hey greetings and welcome back class we're going to go over the second part of the chapter on um neuroscience and biological foundations for your class today and last time we talked about neurons and neurotransmitters and in this lecture we're going to go over brain regions and we'll get into the very end things like hemispheric specialization and this really cool video i want you guys to check out on the severed corpus callosum so away we go so in this video we're going to talk about like i said a specific brain regions and i'm going to go over kind of just what those regions are correlated with as far as behavior is concerned and mental processes are concerned so you know behavior how we move about in our environment and then also thoughts and feelings that we might have and some other things like basic autonomic types of functioning within our body that you don't have to you don't have to think about where things happen automatically so we'll just kind of start deep you know deep down in the brain stem and we'll work our way up into the cortices and then at that point we'll talk about just kind of kind of um like i said different phenomenon of behavior thought and emotion that certain areas of the brain are updated with away we go all right so here it is here's a picture of a brain this is it it's this mysterious organ inside of us that you know can fit within you know if you cup your two hands together you could fit within your hand uh weighs you know just around three pounds um and just amazing you know amazing in its function to do so much with such little you know metabolic intake needed to do so so we'll break this down we'll break the brain down we'll talk about some basic parts of the brain and i'm reminding myself this is an intro class so we're just going to go over some like very kind of general association associations with these brain regions and again just a reminder if you like this if you want to go in more in depth there are classes even a bc you can take and after this one you can go in much more depth about about your nervous system in neuroscience so you can take psych b6 and you can go in great depth but for us it's an intro so we're gonna go uh much more shallow than that right just kind of give you a taste so let's start here with the the brain stem or the older brain structures uh sometimes you might hear this part of the brain referred to as the reptilian brain um you don't hear that language a lot anymore but you know it's still it's still there some people still say that if they say the reptilian brain like really what they mean is that you know this is the oldest part of the brain and most most primitive even those primitive organisms you know that have a spine have uh these same components or something very similar to the same components that serve the same type of function so we haven't gotten into like you know the specialty yet and kind of what makes humans unique you know we're not going to get there until we get up to some parts of the midbrain but the cortices for sure so at this point in the brainstem like i said it's the oldest part of the brain and it really it begins where the spinal cord swells and enters into the skull right and this is responsible really which i want you guys to think are your automatic survival functions right so it makes sense that nearly all all living organisms that have a spine have these same components because they're just important for keeping us alive right and a lot of autonomic types of functions that you don't have to think about that just just happen automatically for you right so let's break this down we're looking here at this picture of the pawns and the reticular formation medulla the cerebellum and let's look at those uh one at a time we'll throw in there they're not on this list the thalamus and um the thalamus and yeah i think i think that's enough until we get to the midbrain okay so let's go look at those sections in a little more detail so here's an image here this the sketch and we're talking about the bottom part there labeled the medulla the very bottom there and like it says here it's the base of the brain stem and for the medulla this is a lot of autonomic functioning associated with the medulla so like it says here in the on the slide like your heartbeat heartbeat and your breathing but also like circulation and regulating your reflexes uh your blood pressure your heart rate your muscle tone all those things that we take for granted that maybe we we don't need we don't want to think about if you had to think about all these things going throughout you know your entire life you just be exhausted because you would never get anything done you just be thinking about stay alive stay alive right so all these things that occur automatically um you know everything that has a reptilian brain or really a you know a brain stem has those same types of functions um let me skip something here oh i don't have a slide for that um right above the medulla though i don't have it labeled right here if you can see my mouse cursor where i'm hovering over it right in the middle where it kind of looks like it's kind of crimped together on one edge and this picture looks almost like a pie crust is what it makes me think of that area is called the pons and the imponse is really important too for regulating things like sleep and arousal uh but also for movement right the pawns is important for communicating information about movement and what's interesting about the pawns is that um you know if many of you guys probably haven't you've ever like looked at a brain the pons actually kind of moves right to left where other parts of the brain don't do that i've had some friends in neuroscience that are trying to get to the bottom of that like why is this one structure seem to be seem to have some kind of motion right to left a bit while the others don't they don't think it's attached any kind of musculature where it's actually you know you can voluntarily move it right to left but but perhaps it moves involuntarily uh don't know um that's the thing about the brain and the nervous system there's just so much left to learn there's just one little thing to focus on the other thing about the pawns is that it helps to connect the brainstem with the cerebellum which we'll get to in a moment now let's move up to the top of the brainstem and this this area here is called the thalamus and the thalamus is important um you know it says here that it it directs messages to the