can also remember previously learned semantic information if it was consolidated prior to the hippocampal damage - But generally live in the moment (in the present) - They don’t really reminisce about previous episodes in their life, nor do they imagine future possibilities

Answer 106

- Process of converting short-term memories into explicit long-term memories - The hippocampus is not the location of either short-term or long-term memories but works with memory consolidation - The hippocampus "turns the past into the future"

Answer 107

Sensory information enters short-term memory, rehearsal keeps it there, and eventually, the information makes its way into long-term memory, where it is permanently stored

Answer 108

- It's generally thought that memories are not stored in the hippocampus, but that the hippocampus forms a hub, node, or index that is capable of both representing and reactivating the sensory systems that initially encoded any given event/experience - The hippocampus is creating some kind of snapshot

Answer 109

Partial cue (ex: ”what did you have for lunch”) processed in cerebral cortex and then goes in hippocampus which reactivates the entire cerebral cortex to relive this event (imagined -> see the sandwich, taste the sandwich, feel how you felt)

Answer 110

- A prominent theory is that hippocampal activity (during recall events and during sleep) is “training” the cortex, causing a reorganization of the synaptic weights in the cortex so that intra-cortical connections can support memory recall on their own

Answer 111

- Some people argue that the cortex only contains semantic information (facts) - In this model, all memory starts off as episodic memory, which is always dependent on hippocampal nodes interacting with the cortex - Over time, as facts emerge from repeated episodic experiences, these semantic memories are permanently stored in the cortex in a hippocampal-independent manner

Answer 112

It is replaying events (10x as fast), which is somehow training the cortex

Answer 113

- The retrieval of most recent long-term memories activated the hippocampus more than the cortex of the superior frontal gyrus - The retrieval of older memories activated the hippocampus less and the cortex more - When memories reached 9 years of age, both regions were activated approx equally

Answer 114

- Rodents need a functional hippocampus to remember newly learned spatial information but not information learned 30 days ago - Memories are consolidated and stored in the cerebral cortex during this time (30 days) - As soon as we inactivate hippocampus, then the animal loses knowledge of the maze and doesn’t know how to solve it (only for day 2 but they can solve it during day 30) - This kind of memory consolidation occurs over several years in humans (hippocampus has to train the brain over years to hold memories)

Answer 115

- The inability to learn new information or retain new information ‘after’ brain injury - Memory for events that occurred before the injury remain largely intact

Answer 116

- The inability to remember events that occurred ‘before‘ the brain injury - Shown in neurodegenerative disorders

Answer 117

The inability to learn new information or retain new information ‘after’ brain injury and inability to remember events that occurred ‘before‘ the brain injury

Answer 118

Causes anterograde amnesia - Nondeclarative learning ability remains intact

Answer 119

- Perceptual learning - Motor learning - Stimulus–response learning - But, do not explicitly remember anything about what they have learned - Incapable of relational (stimulus-stimulus) learning - People with this condition are good for repeated patterns but when the pattern changes, they forget how to play the game - People with anterograde amnesia won’t remember playing the game or playing with symbols but after they have an intuitive feeling that these symbols are good (reinforcing certain actions with certain environments unconsciously) -> performance is low

Answer 120

- Broken drawings (perceptual) - Recognizing faces (perceptual & stimulus-response) -> through familiarity - Recognizing melodies (perceptual) -> through familiarity - Classical conditioning - eye blink (stimulus-response) - Instrumental conditioning (stimulus-response) - Sequence of button presses (motor)

Answer 121

- Remembering past experiences - Learning new words - Finding way in new environment

Answer 122

- With minimal training, healthy mice often turn toward the “Place” goal on the “Probe” test - With overtraining, however, mice mostly turn toward the “Response” goal - These results suggest that what is initially learned is an explicit spatial memory (turn toward the window), but overtime a stimulus-response memory starts to dominate (always turn to the right)

Answer 123

Basal ganglia

Answer 124

Hippocampus

Answer 125

Lateralized function since it's mainly on the left side of the brain

Answer 126

- The left side of brain - Regardless of if people are left-handed or right-handed

Answer 127

- The left hemisphere is dominant for speech in 90% of the population - Right-hemisphere speech dominance is seen in 4% of right-handed people and 27% of left-handed people

Answer 128

Speech production and comprehension because animals can't speak

Answer 129

- People give some words stress (i.e., pronounce them louder) - Pitch of the human voice indicates phrasing and distinguishes between assertions and questions - Humans impart information about their emotional state through the prosody of their speech

Answer 130

Prosody is typically a function of the right hemisphere, so people who don't understand language because of left hemisphere damage will typically still be able to appreciate prosody and extract information from it

Answer 131

Rhythm, emphasis, and tone of someone's speech

Answer 132

- People can recognize the voices of particular individuals - Even newborn infants can recognize the voices of their parents - Recognition of a particular voice is independent of recognition of words and their meanings - People with left hemisphere damage might not be able to understand words but they could still recognize voices

Answer 133

- Disorder where people have great difficulty recognizing voices - Results from localized brain damage to the right superior temporal cortex

