Occipital lobe

For several years the frontal lobes, known to play a role in higher-order cognitive functioning, have been thought to contribute to episodic memory (EM) – a contribution in which researchers have recently made efforts to delineate. Here I will evaluate the notion that frontal lobes contribute to EM, and suggest reasons as to how it might do this. Lesion studies We can look at lesion studies to assess the contribution of the frontal lobes to EM. Unlike cued-recall and recognition tasks (which…

In the history of psychology, Phineas Gage is the one of the patients who became famous patients in neuroscience. From being injured traumatically in the brain with an iron rod that was driven through his entire skull, it destroyed his frontal lobe. Miraculously, Phineas Gage survived the accident but there was a change in him that everyone stated him as a “different man”. On September 13, 1848, 25-year-old Phineas was working as the supervisor with a group of men preparing a railroad bed near…

The prefrontal cortex is located in the frontal lobe of the brain and can be subdivided into different regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These areas as a whole are responsible for decision making, controlling emotions and other key social skills, they are also important for dealing with executive functions such as reasoning and planning. Mitchell (2014) claims that ‘the prefrontal cortex represents the pinnacle of evolution as it handles some…

“Functional MRI-based lie detection: Scientific and societal challenges” is an article written by Martha J. Farah, J. Benjamin Hutchinson, Elizabeth A. Phelps and Anthony D. Wagner in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience. This article is about how Functional MRI (fMRI) are started to be studied for use in lie detection in at least trials in the United States. The authors of this article address five main themes: the science of fMRI-based lie detection, how these studies apply to the real…

Introduction The Eating Disorders (ED) of Anorexia Nervosa (AN) and Bulimia Nervosa (BN) are two psychiatric disorders characterised similarly by abnormal feeding behaviours whose aetiology currently remains undiscovered. As outlined by the DSM-IV (1994), AN is distinguished as the refusal by an individual to maintain body weight at or above the normal minimum weight for their age and height. Further characteristics include an extreme fear of becoming overweight and a disturbance in the way the…

Early brain imaging studies of musical imagery used PET (positron emission tomogra- phy), which has now been almost completely replaced by fMRI. PET and fMRI each have their pros and cons as methods for functional brain imaging. PET works by com- bining several tricks. Typically, subjects are injected with 2-deoxyglucose, a modified form of sugar that is transported through the bloodstream to cells just like glucose, but cannot be metabolized. As a result, 2-deoxyglucose builds up rapidly in…

Perhaps a life well lived is doing what causes dopamine and serotonin to surge in the frontal lobe, or to put it simply, what makes a person happy. The serial killer, who enjoys the murder or some aspect of it, believes he or she is doing what makes them feel happy. It is ethically and morally wrong to take the life of a person in most circumstances…

Silveris provides us research-based studies that tell us adolescent drinking has increased almost ten percent in the last ten years. The question Silveri attempts to answer is what effects does this have directly on adolescents, and on society as a whole. Is this the effect of underlying factors such as alcohol being easier to obtain by adolescents or even an increase in depression by adolescents? Additionally Silveri discusses the types of harms adolescent drinking has directly the brain.…

PPA when compared to transcortical sensory aphasia, it is very much alike, in which articulation, repetition, phonology, and syntax are preserved but patient does not comprehend well. Good fluency is retained but as the disease progresses speech is characterized by repetitious clichés and semantic jargon. Lastly, less frequent words are substituted with more familiar ones typically from a superordinate category like “animal” for “dog” (Kertesz & Harciarek, 2014). Patients with logopenic PPA…

resulted in a “iron rod— weighing 131/ 4 pounds and stretching 31/ 2 feet from its pointed tip to its flat base 11/ 4 inches in diameter” being driven through his skull (Carroll et al. 143). His accident and location of his injury “ the left frontal lobe” led his doctor to recognize that different areas of the brain where responsible for different functions and that head injuries can indeed lead to personality changes. Gage’s injury had no effect of his memory, speech, or intelligence, but it…