TASK 1: A matter of approach
1. How were the brain and behavior related in history and how is it still applicable
today?
2. What methods were previously used? How do they (still) shape today's
techniques?
3. How can brain functions (and brain damage) be localized?
4. What are the differences between the brain hypothesis and the neuron
hypothesis?
5. What did Luria say about brain organization? How is this still relevant?
6. Are there certain research paradigms that have historically shifted?
7. “Gall’s theory is invalid and outdated, despite this phrenology remains important
to Neuropsychology to this day.” Discuss this statement and explain why
phrenology is still important (5p)
8. Discuss one major advancement in a field related to neuropsychology in the past
200 years and explain how it is important to neuropsychology (5p)
1- How were the brain and behavior related in history and how is it still applicable
today?
Perspectives on the brain and behavior:
Mentalism (Aristotle):
• He proposed that a nonmaterial psyche was responsible for human thoughts,
perceptions and
emotions and for such processes as imagination, opinion, desire, pleasure, pain,
memory and reason
• The psyche was independent of the body but worked through the heart to
produce action
• The philosophical position that a person's mind is responsible for behavior is
called mentalism, meaning "if the mind"
o Mentalism has great influence on modern neuropsychology: many terms
(sensation, perception, attention, imagination, emotion, memory, volition)
are still employed as labels for patterns of behavior
o It also influenced the idea about how the brain might work, in as much as
the mind was proposed to be nonmaterial and so have no parts, the brain
was thought to work as a whole
• Modern Neuropsychology: Though scientifically outdated, elements of
mentalism still influence modern terminology, such as using the word "mind" to
describe complex processes like sensation, memory, and perception
Dualism (Descartes)
• Mind and body are separate but interact
• Mind influences bodily movements through the pineal gland, purposing that the
mind controlled the body like a machine
• He located the site of action of the mind in the pineal body, a small structure
high in the brainstem
, o His idea was that the mind, working through the pineal body, controlled
valves that allow CSF to flow form the ventricles through nerves to
muscles, filling them and making them move
o The cortex was not functioning neural tissue but merely a covering for
the pineal body
• This created the "mind-body problem," which questioned how a nonmaterial
mind could influence a physical body
• Modern Neuropsychology: study of animals cannot be a source of insight into
human
• neuropsychology
Materialism (Darwin)
• Behavior can be fully explained by the brain and the nervous system, without
needing a mind or soul
• This has its roots in the evolutionary theories of Wallace and Darwin
o They looked at the structures of plants and animals and animal behavior
o They were struck by the number of similarities and common
characteristics
o This led to the idea that the similarities could be explained if all animals
evolved from a common ancestor
• Darwin argued that all organisms are descended from some unknown ancestor
that lived in the remote past
o All animals descended from one nervous system through natural
selection
o As the descendants from that original organism spread into various
habitats, they developed structural and behavioral adaptations
• Nervous system is such a common characteristics
• Modern Neuropsychology: foundation of modern neuroscience, which studies
how physical change in the brain relate to behavior and mental processes.
2- What methods were previously used? How do they (still) shape today's
techniques?
Localization of function:
• Gall and Spurzheim: introduced phrenology, the belief that specific mental
faculties were localized in different parts of the brain.
• They collected instances of and differences that they related to other prominent
features of the head and skull
o A bump on the skull indicated a well-developed underlying cortical gyrus
and therefore a greater capacity for a particular behavior
o A depression in the same area indicated an underdeveloped gyrus and
a concomitantly reduced faculty
• Phrenology was seized on by some people as a means of making personality
assessments
o They developed a method called cranioscopy, in which a device was
placed around the skull to measure bumps and depressions there
, • Although phrenology itself was discredited, the idea that brain regions are
specialized for different functions laid the groundwork for the localization of
function theory.
o This concept is still relevant today in modern brain mapping techniques,
such as functional MRI (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET),
which reveal active brain areas during tasks.
