Neuroscience Project

Parts of the Brain

• Involves the Amygdala and the Hippocampus
• Auditory Perception
• Memory
• Speech
• Emotional Respones
• Visual Perception

ADD/ADHD

Schizophrenia

• Children that have Attention Deficit Disorder show much lower brainwave activity then people that dont.
• This shows that there is a lack of controll in the cortex.
• This is why people with ADD show symptoms that include
• 1.) difficulty paying attention to details and tendency to make careless mistakes in school or other activities
• 2.) distracted by unnecsary things.
• Inhibitory mechanisms of the cortex are the functions that help us not say things out of turn or think before we speak.
• People with ADD lack these at times.

·One of the most common mental illnesses

·About 1 of every 100 people (1% of the population) is affected by schizophrenia.

·Behavior is abnormal.

·Psychosis is when the person can’t tell reality between non-reality.

·Symptoms include: Hallucinations, disorganized speech, delusions (bizarre, false beliefs).

·Smaller frontal cortex and temporal lobes.

·Schizophrenia is larger than normal lateral ventricles.

·A reduced size of the hippocampus, increased size of the basal ganglia, and abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex are seen in some people with schizophrenia.

·It’s genetic.

·More common in twins.

Alzheimer’s disease

• Symtoms include forgetfulness; disorientation to time and place; and difficulty with concentration, calculation, language, and judgment.
• Occurs in older people ranging from +65.
• ·Alzheimer’s disease brains contain hard, insoluble plaques, which are made of large deposits of a protein called beta-amyloid (Society of Neuroscience).
• These plaques are responsible for clogging up neuron connections.
• Alzheimer’s disease brains also include deposits of the tau protein that are called tangles because of their fibrous appearance (Society of Neuroscience).
• Affects more then 40% of people who are over the age of 85.

Adolescent Brain

Quick Facts

• Humans contain approximately 100 billion neurons.
• Neurons communicate with each other by sending electrical signals long distances and then releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters which cross synapses.
• ·The nervous system consists of two main parts.
• 1) The central nervous system is made up of the brain and spinal cord.
• 2) The peripheral nervous system includes the nerves that serve the neck and arms, trunk, legs, skeletal muscles and internal organs.
• Neuroscience research includes genes and other molecules that are the base of the nervous system, individual neurons, and makes neurons that make up who you are.

• Throughout your life your brain develops from the back to the front.
• Frontal Lobes are the last part of your brain to develop which would explain why kids tend to be reckless.
• Also the prefrontal cortex develops later which deals with how you deal with emotional impulses.
• Adolescent kids are more sussuptible to physchological disorders.
• Scientists believe that the process of development for teenagers may be accelerated or otherwise altered in schizophrenia (mental disorder that makes it difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences), bipolar disorder(going from one emotion to another without much reason), and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

How to we study brain activity?

• CT (Cat) Scan: Computed tomography
• MRI: Magnetic resonance imaging
• PET: Positron emission tomography.

Scanning uses x-ray photos taken of the head from different directions. CT scanning uses a computer program that performs a numerical integral calculation (the inverse Radon transform) on the measured x-ray photos to estimate how much of an x-ray beam is absorbed in a small volume of the brain.

(taken from Wikipedia.com)

Neuroscience

Neuroplasticity

A PET scan uses radiation, or nuclear medicine imaging, to produce 3-dimensional, color images of the functional processes within the human body (taken from Wikipedia).

Neuro=Nerve

Radio waves 10,000-30,000 times stronger than the magnetic field of the earth are then sent through the body. This affects the body's atoms, forcing the nuclei into a different position.

When the atoms recover they send out signals of their own.

The scanner finds these signals and a computer turns them into a picture. These pictures are based on the location and strength of the incoming signals.

Our body consists mainly of water, and water contains hydrogen atoms. For this reason, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom is often used to create an MRI scan in the manner described above.

(taken from www.netdoctor.co.uk)

Neuroscience: Neuroscience, the study of the nervous system, helps with the understanding of human thought, emotion, and behavior. Neuroscientists use tools from special dyes to examine molecules, nerve cells, networks, brain systems, and behavior. From these studies, they learn how the nervous system develops and functions normally and what goes wrong in neurological disorders.

