AP Psych Brain

Brainstem

Central core of the brain beginning where the spinal chord swells as it enters the skull. Automatic functions.

Thalamus

Sensory switchboard—all but smell

Reticular formation

Arousal/alertness, sleep

Pons

Relay/message station for brain

Medulla

Breathing, digestion, heartbeat, swallowing

Cerebellum

Processing sensory input, coordinating movement output & balance, enabling nonverbal learning and memory

Hippocampus

Memory formation, organizations, storage

Limbic system

Hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus. Memory, emotions, drives

Amygdala

Eating, drinking, body temp, controls pituitary gland, emotion and reward

Longitudinal fissure

Separates 2 halves of the brain

Frontal lobe

Planning, thinking, decision-making, higher level thinking

Motor cortex

Controls all voluntary movement in the body

Somatosensory

Receives opposite half of body’s skin and muscles

Parietal lobe

Mediating attention

Occipital

Specialized for visual processing

Temporal lobe

Auditory processing, understanding speech, listening to music

Auditory cortex

Receives and processes sound

Contralateral

Right half of brain sends and receives information from the left half of the body, and the left half of brain sends and receives information from the right half of the body.

Broca’s area

Frontal lobe of left hemisphere ONLY—helps with speech formation

Wernickle’s area

Temporal lobe of left hemisphere ONLY—helps understand speech

Left hemisphere

language

Corpus callosum

Narrow band of nerve fibers that connects the 2 hemispheres

Neurogenesis

Brain’s ability to form new neurons

Plasticity

Brain’s ability to change and reorganize based on experience

Neuroplasticity

Helps recover from brain injury

Ablation

Surgical removal of parts of the brain

Deep lesioning

When doctors destroy brain tissue by using a targeted microelectrode

ESB

Electrical stimulation of the brain, electrode to activate brain tissue through mild electrical stimulation

Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Research method that uses electrodes stuck to the head to detect, amplify, and record brain waves

Angiogram

A procedure that uses a mildly radioactive dye injected into the bloodstream, while an x-ray is taken to show blood flow through the brain

CT scan

Moving x-ray collected by a computer and formed into an image of the brain

MRI

Magnetic fields to produce cross-sectioned images of the brain

Position emission tomogram (PET)

Injecting a mildly radioactive glucose into the bloodstream which will measure brain activity and function