Answer 134

- Metaphors = right superior temporal cortex - Moral of fables = regions of right hemisphere

Answer 135

It makes people more literal in speech comprehension and production

Answer 136

- A disturbance in understanding, repeating, or producing meaningful speech - The difficulty must not be caused by simple sensory or motor deficits or by lack of motivation - The deficit must be relatively isolated, such that the patient must be capable of recognizing when others are attempting to communicate - The patient must be somewhat aware of what is happening around them - People's senses are doing fine but they have a hard time producing meaningful speech

Answer 137

A stroke in the left cerebral hemisphere

Answer 138

In speaking

Answer 139

- anterior aphasia - motor aphasia - expressive aphasia - Broca’s aphasia - non-fluent aphasia

Answer 140

In understanding language

Answer 141

- posterior aphasia - sensory aphasia - receptive aphasia - Wernicke’s aphasia - fluent aphasia

Answer 142

- VISION - What do dogs look like? - AUDITORY – What do dogs sound like? - TOUCH - What do dogs feel like? - OLFACTION - What do dogs smell like? - GUSTATORY - What do dogs taste like? - MOTOR – What do dogs act like? What does petting a dog entail? - We think understanding language is related to a network of how all the senses relate to a word - Association cortexes

Answer 143

SPEAKING (speech production) - Word choice - Sequencing - Grammar - Articulation

Answer 144

- Posterior language area wraps around the lateral fissure - Located in the interface between Wernicke's area and perceptions and memories - Located at the junction of the temporal, occipital, and parietal lobes, around the posterior end of the lateral fissure - Damage there makes it so that people don’t understand the meaning of words - This makes it so that words lose their literal meaning

Answer 145

- Involved in analysis of speech sounds and in recognition of spoken words - Region of auditory association cortex on left temporal lobe of humans - Posterior Language Area overlaps with Wernicke’s area - Right below the posterior language area

Answer 146

- The posterior language area is critical for language comprehension, regardless of whether the words are heard, seen, or spoken - Neurons here probably activate the ensemble of neurons throughout sensory association cortices that store the representations (the meanings) of specific words - Ex: activating the DOG neurons here would cause activity throughout sensory association cortices (vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and even motor commands like petting) that are associated with the word DOG

Answer 147

Transcortical Sensory Aphasia

Answer 148

- Failure to comprehend the meaning of words and an inability to express thoughts with meaningful speech - Word perception and speaking might be fine (without any comprehension of what is heard or spoken) - Fluent speech, can't comprehend spoken messages and can repeat after people Ex: - Word repetition (e.g., repeat after me…) - Reading (without understanding) - Writing (without understanding)

Answer 149

- Type of aphasia with poor comprehension - Speech is effortless, but the meaning is impaired - People with damage in back of the brain that don’t comprehend language - Unaware of their deficit - Not frustrated with their language deficit - Not aware that people don’t understand what they’re saying - Don’t seem to express annoyance - Not trying to make meaning with their words, they’re just trying to express emotions - Repeated use of certain phrases and connecting words (skip over structures words ex: nouns and adjectives) - They understand when a conversation is coming to an end by other cues (tone of voice, non-verbal behaviour)

Answer 150

The posterior language area

Answer 151

True Ex: When you read but aren’t registering what you’re reading because you’re on autopilot (you see the word and process it through language)

Answer 152

- Characterized by an inability to repeat the exact words you hear - Meaningful, fluid speech and good speech comprehension - When asked to repeat the word ‘house’, the person may say “home” - When asked to repeat a word that’s not easily understood, a made up word, they can’t retrieve understanding because they can only repeat words they already know. They will just say I didn’t hear you - Need to know what a word means to be able to repeat - Seems to be an issue with working memory - Small deficit where frontal lobe is fine

Answer 153

Caused by damage to and around the arcuate fasciculus, a bundle of axons that connects Wernicke's area with Broca's area

Answer 154

- A bundle of axons that connects Wernicke's area with Broca's area - Enables them to repeat words that they can't understand

Answer 155

- Disorder of auditory word recognition - Inability to comprehend or repeat spoken words - Words just sound like sounds to them - “I can hear you, but I don’t recognize the words you are saying. I even have trouble repeating what you say.”

Answer 156

- Caused by damage to Wernicke's area or disruption of auditory input to this region - Damage to superior temporal lobe

Answer 157

- Hear - Interpret non-speech sounds (doorbell, phone, barking) - Read - Write - Read lips - Speak intelligently, but they can’t recognize the words they are saying by listening to themselves - Over time their speech becomes a bit awkward, like when a deaf person speaks

Answer 158

- Features of transcortical sensory aphasia and pure word deafness - Poor language comprehension - Fluent speech production, but speech is meaningless and typically filled with function words, such as a, the, in, about (as opposed to content words that convey meaning, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives) - Speech seems natural and is filled with intonation and emphasis (prosody) - Words seem to come easy to them, but what they say is meaningless - Typically not completely aware of this problem and are generally not bothered/annoyed by them

Answer 159

Damage to both Wernicke’s area and the posterior language area

Answer 160

- Transcortical Sensory Aphasia (but Wernicke's aphasia can't repeat) - Characterized as a Receptive Aphasia or Fluent Aphasia

