Injured brain areas scenarios - ap psyc

Anna can sometimes have trouble controlling her emotions, and she has little ability to think ahead or organize plans that she can then follow – so she is usually running late for meetings with teachers and friends. She also has trouble avoiding distractions and often has difficulty delaying gratification (short-term vs. long-term thinking), especially when it comes to getting her schoolwork completed on time.

frontal lobe

Deena has been in a coma for years and shows no signs of waking up – during that time she has been on life support.

RAS

Lola is unmotivated to carry out organized sequences of actions to satisfy basic needs, such as finding food when she should be eating or covering up with a warm coat when it’s freezing outside.

Hypothylmus

After his boxing career ended, Thurgood gradually lost the ability to understand others when they spoke to him – the sounds in speech were heard as gibberish, as if the phonetics of others’ speech were mixing together.

Wernicke’s Area

Judy fell while skiing this past winter. When she fell, she hit the back of her head very sharply against some packed snow and ice. She now has difficulty moving about, and her movements are jerky and she has to concentrate hard to make even the most basic movements and maintain her balance.

Cerebellum

Kip was in a car accident recently. He seems to be doing alright except that he has a very difficult time remembering things. He can recall things that happened in his life prior to the accident, but he really struggles to form new memories.

Hippocampus

Shawna took a part-time job in the evenings working in a small factory. While working, the factory caught fire and there was an explosion that caused a small piece of metal to lodge deeply in her left frontal lobe. Although she made a complete recovery otherwise, her ability to use language was forever changed. She could only utter one or a few words in succession without mumbling or getting her word order mixed up – her doctor says she’s suffering from aphasia.

Broca’s Area

You are in a parking garage outside of Lucas Oil Stadium at 2am when a man in a hockey mask jumps out from behind one of the vehicles. Which brain area would cause the fight-flight-freeze stress response system to activate?

RAS

Your grandmother has begun to lose her spatial abilities—she gets lost in the neighborhood where she has spent her whole life, she can no longer read a map, she can’t put dishes or clean laundry away because she no longer knows where things go in her home of 40 years. What part of the brain mediates these spatial abilities?

Pariental lobe

Ben shows extremely confused thinking, scrambled word order (word salad), lack of planning and disordered attention of the sort characterizes schizophrenia. He also hears voices telling him to harm himself. Which TWO brain areas of the cerebral cortex might help to explain these issues?

Temporal lobe and Frontal lobe

Ever since she had a brain tumor removed from deep inside her brain, Rosie has been quick to anger and aggression with those in her family. She also cries a lot more than she used to.

Amygdala

Jean has synesthesia – for her this means seeing certain letters as specific colors, and when she looks at numbers she hears corresponding notes in music. And when she eats sour foods, she notices a tingling sensation on her skin.

Thalamus

When Bob’s car was T-boned crossing an intersection, he suffered pretty severe lateral whiplash as well as smashing his head through the glass on the driver’s side window. He reported symptoms of a numb and tingling feeling in his right leg, although there was no nerve damage or puncture wounds. He also claimed the leg wouldn’t bend and move properly while walking at times. Beyond that, he began to have trouble orienting his body in the physical space around him. On multiple occasions when attempting to sit in a chair, he has missed and fallen to the floor. Which brain area is most likely suffering damage?

Parietal lobe