Lecture 1 - History of Neuroscience Flashcards
(15 cards)
What is Trephining?
Drilling holes into the skull. A brain surgery thought to have existed up to 7,000 yrs ago.
What was Aristotle’s Cardiac Hypothesis? What was the role of the brain in the Cardiac hypothesis?
Thoughts, perception, and emotion was b/c of the heart. The brain was considered a secondary organ that cooled hot blood & tempered emotions.
What did Hippocrates propose about the brain?
He believed the brain was the origin of thoughts & emotions
What did Galen propose about the brain in rejection of Aristotle’s Cardiac Hypothesis?
Galen noticed change in behaviour in gladiators due to brain injury.
He believed mental experiences occurred in ventricles (CSF) and behaviour results from connections between the brain and nerves.
What did Descartes propose about the brain?
The brain squeezes fluids to the body causing emotion and behaviour.
He proposed the concept of spinal reflexes and their neural pathways.
What are ventricles?
Ventricles of the brain are cavities within the brain that produce and store cerebrospinal fluid
What were Paul Broca’s findings?
Found that language ability (speech fluency) is restricted to small region because of patient w/damage in that area.
Functions are localized in the brain like speech production is in Broca’s area in the frontal lobe.
How did Luigi Galvani discover the electrical nature of neural communication?
The muscles of dead frogs twitched when sparked, thus he saw that electrical signals produced movement.
What did Darwin’s theory of rational thinking explained by nervous system lead to?
Led to studies examining the relationship between disorders and damages to the brain.
Brought up PHRENOLOGY - assigning separate functions to regions of the brain. Bumps matched behaviours because they reflect enlargements of brain regions (brain growth) responsible for certain behavioural faculties
Wernicke’s Area vs Broca’s Area.
Wernicke’s Area: Language comprehension – understanding spoken and written language. Located in temporal lobe. Fluent but nonsensical speech with impaired comprehension,
Broca’s Area: Speech production – forming words and construct grammatically correct sentences. Located in the frontal lobe. Halting, effortful speech with intact understanding.
What was Golgi’s Reticular theory & why did he think that?
Everything in the nervous system is made up of a single interlinking network.
He saw that neurons under a microscope look undifferentiated.
What was Cajal’s Neuron Doctrine?
The NS is not a single network, but an array of separate independent cells.
Behaviour is influenced by individual neurons.
What was Hebb’s proposition about the brain and behaviour in terms of synapses?
Synapses observable & measurable bc they’re plastic neuronal connections. The strength of connections could change as a product of experience.
What did Kandel do?
He built off of Hebb’s proposition and demonstrated changes in neurons to changes in behaviour
What is psychology, neuroscience and the 2 main fundamental thoughts?
Psychology is the study of behaviour. Neuroscience is the connection between human behaviour and the brain.
Brain Hypothesis – brain is the source of all behaviour
Neuron Hypothesis – neuron is the fundamental unit of the brain