Answer 161

- In the Visual Word Form Area - Located in the fusiform gyrus of the left hemisphere

Answer 162

- Disrupted ability to perceive written words - They just see lines and squiggles - Develop Pure Alexia/Pure Word Blindness

Answer 163

- Damage to visual word-form area (VWFA) - Cannot read, as they cannot recognize written words - Can write just fine, just can’t read what they write - Have the motor ability to write but after reading over, they can’t recognize what they wrote -> leads to messy handwriting

Answer 164

- "Faulty reading" - Difficulty reading

Answer 165

- Whole-word reading ("sight reading"): direct recognition of the word as a whole - Phonetic reading ("sound reading"): sounding it out letter by letter or decoding the phonetic significance of letter strings

Answer 166

Unfamiliar words and nonwords

Answer 167

For most familiar words

Answer 168

- An inability to recognize whole-words - The person can only read words phonetically - Irregularly spelled words are difficult for these people to perceive, because sounding them out doesn’t work Ex: Pair, pear, pare,…. Sew, pint, yacht,….

Answer 169

- Reading disorder in which a person can read familiar words but has difficulty reading unfamiliar words or nonwords - Ex: Blint, trisk, juff,…. - Kanji vs Kana Japanese symbols

Answer 170

- mostly a type of phonological dyslexia - problem is largely genetic - great difficulty learning to read and some never become fluent readers, even though they are intelligent - trouble with grammar and spelling and have a hard time distinguishing the order of sound sequences

Answer 171

- Some stroke patients have shown very specific deficits in their ability to extract meaning from written words even though they can read out loud - Typically seen with larger deficits, like transcortical sensory aphasia where there is limited language comprehension - Caused by stroke in back half of the brain

Answer 172

- Those that remain relatively constant even when objects are viewed from different angles - Most reliable of these cues are ways that lines meet at vertices, forming junctions with particular shapes, such as L, T, and X - Our visual system grabs onto corners and edges to make sense of things - Writing without edges and corners is hard to identify

Answer 173

- Understanding of language but cannot speak it - Characterized by slow, laborious, and nonfluent speech - Patients with this condition are aware of their condition and are extremely frustrated because they have a word in their head they understand what they want to say but when they go to speak it it comes out wrong (have something to say, but have trouble saying it) - Caused by damage to Broca’s area in the left inferior frontal lobe - Difficulty to express themselves - Words are on the tip of the tongue (anomia)

Answer 174

- Articulation problems - Agrammatism - Anomia

Answer 175

- Articulation problems might make it hard for someone to hear the words you are saying - It could cause a sequencing problem Ex: lipstick -> likstip

Answer 176

- Difficulty comprehending or using grammatical devices, such as verb endings (-ed) and word order (e.g., man bit dog) - Typically don't derive meaning from the sequence of words or the grammar of sentences - Almost exclusively use content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) without any function words (a, the, on, about, etc.) - Lack of context in what they're saying

Answer 177

- A symptom of Broca's Aphasia - Difficulty in finding (remembering) the appropriate word to describe object, action, or attribute - Word is on the tip of the tongue

Answer 178

- Have a hard time thinking of the word they want to say - They can understand what other people say just fine - They basically talk just fine, but they often describe things in roundabout ways (circumlocution)

Answer 179

- Strategy by which people with anomia find alternative ways to say something when they are unable to think of most appropriate word - Drop words during sentences (skip over words) - Talking around things

Answer 180

Because visual system is usually stronger than the auditory system

Answer 181

Very slight movements of the muscles involved in speech that do not actually cause obvious movement

Answer 182

- When we talk to ourselves in our head (our inner monologue)

Answer 183

- Region of Broca's area - When a person is asked to look at a pair of drawings and say whether names of the items rhyme, functional imaging shows increased activation in region of Broca's area because the person “says” the two words subvocally - Talking to ourselves in the head uses the same brain networks as talking out loud

Answer 184

- Trouble with writing - There can be very specific deficits in motor programs (stored in frontal lobe) caused by brain damage - Ex: people can have trouble writing: - Letters but not numbers - Lowercase but not uppercase letters - Vowels but not consonants - Print but not cursive - Letters in the correct order

Answer 185

Writing is a complex activity that involves the whole brain (imagine the words, what they sound like, use the motor parts of brain to use your hand)

Answer 186

- Phonetically sounding out the word - Visually imagining the word

Answer 187

- Condition where people cannot spell words by sounding them out (common in Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia) - They can only write words by imagining how they look - They have to be very familiar with how the word looks or they cannot write it - They cannot write non-words that sound fine, like blint or vak

Answer 188

- Condition where people can't spell words by visualizing them (common in people with damage to VWFA) - They can only sound words out, which means they cannot correctly spell any words that have an irregular spelling (half -> haff; busy -> bizzy)

Answer 189

- Incidence of strokes in the US is approximately 750,000/year - Likelihood of having a stroke is related to age – probability doubles each decade after 45 years of age and reaches 1–2% per year by age 75