• A rapidly growing branch of Neuroscience
• New therapies for patients that suffered traumatic injuries and chemical imbalances due to brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, emotional disorders, drug addiction, and chronic pain.
• Your mind is always changing due to your environment.
• Buddhist meditators had a much higher level of gamma-band rhythms than the nonmeditators. In tact, some of the monks produced ganuna-wave activity more powerful than any previously reported in a healthy person, according to Davidson.
• What that means is that Buddhist mediators can change their mind through hours of meditation and that the way it shows is that there brain activity is much higher then a non mediator.
• Test have shown that meditators can cortical plasticity in areas of the brain which prime function are cognitive and emotional processing and well-being.
• This means that people are less likely to be depressed and make better decisions.

• Frontal lobes are responsible for the planning and execution of tasks.
• The anterior (front) portion of the frontal lobe is called the prefrontal cortex, responsible for higher thinking (determining personality

•Important for language processing.

•How you percive of stimuli related to touch, pressure, temperature and pain.

·An almond shaped set of neurons located deep in the brains medial temporal lobe.

·Emotions

·In humans and other animals, this subcortical brain structure is linked to both fear responses and pleasure.

·Conditions such as anxiety, autism, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and phobias are suspected of being linked to abnormal functioning of the amygdala, owing to damage, developmental problems, or neurotransmitter imbalance.

Sleep

•Visual Processing

•Part of the brain that is associated with dreams

• Sleep helps our body secure memories and aid learning.
• Specifically it secure memories, termed procedural memories, which help people learn skills.
• ·In one recent example, participants had to repeatedly type a sequence on a keyboard. A group trained in the morning and then tested 12 hours later showed no significant improvement. But a full night's sleep improved their performance by almost 20 percent. Another group, trained in the evening, improved their performance by about 20 percent after a full night's sleep. But after another 12 hours of staying awake, they showed hardly any improvement. This shows that sleep, not time, aids the learning (Society of Neuroscience).
• Sleep is the replaying of newly learned information so that memories of it stick.
• One theory of Dreaming is that its the playback of your days activities

• The Hippocampus is connecting memories with other related memories and giving the memories meaning. In other words, the hippocampus might be connecting the memory of your first day at school with information about the physical surroundings, the smells, and the sounds of that event.
• Many people with damage to the hippocampus have anterograde amnesia: they can remember the distant past but cannot form new memories.
• The hippocampus is a major component of the brains of humans and other vertebrates. It belongs to the limbic system and plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory and spatial navigation.

Cycles

Dreaming

Stage 1: Can last from 10-15 minutes, very little brain activity and if person is awoken they will claim they haven' slept at all. Also many people feel as though they are feeling which would explain why many people twitch during this part of sleep.

Stage 2: This is the period of sleep that you see light signs of brain activity, but it goes in waves from positive and negative waves.

Stage 3&4: These stages are known as slow-wave, or delta, sleep. If a person is woke up they will feel disoriented for a few minutes.

Stage 1-4: Non REM sleep (Non rapid eye movement): The body repairs and regenerates tissues, builds bone and muscle, and appears to strengthen the immune system during these four stages.

Stage 5: Dreaming occurs during this stage which is known as REM sleeping. This is stage of sleep shows the most activity in the brain. It is as almost as if you are awake but your body is paralyzed. Your eyes move rapidly and you may twitch or sleep walk during this stage. You dream during this stage and if awoken will recall your dream very well.

• Dreams is your brain trying to make sense of biochemical changes and erratic electric pulses originating in the brainstem. (which is known to be your mind digesting the days thoughts)
• This explains why our dreams can be so random at times.
• During our waking state our brain is constantly doing reality checks with our logical thoughts to keep up with our brain.
• But in a dream the serotonin in your brain goes away bringing about a dreams of consciousness ruled by strong emotions and unrealistic sensations.
• The reason we don’t remember our dreams is because when we wake up serotonin floods our brain.