sensory areas in the cortex and that's definitely something that we take for granted that the thalamus is capable of um one analogy i've heard is that it's like a way station for your brain but we don't really know what way stations are anymore in 2020 so you know we call this like a bus station maybe that would work um but the idea is that all incoming sensory information with the exception of smell but like taste and sight and sound and touch all this sensory info you know passes through the thalamus before it goes to uh like cortices for the midbrain and the cortices for like we're considering higher order processing of that sensory info but what the thalamus really does and does well is to sort that type of information and make sure that make sure that it goes to those correct areas within the cortices so that you can perceive that chemical information as sight and as sound and as touch and taste right and that's another thing we take for granted what if your thalamus you know was not operating correctly then you might get information from the environment that's that's related to your vision but it goes to your auditory cortex and so then you look at things you know and they're making sounds at you instead of giving you visual information so you can imagine how confusing life could be should that happen right okay so yeah we can take that one for granted um that could produce some form of effect called synesthesia which is kind of an interesting concept um it's a little different because it's happening in a different way than if you're using some kind of like hallucinogenic drug and it creates those effects too it's it's impacting the thalamus for sure um but but you don't have to have drugs some people it's very rare have uh disorders where they have these types of the first they think are like hallucinations and they find out they have some damage to their thalamus and it's creating kind of this this mix-up this mix-up of signals so take that for granted for sure i know there's some musicians i've read about that say they have synesthesia and it's due to um kind of impairment to their thalamic regions like uh who's just reading about oh um john mayer you know john mayer the the songwriter this guitar player right um he was talking about how music to him gives him a color and that sounds like a like kind of cool thing to say that he was like no it's actually he said before he learned how to use it it was really intrusive and really complicated for the rest of his other functions you know within his normal life but that when he's writing a song he said he can try to keep as far as like the mood of the song goes if the song is actually giving him like visual information so he's actually like seeing a color with his music if he tries to keep it all like within the realm and the scope of like one color then he says he has a good idea that that song is dealing within the realm of like one emotion but if all of a sudden it switches to a different color you know something's something's going on now the song is like out of the theme kind of off track but that was that's pretty interesting okay now let's move on to a couple more parts of the brain stem sometimes called behind brain so this area here kind of looks like it's inside right inside the medulla and pons and thalamus in the middle there looks like it has a stem inside of it this is called the reticular formation and the reticular formations is interesting right it's the central core of the brain stem and it helps to regulate things here like it says uh like in your arousal levels like how excited you know you can become and then um you were talking about the autonomic nervous system the sympathetic and para sympathetic branches in the last chapter so some of that is beginning you know is is happening here with a reticular formation um for some people they have like um problems with with the functioning of their of their autonomic nervous system responses and for some of them it's an issue deep within the brain stem within the reticular formation where you know it's difficult for them to kind of excite themselves on purpose or also to calm down like willfully like it takes a lot of practice for them to do that like they kind of just go boom you know the autonomic system kind of kicks in like a reflex it's really hard for them to calm down and for the other people like where it might be good for you to kind of pump yourself up to prepare for something like that can be hard to do and sometimes people have damage to different areas of their brain but um sometimes to this particular formation so that's what we mean by arousal but also for kind of the basic uh everyday cycle of arousal with kind of you know waking up and feeling sleepy kind of in that cycle then you know that can be off for people who have damaged their reticular formation too but another another big thing that that reticular formation is associated with is uh regulating pain perception right so feeling feeling pain that physical sensation of pain and then there's been some new studies suggesting that it's not just the physical sensations of pain but can affect your perception of like the emotional perceptions of pain as well right but primarily like the physical pain is what we're going to associate reticular formation with and that's a good thing right like you want to feel pain when something hurts because you learn you know you learn that way like okay you know be cautious or take precautions when interacting with this potential danger right okay so there's a reticular formation now let's move on to the cerebellum there we go so the cerebellum this isn't the best picture here but the cerebellum is in the back of the brain here kind of on the bottom you can see it's behind this spinal cord right here and it translates to little brain right it's attached to the rear of the brain stem and this is important for the coordination of movement right coordination of your movements in space so it has to do also with understanding kind of where you are in space so integrating all that sensory information related to where you are in space but crucial though from for movement and your sense of equilibrium and balance um we take this for granted too that when we're you know walking around day-to-day even right now if you're like walking around whatever room you're in or if you were to get up and walk like the idea that you know you're not so stiff and rigid that you can't walk right and you're not so like loose that