Cognitive Neuroscience and Functional Neuroanatomy

Vocabulary-style study flashcards covering key terms, historical experiments, functional neuroanatomy, cortical mapping, and subcortical structures from Cognitive Neuroscience.

Broca's Aphasia

A condition resulting from injury or stroke to the left inferior frontal cortex, characterized by preserved comprehension and ability to copy words, but an inability to express full sentences, retrieve spontaneous words, or write.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A language disorder caused by brain damage that results in severe impairment of speech comprehension, leading to babbling, nonsense responses, inability to read or write, and echoing or imitating spoken questions without understanding them.

Coronal Slice

An anatomical brain viewing plane that cuts vertically from head-on, producing cross-sections similar to slices of bread.

Axial Slice

An anatomical brain viewing plane taken horizontally from a bird's-eye perspective.

Sagittal Slice

An anatomical brain viewing plane taken from the side profile, oriented from left to right.

Wilder Penfield

A surgeon (1891–1976) who conducted experiments using artificial electrical brain stimulation on awake patients to map motor and speech functions, evoking a mental sense of brain activity without direct sensation of physical stimulation.

Gray Matter

Nervous tissue in the brain and spinal cord that contains the neuronal cell bodies.

White Matter

Nervous tissue consisting of neuronal axons wrapped in myelin.

Myelin

A fatty substance covering axons that serves as insulation and increases the conduction velocity of nerve impulses.

Fissure / Sulcus

Interchangeable terms used to describe a groove on the surface of the cerebral cortex.

Gyrus

A convolution, ridge, or fold on the surface of the cerebral cortex.

Encephalization Quotient (EQ)

A measure of relative brain size scaled in relation to total body weight across different species.

Corpus Callosum

The major nerve fiber bundle structure that connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres.

Precentral Gyrus

The region of the frontal lobe functioning as the primary motor cortex, controlling voluntary motor output on the opposite side of the body.

Postcentral Gyrus

The region of the parietal lobe functioning as the primary somatosensory cortex, receiving sensory information from the opposite side of the body.

Frontal Lobe

The anterior lobe of the cerebral cortex involved in motor movement planning, memory aspects, and the inhibition of inappropriate behavior.

Parietal Lobe

The cerebral lobe responsible for processing bodily somatosensory inputs and sensations.

Temporal Lobe

The inferior cerebral lobe dedicated to auditory perception (hearing) and advanced visual processing.

Occipital Lobe

The posterior lobe of the cerebral cortex primarily dedicated to visual processing.

Association Areas

Cortical regions that integrate information from multiple sources and are not exclusively dedicated to primary sensory or motor processing.

Brain Metabolic Requirement

The brain utilizes $20\%$ of cardiac blood flow and lacks internal oxygen or glucose storage, causing loss of consciousness or death upon supply disruption.

Reflex Arc

A neural circuit comprising sensory receptors in skin, an afferent neuron passing through the dorsal-root ganglion, an interneuron in the spinal cord, and an efferent neuron signaling an effector muscle.

Limbic System

A set of brain structures—including the cingulate gyrus, hypothalamus, anterior thalamic nuclei, hippocampus, and amygdala—implicated in emotion, motivation, learning, memory, and autonomic regulation.

Hippocampus

A subcortical limbic structure composed of archicortex that plays an essential role in learning and memory.

Basal Ganglia

A network of subcortical nuclei—including the globus pallidus, caudate nucleus, putamen, subthalamic nucleus (STN), and substantia nigra—that modulates motor action via loops with the frontal lobes, and is implicated in Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases.

Hypothalamus

A subcortical structure critical for emotional behavior and homeostasis that regulates the autonomic nervous system in conjunction with the pituitary and adrenal glands.

Autonomic Nervous System

A division of the peripheral nervous system consisting of the sympathetic branch (mediating flight-or-fight actions such as dilating pupils and accelerating heart rate) and parasympathetic branch (mediating rest-and-digest actions such as constricting pupils and slowing heart rate).

Anatomical Directions in Animals

Standard directional descriptors used in neuroanatomy including Rostral (anterior/towards the nose), Caudal (posterior/towards the tail), Dorsal (superior/towards the back), and Ventral (inferior/towards the belly).