Answer 190

From strokes which cause brain damage

Answer 191

- Process in which linings of arteries develop a layer of plaque, deposits of cholesterol, fats, calcium, and cellular waste products - Plaques can cause severe narrowing of interior of artery, greatly increasing the risk of a massive stroke - Risk factors (causes) include high blood pressure, cigarette smoking, diabetes, and high blood levels of cholesterol

Answer 192

Atherosclerosis

Answer 193

- Often form in the internal carotid artery, which supplies most of the blood flow to the cerebral hemispheres - Narrowing of interior of arteries can be visualized in an angiogram, produced by injecting a radiopaque dye into the blood and examining the artery with a computerized X-ray machine

Answer 194

- Rupture of a cerebral blood vessel - Much more rare

Answer 195

- Occlusion of a blood vessel - 87% of strokes are ischemic

Answer 196

Blood clot that forms within a blood vessel, which may block it and reduce blood flow to the affected area

Answer 197

- Piece of matter (such as a blood clot, fat, or bacterial debris) that dislodges from its site of origin and occludes an artery - In the brain, an embolus can lead to a stroke

Answer 198

- Drugs that reduce swelling and inflammation - Physical, speech, and/or occupational therapy - Exercise and sensory stimulation (constraint-induced movement therapy)

Answer 199

- To administer drugs that dissolve blood clots in an attempt to reestablish circulation to an ischemic brain region - This approach has been met with some success. Ex: administration of a clot-dissolving drug called tPA (tissue plasminogen activator) after the onset of a stroke has clear benefits, but only if it is given within 3-4 hours

Answer 200

Clot-dissolving drug

Answer 201

tPA (tissue plasminogen activator)

Answer 202

- Coil retrievers - Aspiration devices - Stent retrievers

Answer 203

- Mass of cells whose growth is uncontrolled (mutations in dna causing uncontrollable cell division) and that serves no useful function - Tumors happen in multicellular organisms

Answer 204

- Non-malignant: noncancerous, "benign" tumor. Has distinct border and cannot metastasize - Malignant: cancerous, "harm producing" tumor. Lacks distinct border and may metastasize

Answer 205

Process by which cells break off of a tumor, travel through the vascular system, and grow elsewhere in the body

Answer 206

- Whether the tumor is encapsulated (whether there is a distinct border between the mass of tumor cells and the surrounding tissue) - If there is such a border, the tumor is non-malignant; the surgeon can cut it out, and it will not regrow - If the tumor is cancerous it grows by infiltrating the surrounding tissue, and there will be no clear-cut border between tumor and normal tissue - When surgeons remove malignant tumors, some cancer cells are often missed, and these cells will produce new tumors

Answer 207

- Any tumor growing in the brain (malignant or benign) can produce neurological symptoms and threaten the patient's life

Answer 208

- Tumors damage brain tissue by two means: compression and infiltration - Even a benign tumor occupies space and thus pushes against the brainand squishes neurons - Compression can directly destroy brain tissue, or it can do so indirectly by blocking flow of cerebrospinal fluid and causing hydrocephalus

Answer 209

Blocking flow of cerebrospinal fluid

Answer 210

- Gliomas - Meningioma - Pituitary adenoma - Neurinoma - Metastatic carcinoma - Angioma - Pinealoma

Answer 211

- Brain tumors are often in glial cells - Tumors in glial cells are very deadly

Answer 212

- A malignant brain tumor - The tumor initiating cells originate from the neural stem cells that make glia - They rapidly proliferate and are more resistant to chemotherapy and radiation than most tumor cells - The survival rate from malignant gliomas is very low

Answer 213

- Example of a non-malignant (encapsulated) tumor - Slow-growing tumor - Composed of cells that constitute the meninges (dura mater or arachnoid membrane) often right between the two cerebral hemispheres - Symptoms start with headaches which become more and more common - This tumor is compressing the neural tissue - Can be dangerous if they grow very big (can block the flow of cerebrospinal fluid and occlude ventricles)

Answer 214

To use a syringe and relieve the pressure in the brain

Answer 215

- Inflammation of the brain caused by infection (bacterial or viral), toxic chemicals, or allergic reaction - First symptoms are headache, fever, and nausea

Answer 216

- Inflammation of meninges (surrounding the brain) caused by viruses or bacteria - The first symptoms are headache and stiff neck

Answer 217

- Viral disease that destroys motor neurons of the brain and spinal cord - 1% of people with it will have it go to the brain and it will kill all their motor neurons and they’ll become paralyzed

Answer 218

- Fatal viral disease that causes brain damage; usually transmitted through the bite of an infected animal - Take a vaccine after getting bit by an animal with rabies (within a week or longer depending on where you got bit)

Answer 219

- Virus that normally causes cold sores near the lips or genitals - In rare cases, it instead enters the brain causing encephalitis and brain damage

Answer 220

- Caused by a blow to the head with a blunt object - Coup: the brain comes into violent contact with the inside of the skull - Contrecoup: the brain then recoils in the opposite direction and smashes against the skull again

