Exhaustive Summary of the 'Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of The Mind' book by Gazzaniga et. al. (4th ed). Written with bullet points, simple language and images from the book. This will definitely get you through the exam!
A lot of essential information missing. Whole hypotheses or subjects skipped in several chapters.
By: reneelipka161 • 2 year ago
It is interesting to note that this review was made minutes after purchasing. I don't see how this critique could be possible given that I have included all headings and all bold faced definitions included in the book. Good luck with studying, you may change your mind :)
Chapter 1: A Brief History of Cognitive Neuroscience
1.1 A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
- Thomas Willis: saved Anne Green and married her, coined the term neurology, first to link
specific brain damage to behavioral deficits
- Cognitive neuroscience: how the brain enables the mind
> Cognition: the process of knowing; neuroscience: how the brain is organized and functions
- Our brains have not been designed by a team of rational engineers, it all evolved in evolution;
will be reminded of: WWHGD - what would a hunter gatherer do
1.2 THE BRAIN STORY
- The central issue in cognitive neuroscience is to find out whether the mind is enabled by the
whole brain working in concert or by specialized brain parts working at least partly
independently: the dominant view changes back and forth between the two
- Gall: anatomical personology, he was not a scientist only tried to prove not disconfirm his theory
- Flourens: hired by Napoleon to check the validity of Gall; removed parts of pigeon- or rabbit
brains and found that yes some parts are responsible for special things: no balance without
cerebellum, but advanced abilities like cognition were scattered through the brain
> Aggregate field theory: all sensations, perception and volition occupy the same seat in
brain (superseding the theory of localized functions)
- Jackson: first proposed a topographic organization; a map of the body across a brain area (later
taken up by Penfield)
> Also proposed that many regions are involved in behavior: people rarely completely loose
abilities after damage
- Broca: patient Tan: could understand everything but not say anything other than “tan“
> Lesion to Broca’s area (left hemisphere inferior frontal lobe)
- Wernicke: patients who can not understand written or spoken language; can talk but make no
sense
> Lesion to Wernickes ares: a more posterior region of left hemisphere (where temporal and
parietal lobes meet)
,CNS RL SUMMARY 2018 2
- Fritsch & Hitzig: stimulated discrete parts of dog brains
- Brodmann: described 52 distinct brain areas on the basis of cell structure and arrangement
- Cytoarchitectonics: cellular architecture (study of how cells differ between regions)
- Golgi: Italian physician, introduced ‘the black reaction’ = how to impregnate single neuron with
silver chromate permitting its visualization
> Believed the whole brain to be a syncytium: a coherent mass of tissue
- Cajal: Spanish, used Golgis method to disprove him: neurons are unitary
> Neuron doctrine: concept stating that the NS is made up of individual cells
> Also discovered that electrical information transmission is one-directional: from dendrites to
axon tips
- Purkinje: described the first cell of the NS: the purinje cell in the cerebellum
> Invented the stroboscope
- Helmholtz: electrical current is not a by-product but the medium carrying information along the
axon
- Sherrington: coined the term synapse
- With progression of the 20th century: scientists came to the belief that knowledge of the parts
need to understood in conjunction with the whole
1.3 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STORY
- Donders: differences in reaction time reflect differences in amount of cognitive processing
- Philosophers two main positions:
> Rationalism: all knowledge can be gained through reason alone - truth is intellectual not
sensory; is not logic because logic is concerned with inductive reasoning and statistics, but
not with the meaning of life
> Empiricism: all knowledge comes from sensory experience, life begins as a blank slate;
direct sensory experience produces simple ideas and simple ideas become associated =
complex ideas
• Birth of experimental psychology
• Experience determines mental development (associationism)
- Ebbinghaus: mental processes like memory can be measured (ch 9)
- Thorndike: law of effect = first general statement about nature of associations
- Watson: empiricist, little Albert experiment - blank slate, I can turn a baby into anything
- Penfield: opposed behaviorism and focussed on biology; montreal procedure: treating
epilepsy by surgically destroying neurons in the brain that produce seizures
> Open-brain stimulations while patients are awake to determine the damage if taken away
> Created maps of sensory & motor cortices
,CNS RL SUMMARY 2018 3
- Hebb: convinced that biology and psychology can not be separated
> Revolutionized the understanding of learning: neurons that fire together, wire together
> The connection patterns of single processing units make up the ever-changing algorithms
determining the brains response to a stimulus
> Brain is active all the time, outside inputs can only modify the ongoing activity
> Build the basis for artificial neural networks
- Milner: Penfields student, provided first anatomical proof for multiple memory systems
- Miller: change of mind from behaviorism to cognitive psychology, “the bias is behavioristic“
> Magical number 7, +/- 2
- Chomsky: the sequential predictability of speech follows from adherence to grammatical and not
probabilistic rules
> Associationism can not explain how language is learned; language is innate and universal
- Miller then set out to understand how the brain works as an integrated whole (explaining both
brain and mind) - which later developed into cognitive neuroscience
1.4 THE INSTRUMENTS OF NEUROSCIENCE
- Noninvasive techniques to studying how the brain enables the mind
The electroencephalograph
- Einthoven: string galvanometer: makes photographic recordings of electrical activity
Measuring blood flow in the brain
- Mosso: studied patients with skull defects and noticed that pulsations in the brain increased
locally during mental activities > inferred that blood-flow followed function
- Kety: inserted gas to follow the blood flow > provided basis for PET
Computerized axial tomography (CAT)
- Vallebona and Olendorf: first outlining concepts later used for CT > series of x-rays
reconstructed into a three-dimensional picture
- Hounsfield: first CAT scanner
- Good for detail (tumors), says little about function
Positron emission tomography (PET) and radioactive tracers
- Provides information about functions
- Insert radioactive substances into blood and see where the molecules concentrate and start to
decay of its radioactivity
> Tracers are then measured over time, allowing inferences about metabolism over time
- The problem with radioactive isotopes of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and fluorine is that their half-
life is measured in minutes
, CNS RL SUMMARY 2018 4
- Glucose has a half-life that is amenable for PET imaging: giving precise values of energy
metabolism
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
- Based on principle of nuclear magnetic resonance: protons in a molecule line up when placed in
a magnetic field > this equilibrium is disturbed when under radio impulses > inducing a
measurable voltage in a receiver coil > voltage changes as a function of proton’s environment:
analyzing the voltages provides information about the examined tissue
- First MRI: injection of contrast material into bloodstream, produced excellent anatomical images
and could be extended to show function by combining it with physiology germane
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
- Functional activity induces increases in blood flow but not a corresponding increase in oxygen
consumption
- Systems become visible due to the contrast provided by deoxygenated hemoglobin, however on
100% O2 this contrast disappears > thus contrast dependent on blood oxygen levels
> BOLD (blood-oxygen level-dependent) contrast was born
> Birth of fMRI
- Comparing between brains still remained difficult: averaging blood-flow across patients solved
this problem
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