Localization and lateralization of language:
• Bouillaud argued that certain functions are localized in the cortex and that
speech is localized in the frontal lobes, in accordance with Gall's theory
o He also suggested that the part of the brain that controls them might be
the left hemisphere
• Paul Broca had a patient who lost his speech and was able to say only "tan"
o He had paralysis on the right side of the body but in other respects
seemed intelligent and normal
• After Tan died, they found out that the left frontal lobe was the focus of Tan'
lesion
o Broca collected eight more cases - he located speech in the third
convolution (gyrus) of the frontal lobe on the left hemisphere
• He demonstrated that different regions of the cortex have specialized functions
and that functions could be localized to a side of the brain, a property that is
referred to as lateralization
• The anterior speech region is called Broca's area and the syndrome that results
from its damage is called Broca's aphasia
Sequential programming and disconnection
• People who interpreted Broca's findings as evidence that language resides
totally in one part of the brain are called strict localizationist
• Carl Wernicke was aware that the part of the cortex that receives the sensory
pathway from the ear (called the auditory cortex) is located in the temporal
lobe, behind Broca's area
• He therefore suspected a relation between hearing and speech
• Wernicke's finding that the temporal lobe is also implicated in language
disproved the strict localizationist view
• Wernicke's syndrome is sometimes called temporal-lobe aphasia or fluent
aphasia, to emphasize that the person can say words, but is more frequently
called Wernicke's aphasia
• The associated region of the temporal lobe si called Wernicke's area
• He proposed that auditory information travels to the temporal lobes from the
auditory receptors in the ears
• In Wernicke's area, sounds are processed into auditory images or ideas of
objects and stored
• From there they flow through a pathway, the arcuate fasciculus which leads to
Broca's area, where representations of speech movements are stored
• To produce the appropriate sounds, neural instructions are sent from there to
muscles
• If the temporal lobe is damaged, speech movements are preserved, but the
speech makes no sense because the person cannot monitor words
, • Damage to Broca's area produces a loss of speech movements without the
loss of sound images and therefore Broca's aphasia is not accompanied by a
loss of understanding
Disconnection
• Wernicke also predicted that if the arcuate fibers were cut, disconnecting the
areas without inflicting damage on either one, it would result in a speech
deficit called conduction aphasia.
• Speech sounds and movements are retained, but speech is impaired
• After this was confirmed, Geschwind updated the speech model: Wernicke-
Geschwind model
• His idea of disconnection lead to the proposal that brain regions are
interdependent
• Disconnection is important in neuropsychology, because it predicts that
complex behaviors are built up in assembly-line fashion as info collected by
sensory systems enters the brain and traverses different structure before
producing an overt response
Neuroplasticity
• Pierre Flourens and later Friedrich Goltz created animal models of human
clinical cases by removing small parts of cortex
• They expected that the animals would lose specific functions
• Flourens found instead that with the passage of time, his animals recovered
from their initial impairments to the point that they seemed to behave typically
• These early experiments built the foundation for neuropsychology's emphases
on recovery of function an on promoting recovery by rehabilitation after brain
damage
• The brain's plasticity can be harnessed to produce significant functional
improvement
Hierarchical organization
• Information is processed serially and organized as a functional hierarchy;
higher levels (forebrain) control more complex-aspects of behavior via the
lower levels (brain stem and spinal cord)
• His theory gave rise to the idea that functions are not simply represented on
one location in the brain but are re-represented in the neocortex, brainstem
and spinal cord
Multiple memory systems
• Many memory systems operate within the brain
• The study of amnesia suggests that when people have a memorable
experience, they encode
• different parts of it in different parts of the brain
• Binding problem: how does the brain tie a single and varied sensory and
motor events together into a unified perception, behavior or memory?
o Although the brain analyzes sensory events through multiple parallel
channels that do not converge on a single region, we perceive a unified
experience
