neuroscience

Which brain area is responsible for speech production?

Broca’s area

Which brain area is responsible for language comprehension?

Wernicke’s area

What does structural MRI (sMRI) primarily measure?

Water content in tissue to show brain structure

What does functional MRI (fMRI) primarily measure?

Blood oxygen levels (BOLD signal) to show brain activity

What is the main role of gray matter?

Neural processing in neuron cell bodies

What is the main role of white matter?

Connecting brain regions via myelinated axons for communication

Define brain plasticity in one phrase.

The brain’s ability to adapt and change in response to experience

What was the key finding of the 2000 London taxi-driver study?

Taxi drivers had larger hippocampal volumes linked to spatial memory

Why can’t cross-sectional studies like the taxi-driver and musician studies prove causation?

They compare different groups at one time point rather than tracking change over time

What did the 2004 juggler study show after two months of practice?

Increased gray-matter volume in areas for motion anticipation and spatial perception

Which brain structure showed increased density in medical students during intense study (2006)?

The hippocampus

How did regular meditation affect brain age in the 2006 study?

Meditators’ brains appeared about 7.5 years younger than controls

What is cortical thickness?

Distance between gray–white boundary and outer cortical surface

What does a higher degree of cortical gyrification indicate?

More folding

Which metric from DTI indicates white-matter integrity?

Fractional anisotropy (FA) — higher values mean better integrity

How many major white-matter fibre tracts are commonly identified in the brain?

Twenty: nine in each hemisphere and two in the corpus callosum

How is brain age estimated from MRI scans?

By machine-learning models trained on thousands of brains to predict age from structural features