hi my name is Nicole McIntyre and I'd like to talk to you about psychology psychology is interesting to study because of how it relates to other Sciences into the real world today let's study the human brain the brain is easily the most intricate and interesting psychological phenomenon that we know if you're taking AP Psychology an intal level psychology class in college or if you're just curious about the most important thing that makes us human you'll want to get to know the brain the brain is a part of the nervous system or more specifically the central nervous system the CNS is comprised of the brain and the spinal cord and it makes all the big decisions for your body but what those big decisions are and how it makes them is complicated as you probably imagine it's very difficult to study brain activity the brain does nothing on the outside to indicate anything it might be doing on the inside this is why we use technology to try and find connections between the brain and behavior we have eegs CT and pet scans MRI and fmri machines all of which provide many details about the brain structure but only some of which the EEG pet scan and fmri show us exactly how the brain functions now back before we had this kind of technology and even now an important way in which we study the brain is through accidents in 1848 a railroad worker named Phineas Gage was involved in a gunpowder accident that sent a metal rod through the front part of his skull though he miraculously survived and retained his ability to function completely as before the brain damage to his frontal L somehow altered his entire personality he was no longer himself but rather mean emotional and impulsive and so researchers concluded that the areas in which the brain was damaged must have controlled Behavior the idea that different areas of the brain control different parts of behavior is called brain localization and brain localization can help us divide the brain into separate categories so that we can study both its structure and function there are three major parts of the brain the hindbrain midbrain and forebrain Each of which serve different purposes the hindbrain rests at the top of the spinal cord and is the oldest most ancient part of the brain it Evolved first and has kept us alive by controlling our most basic biological functions it consists of the brain stem the central connection between the spinal cord and our skull the medulla which controls involuntary but necessary actions such as our breathing blood pressure and heart rate the ponds which passes neural information between the three brain regions and helps coordinate movement such as facial expression the reticular activating system that controls arousal or our alertness the thalamus which receives and relay sensory information and our cerebellum which means little brain because it controls many important things like muscle movement balance and motions and because it looks like a literal little brain attached to the underside of our hind brain the midbrain follows sitting just above the spinal cord and just below the forebrain and primarily functions using sensory information to coordinate simple movements its major components are the tectum and tegmentum the brain's roof and floor lastly is the forebrain containing our lyic system or the emotional center of our brain you may recall that the forbrain is where Phineas gauge sustained the most damage had the rod hit him any lower he may have died but instead he just changed this is because the lyic system contains three very important things that allow for higher brain function and human behavior the hippocampus is involved in processing new learning and new memories the amydala is more involved in the expression of emotions such as anger and frustration and the hypothalamus controls many things such as our body's temperature water balance and hunger our sympathetic nervous system and endocrine system and even our sex drive and sleeping patterns the forbrain is essentially the most human part of our brain and it's the part that we're most familiar with part of it is the cerebral cortex all that pink and wrinkly stuff that we know and love this is the gray matter full of densely packed neurons that cover the entire brain as we grow and develop our cerebral cortex grows as well allowing it to wrinkle even more and fill our brain with more and more neural connections the cerebral cortex covers our two hemispheres left and right each specializing in different functions which is what we call brain lateralization or hemispheric specialization the left hemisphere is involved in language processing and logical tasks while the right hemisphere is more involved in creative and spatial reasoning the hemisphere are connected by the Corpus colossum a very important band of nerve fibers between them that allows them to work together but neuropsychologist Roger Sperry discovered that each hemisphere can also operate independently of the other in split brain patients these patients are so-called because of a surgery they obtained to have their Corpus colossum cut in order to treat severe seizures okay so bear with me I know that you've been given a lot of ways to categorize the brain already but the cerebral cortex can still be broken down even further within each hemisphere of the cortex are four distinct Globes the frontal parietal temporal and occipital these loes are categorized based on how they receive sensory information and control muscle movements what comes in is your sensory cortex and what goes out is your motor cortex in the frontal lobe higher level thinking takes place living right behind your eyes is your prefrontal cortex which can be thought of as your brain's boss of sorts It's associated with executive thought processing and emotional control it thinks ahead to pursue success and to for see consequence it allows for judgment abstract thought a lot of our personality and even speech because also within the frontal lobe but typically only in the left hemisphere is one of the brain's two language processing centers the broka area was discovered by Paul broka as able to control speech production when he noticed that damage to this area caused expressive Aphasia or the inability to speak in the parial lobe we have our somato sensory cortex or as I called it before our sensory cortex which receives touch Sensations as well as information about our body's temperature and position the occipital loes are furthest from our eyes but how is our visual cortex when your right eye sends visual information to the brain it's interpreted by your right occipital lobe and when your left eye does so it's interpreted by your left occipital lobe and the temporal lob's right by our ears process sound sound unlike sight is not lateralized and when it enters our left ear is processed in both hemispheres and this is also where our second language processing center is located waki's area this Center interprets speech and when damaged cause receptive aasia or the inability to comprehend speech the rest of the cerebral cortex is made up of association areas which deal with complicated sophisticated thinking the stuff that you're always trying to get better at like learning remembering or being funny and though while because the brain is localized and has these unimaginably complex functions that come from its very specific structure it's still somewhat flexible the brain's plasticity is what allows it to adapt grow and heal itself I know that was a lot of biology for a discussion on psychology but psychology is very complex and has a lot of different parts to it not unlike the human brain itself thank you for listening today and learning about the brain structure and function goodbye