Answer 221

- Penetrating brain injuries (also called open head injuries) cause damage to the portion of the brain that is damaged by the object or the bone - Damage to blood vessels can deprive parts of the brain of their normal blood supply - Accumulation of blood within the brain can cause further damage by exerting pressure within the brain - As soon as there’s injury to the brain there will be inflammation in the brain and a build-up of blood pressure

Answer 222

- In the US, approx 1.4 million people visit an emergency room for TBI, 270,000 people are hospitalized, and 52,000 people die from it - Almost a third of deaths caused by injury involve TBI

Answer 223

- In survivors, scarring (scar tissue) often forms within the brain, around the sites of injury, which increases risk of developing seizures - Mild cases of TBI (mTBI) greatly increase a person's risk of developing brain problems (neurodegenerative diseases) down the road Ex: likelihood of Alzheimer's disease is much higher in a person who has received blows to the head earlier in life

Answer 224

Collection of glial cells and other neurons that leave cellular debris there

Answer 225

Maybe the neuron doesn’t die in the moment but it gets more and more weak and likely to go through neural apoptosis

Answer 226

- Most common cause is scarring, which may relate to an injury, a stroke, the irritating effect of a growing tumor, or a developmental abnormality in the brain - Other causes are high fevers (especially in young children) and withdrawal from GABA agonists, such as alcohol and barbiturates - Neural network instability and increased risk of seizures can come about for genetic reasons - Most seizures aren’t caused by genetics but by brain damage

Answer 227

Gene mutations that affect… - the amount or function of different ion channels in the brain - the reciprocal wiring of excitatory and inhibitory neurons - the rules that govern synaptic plasticity

Answer 228

- AKA epilepsy - Sometimes, if neurons that make up motor system are involved, a seizure can cause a convulsion - But not all seizures cause convulsions; in fact, most do not - Each time seizures happen with seizure disorder, they spread more and more - People who got 2 or 3 seizures might be on medication for the rest of their life

Answer 229

- Violent sequence of uncontrollable muscular movements caused by seizure - Involves the frontal lobe

Answer 230

- Seizure that begins at a focus and remains localized, not generalizing to rest of brain - Simple partial seizure: seizure that doesn't produce loss of consciousness - Complex partial seizure: seizure that produces a loss of consciousness

Answer 231

- Seizure that involves most of the brain (non-localized seizure) - Includes tonic-clonic seizures, atonic seizures, and absence seizures

Answer 232

- Sensation that comes before a seizure (motor abnormalities) - Its exact nature depends on the location of the seizure focus

Answer 233

- Generalized, grand mal seizure that typically starts with an aura that is followed by a tonic phase and then a clonic phase - This type of seizure involves convulsions

Answer 234

- First phase of tonic-clonic seizure, in which all of patient's skeletal muscles are contracted - Can lead to huge forceful contraction where people can break their own bones and can stop breathing or having their heart stop beating for a little

Answer 235

- Second phase of a tonic-clonic seizure, in which patient shows rhythmic jerking movements - eople will fall asleep for a while after they will be extremely exhausted

Answer 236

- Second phase of a tonic-clonic seizure, in which patient shows rhythmic jerking movements - People will fall asleep for a while after, as they will be extremely exhausted

Answer 237

- Children - Many do not have tonic-clonic episodes but instead have very brief seizures that are referred to as spells of absence - Absence seizures are generalized complex seizures

Answer 238

- AKA petite mal seizures - People stop what they are doing and stare off into the distance for a few seconds, often blinking their eyes repeatedly - Children will often go offline for a little bit (not conscious) - Seizure wave lasts about 3 seconds

Answer 239

- Mutation of calcium voltage gated channels - Often correlated with genetics - Breathing really fast can trigger spells of absence

Answer 240

Leads to complete paralysis and complete loss of muscle tone

Answer 241

- Anticonvulsant drugs, such as benzodiazepines, many of which work by increasing effectiveness of inhibitory synapses and loosening the function of GABA receptors - Most seizure disorders respond well enough to medications that the patient can lead a normal life - In a few instances drugs provide little or no help and the seizures remain so irritable that brain surgery is required

Answer 242

- Exposure to certain toxins, viruses, and drugs during pregnancy can impair fetal brain development and cause intellectual disability - Dangerous toxins include organophosphates (from insecticides) and heavy metals such as lead and mercury - Famous viruses that alter brain development include the rubella virus (German measles) and the Zika virus (which spread fast in Brazil several years ago)

Answer 243

- Babies born to alcoholic women are typically smaller than average and develop more slowly - Associated with alcohol consumption during the 3rd and 4th week of pregnancy - Associated with certain facial anomalies and severe intellectual disabilities

Answer 244

- Small palpebral fissures - smooth philtrum - Thin upper lip - Low nasal bridge - Minor ear anomalies - Epicanthal folds - Micrognathia - Microcephaly

Answer 245

- Babies are born addicted to crack and heroin - They’ll be born with extreme withdrawals but will recover from it quick and then not many issues with them

Answer 246

- Several inherited “errors of metabolism” can cause brain damage or impair brain development - "Errors of metabolism” are genetic abnormalities in which recipe for a particular protein is in error - Typically the cause is that an enzyme is not synthesized on account of mutations in both copies of the gene - If the enzyme is a critical one, results can be very serious

Answer 247

- Phenylketonuria (PKU) - Tay-Sachs disease

Answer 248

- Heritable, fatal, metabolic storage disorder - Lack of enzymes in lysosomes causes accumulation of waste produces and swelling of cells of brain

Answer 249

Organelle of the brain that breaks down proteins into their component parts

Answer 250

- Hereditary disorder caused by the absence of enzyme that converts the amino acid phenylalanine to tyrosine - Accumulation of phenylalanine causes brain damage unless a special diet is implemented soon after birth - 2 bad mutations lead to not making this enzyme

Answer 251

- Caused not by inheritance of a faulty gene but by possession of extra 21st chromosome - Congenital, which does not necessarily mean hereditary; refers to a disorder that one is born with - Characterized by moderate to severe intellectual disability and often physical abnormalities - After age 30, the brain of a person with Down syndrome begins to degenerate in a manner similar to Alzheimer's disease (genes for Alzheimer’s are on the 21st chromosome) - 100 years ago, people with down syndrome only lived up to 20 years old but now It’s common for them to live 50 – 70 years of age

Answer 252

Their child has a 50% chance of having down syndrome

Answer 253

- Autoimmune demyelinating disease that usually occurs in people’s late twenties or thirties - Certain genes increase one’s susceptibility for getting MS, but it is generally a sporadic disease - one that is not obviously caused by an inherited gene mutation or an infectious agent -At scattered locations within the central nervous system, myelin sheaths are attacked by the person’s own immune system, leaving behind hard patches of debris called sclerotic plaques - Normal transmission of neural messages through demyelinated axons is interrupted - Because the damage occurs in white matter located throughout the brain and spinal cord, a wide variety of neurological disorders are seen - When people die of sclerosis, they have hard plaque all over their brain

Answer 254

- Symptoms of multiple sclerosis go through cycles where they flare up and then decrease after varying periods of time(remitting-relapsing MS) - In most cases, this pattern is followed by progressive MS later in course of disease - Progressive MS is characterized by a slow, continuous increase in symptoms - 2x as common in females than males

Answer 255

- There isn't yet an effective treatment for multiple sclerosis, but many drugs that help a little have been approved, including: - interferon beta - injection of a protein that modulates immune system activity - glatiramer acetate – peptides that mimic myelin (decoy approach)

Answer 256

- People who spend their childhood in places far from equator are more likely to come down with disease than are those who live close to equator - It's likely that some disease contracted during childhood spent in region in which virus is prevalent causes person's immune system to attack his or her own myelin - Some gene mutations that make the immune system not as accurate

Answer 257

Degeneration is typically the result of apoptosis, which is triggered by collections (aggregates or clumping) of misfolded proteins that disrupt normal cellular function

Answer 258

By which cells die off first

Answer 259

- Contagious brain disease (includes mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease) whose degenerative process gives the brain a sponge-like appearance - Accumulation of misfolded prion protein is responsible for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies

Answer 260

Misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein

Answer 261

- When a misfolded prion protein interacts with correctly folded prion proteins, it will cause them to misfold as well - Prion protein diseases spread from cell and cell and animal to animal by means of contact with misfolded prion protein - It is the only infectious agent that is just a protein - All other infectious agents (viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites) contain nucleic acids

Answer 262

Through feeding infectious animals and their brains to other animals or people

Answer 263

- Caused by one dominant mutation in the Huntington gene - Over time, aggregates of huntington protein form in the input nuclei of the basal ganglia (the striatum - caudate nucleus and putamen) causing neurodegeneration - Affects 1 in 10,000 people - Symptoms usually begin between 30 and 50 years of age and death follows 15-20 years later - Characterized by an increasingly severe lack of coordination, uncontrollable jerky limb movements, and eventually dementia followed by death - Movements in Huntington's disease look like fragments of purposeful movements but occur involuntarily - People with this disease look drunk, due to uncontrollable movements

Answer 264

- Normal protein: string of glutamine amino acids (less than 35) - Huntington protein has more than 39 strings of glutamine amino acid

Answer 265

- There is presently no cure (or treatment really), but there is guarded optimism about the potential of antisense gene therapy (even though two large clinical trials recently failed) - Antisense DNA (or RNA) -> string of DNA that replicates huntington’s DNA, can be administered intrathecally (in the spinal cord) - Flood the brain with Antisense DNA so the huntington DNA doesn’t get translated - Researchers are hopeful that this approach (or viral-mediated gene delivery and gene editing technologies) will one day become a practical and effective approach to altering gene expression in the brains of living people

Answer 266

- Degenerative “movement” disorder - Associated with degeneration (death) of dopamine neurons in the midbrain, specifically in the substantia nigra - Affects 1% of the population - Symptoms usually appear after the age of 60 - Characterized by shaking, muscular rigidity, slowness of movement, difficulty walking, and eventually dementia - Without treatment, people have increasing difficulty initiating purposeful movement

Answer 267

- Causes are largely unknown (partly genetic, partly environmental), however the death of midbrain dopamine neurons seems to relate to aggregation of the protein alpha-synuclein - Reduced dopamine signaling in the basal ganglia disrupts movement - Cognitive, emotional, and sleep disturbances eventually develop as well and there are currently no good treatments for those symptoms

Answer 268

- There is presently no cure, but there are many ways to somewhat successfully treat the motor problems

Answer 269

- Protein heavily expressed in midbrain dopamine neurons - Its function is not entirely clear - Abnormal accumulations are associated with dopamine neuron degeneration in Parkinson's disease

Answer 270

Aggregate of misfolded alpha-synuclein protein; found in the cytoplasm of midbrain dopamine neurons in people with Parkinson's disease

Answer 271

- Can promote alpha-synuclein aggregation and cause Parkinson’s disease - These mutations can be dominant, in that only one bad gene (from one parent) can cause the problem

Answer 272

- Protein that is put on faulty/old/misfolded proteins, which targets them for degradation - Ubiquitinated proteins get brought to proteasomes, which breaks them into their constituent amino acids for recycling

Answer 273

- Protein that plays a critical role for ubiquitination - Used for the destruction of abnormal and misfolded proteins by the ubiquitin-proteasome system - Floats around and recognizes misfolded proteins and attaches to them - Mutated parkin is a cause of familial Parkinson's disease - If parkin is defective, misfolded proteins accumulate, aggregate, and eventually kill the cell - If a-synuclein is defective because of a mutation, parkin is unable to tag it with ubiquitin, and it accumulates in the cell - Recessive gene, you need to have 2 copies

Answer 274

Organelle responsible for destroying ubiquitinated proteins within a cell

Answer 275

The loss of parkin function and alpha-synuclein aggregation

Answer 276

People who have 2 bad copies of parkin gene

Answer 277

- Genetic disorder caused by a dominant gene mutation that produces a protein with toxic effects - Caused by 1 bad copy - Ex: mutations in the alpha-synuclein gene and huntington gene can produce proteins that create problems, causing Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, respectively

Answer 278

- Genetic disorder caused by a recessive gene mutation that fails to produce a protein that is necessary to avoid problems - Caused by 2 copies (recessive gene) - Ex: loss of or mutations in the parkin gene can cause misfolded alpha-synuclein protein to not be degraded

Answer 279

- Main symptoms of PD are the result of reduced dopamine signaling - Dopamine doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, so it cannot be taken as a medicine to boost brain dopamine levels - A precursor of dopamine, L-dopa, can enter the brain where it is readily converted to dopamine - L-dopa treatments (injecting it) diminish the motor symptoms of PD - Not fixing the disease but helps restore the dopamine levels that help the system function at a basic level - Brain lesions and deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices are also common treatments for PD - Main targets for lesions and DBS are parts of the basal ganglia that become overactive in PD, the globus pallidus and subthalamic nucleus, respectively - Damaging the globus pallidus or disrupting subthalamic nucleus activity seems to relieve symptoms of Parkinson's disease by removing one of the brakes on motor behaviour

Answer 280

- Globus pallidus - Subthalamic nucleus

Answer 281

- Start with L-dopa injections, then move to metal wires in subthalamic nucleus - When the doctor stimulates these wires, there will be immediate effects, immediate relief of tremors and ease of ability to move

Answer 282

- Internal division of Globus pallidus - Subthalamic nucleus - Damage or deep brain stimulation of these regions reduces inhibitory input to the thalamus and facilitates movement

Answer 283

Progressive impairments to memory, thinking, and behavior that affect the ability to perform everyday activities as a result of a neurological disorder

Answer 284

-Neurodegenerative disease - Multiple Sclerosis - Multiple strokes - Repeated brain trauma (chronic traumatic encephalopathy)

Answer 285

- Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes progressive memory loss, motor deficits, and eventual death - Occurs in approximately 10% of the population above the age of 65 and almost 50% of people older than 85 years - Associated with aggregates of misfolded Beta-amyloid protein and severe degeneration within and around the hippocampus and neocortex - Most common form of dementia - Occurs very slowly over decades

Answer 286

- Protein that is the precursor for beta-amyloid protein - Gene for this protein is located on chromosome 21, which is the one duplicated (triplicated) in down syndrome - Explains why people people with down syndrome often get Alzheimer’s

Answer 287

- Class of enzymes that cut the beta-amyloid precursor protein into smaller fragments, including beta-amyloid - Cut the protein in 2 places - Over 70-90 years, the aggregation in the brain gets overwhelming

Answer 288

- Protein that forms part of the secretases that cut APP - Mutations in presenilin can cause it to preferentially generate the abnormal long form beta-amyloid, which causes early onset Alzheimer's disease

Answer 289

- Glycoprotein that transports cholesterol in the blood and plays a role in cellular repair - Presence of the E4 allele of the apoE gene increases risk of late-onset Alzheimer's disease - The amount of cholestrerol you have in the membranes of your brain, will impact how much cutting in the wrong spot will occur (which can lead to Alzheimer’s)

Answer 290

Protein found in excessive amounts in brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease

Answer 291

Extracellular aggregation of Beta-amyloid protein surrounded by glial cells and degenerating neurons

Answer 292

Microtubule protein that becomes hyper-phosphorylated in Alzheimer's disease, disrupting intracellular transport

Answer 293

Intracellular accumulation of twisted Tau protein in dying neurons

Answer 294

Have 2 mutations: - One causing amyloid plaques to appear early-on - One is a mutation in microtubules (in tau proteins) that blocks them from being phosphorylated -> never get neurofibrillary tangles and never show dementia

Answer 295

- There's no cure for Alzheimer's - Getting rid of the amyloid protein and use antibodies to get the immune system to target that protein - Preventing microtubules from getting dysregulated from getting phosphorylated and aggregating together - Some medications reduce the symptoms a little bit, but they don’t significantly stop the neurodegeneration - Most promising treatments are a form of Immunotherapy - Many use an immunotherapy approach to get antibodies to recognize and destroy Abeta protein (or Tau protein, or both), either by sensitizing the patient's own immune systems to these proteins or by directly injecting antibodies that are made elsewhere (vaccines)

Answer 296

Traumatic brain injury

Answer 297

- Obesity - Hypertension - High cholesterol levels - Diabetes

Answer 298

- Less prevalent in well-educated people, especially those that keep their minds and body highly active - Seems to be a use it or lose it phenomenon

Answer 299

- Degenerative disorder that attacks spinal cord and cranial nerve motor neurons - The motor neurons in the central nervous system are dying - Incidence of this disease is approximately 3 in 100,000 - Typically starts after the age of 50 - Symptoms include spasticity (increased tension of muscles, causing stiff and awkward movements), exaggerated stretch reflexes, progressive weakness and muscular atrophy, and paralysis - Average life span following a diagnosis is 2-4 years, but some people live much longer than that Ex: Stephan Hawking lived with the disease for over 50 years

Answer 300

- 90% of cases of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are sporadic (probably new gene mutations) - Mutations in 2 or more genes are usually required to cause the disease - 10% of ALS cases are inherited - 10–20% of these cases are caused by a mutation in the gene that produces the enzyme superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1), found on chromosome 21

Answer 301

Causes a toxic gain of function that leads to protein misfolding and aggregation, impaired axonal transport, and mitochondrial dysfunction

Answer 302

- Frontotemporal dementia (FTD - neurodegenerative disorder) - Genetic, clinical, and pathological similarities

Answer 303

- Currently no cure for ALS - Only current pharmacological treatment is a drug that reduces glutamate-induced excitotoxicity, which extends life by about 2 to 3 months

Answer 304

- Most disorders associated with old age (including neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease, and cancer) - Common gene variants in the human population are associated with higher risk of getting a particular late onset disorder

Answer 305

- Gene mutations that reduce reproductive success tend to get eliminated from the gene pool fairly quickly - Very harmful gene variants are typically eliminated within a few generations, so they tend to be extremely rare and recent in origin

Answer 306

- Mutations that cause small deleterious effects are removed more slowly, so they tend to be more common and older – inherited from parents, grandparents, and so forth - These mutations may only persist in the population for a 100 generations on average before getting selected out

Answer 307

- Virtually 100% prevalence in the human population - Because they promoted survival and reproduction under ancestral conditions better than other genes did

Answer 308

Can give rise to variations in human nature that are not clearly associated with an overall change in reproductive success (like different personality traits)

Answer 309

- Since our environment, culture, and life span changed so dramatically in the last few hundred years - These common gene variants are associated with diseases that show the classic hallmarks of gene-environment interactions (i.e., they are heritable, but prevalence rates vary widely across cultures and recent history, and there are straightforward environmental explanations for the variability in disease prevalence) - There are common gene variations that have been present around in cultures for a while that were never bad but are recently showing strong environmental pressure on them and making the genes much more of a concern

Answer 310

- late onset disorders, due to rapid increase in human life spans - obesity and diabetes, due to the abundance and low price of unnaturally tasty food - asthma, due to new types and unnaturally high levels of antigens and pollutants - addictions to highly purified synthetic drugs, such as heroin and meth - depression and anxiety – prevalence rates have changed rapidly in recent history and vary enormously between cultures

Answer 311

- They're heritable (20 to 80% of the variance in who has a given mental disorder is well explained by genetics) - They're common (the frequency of severe mental disorders is around 4%) - They're harmful to reproductive success (the fertility rate for people with severe mental disorders is about half the national average)

Answer 312

- About ~1% of the population - This has been highly consistent across cultures and recent history

Answer 313

- Genetic studies have found that schizophrenia is generally not associated with one bad gene, one bad protein, or one dysregulated brain region - Rather, hundreds of relatively common gene variants each individually confer a very small statistical increase in the risk of developing schizophrenia

Answer 314

- That certain combinations of them may be advantageous for reproductive success and certain combinations may lead to schizophrenia - There's a perfect combination that evolution is going for, but when it messes up people get schizophrenia - If this were true, the siblings of schizophrenics who don’t have the disease should have increased reproductive success on average, because they would be more likely to have the good combination of these schizophrenia genes in comparison to the general population - However, siblings of schizophrenics have the same reproductive success as the general population

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