you just fall to the ground or a lot of that is means that you have a functioning cerebellum a lot of things can affect your balance in that way but the the cerebellum processes that information like primarily it's also one of the most densely packed areas for neurons within your brain because of all the integration that goes on of different types of information right so a lot of integration goes on there it's also the first area of the brain that is affected by alcohol consumption right so uh what's what's interesting about that it makes me think like uh when i was younger and i had friends who were just really they really had drinking problems right i'm just gonna be honest um and we would go out sometimes we'd be at a bar and i was never much of a drinker you know i'll have like one or two and just kind of nurse them all night and i'm good but my buddies you know they would drink a lot and i remember um this one night we were sitting at a bar in downtown bakersfield and we're all sitting there and i'm i know i'm not drunk because i don't drink very much but i'm looking at my friends and i'm like man they're pounding them and um one of my friends is before like uber right he goes i'm gonna call someone to come get me like i'm thinking very responsible good for you i look at my other friend like and what about you you know and he's like i can drive he said something like you know i'm not one of those guys that's got so much pride that you know i'm not aware of when i can't drive i know what i'm capable of i know where my limits are i think it's what he said i know where my limits are if i was over the limit i wouldn't drive i don't have that much pride i was like okay you know and we're sitting at the bar you know we've been there for like you know i don't know like an hour or so and i was like why don't you remember saying do you want you stand up and see if you still think that's true you know of course he stood up and he kind of went wobbled around and he goes okay all right i didn't know how drunk i was until i tried to stand up and move around it's like ah right so he definitely had you know impairment in his cerebellum his you know impairing his motor skills to say the least right okay um let's move up a little further into the brain so now we're moving out of the brainstem or the hindbrain and into the midbrain area in the limbic system so the limbic system um you know really isn't isn't like an area you don't have like a limbic within your brain it's a connected network of structures right so including the hypothalamus your pituitary gland amygdala uh your hippocampus hippocampus will talk much more about in chapters later on because it plays a crucial role uh in memory so in informing storing and retrieving memories but especially in the potentiation between short-term and long-term memory that means like turning short-term memories into long-term memories that's like that's all hippocampal functioning so crucial uh for us and you know our success as a species you know this ability of memory though very fallible which we'll learn later on okay so let's look at these parts of the limbic system or the midbrain kind of one at a time and just briefly talk about uh talk about them so let's start with how about the amygdala there it is so if you're looking at this picture i have here on the screen the amygdala is that dark purple part and this is all lateralized by the way so i know we're looking at this image like you know as like a cross section like we cut the brain directly in half and we're looking at one side but you have this system on both your right and left hemisphere so you have you have two of these right so you've got this amygdala in the right and the left kind of creating this type of shape in your head almost like horns of some kind on the inside right um it's about the size of a lima bean if you want to know how big it is and for the amygdala um really what you can do is associate this with like extremely base emotions that are that are critical again for our survival and our success as a species and they're primarily negative emotions though with fear and anger but i would say negative emotions because we often don't don't like that you know however necessary emotions maybe even for like even for our success is knowing like what to be afraid of and and learning to regulate anger and that kind of thing so that's what i want you to think when you look at the the amygdala um have we learned things like these different brain areas i say this now and what they're associated with through uh in multiple ways like now of course we can do brain imaging research we can we can look with functional mris at you know what part of the brain is being stimulated in different different types of situations in older studies it might be much more crude than that if things they don't do today where if you you know lesioned parts of the brain you know what kind of abilities does that person's or if you stimulate the type of the brain then what kind of what kind of experience do they have and can they report you know back to you as it's being stimulated a lesioning means literally going with like an electrode and turn it on at such a high voltage that it would burn it out and just like you know destroy that part of the brain essentially so like i said we don't do that you know we as if i ever did but um researchers don't do that kind of thing today on humans so we learned those things from the past now they can have other ways where they got fmris they might use a transcranial magnetic stimulation that's a big word right it's a big machine that basically blasts a magnetic pulse through your brain and they can really pinpoint it with software to hit specific types of you know just specific targets within the brain and go okay so that's temporarily and i mean temporary like seconds you know kind of like offline like not working right now because of this magnetic pulse and then what kind of what do you lose the ability to do within that you know within that moment and oh the other thing is some people have you know damage to these areas um and i mean it can be really really really rare for some of these areas that are important for like a like really really base uh phenomenon that has an impact on our behavior so i have an example of that i was just reading this article and this was an article about a disease it's a genetic disorder extremely rare you probably don't know anybody that has this but you know it's extremely rare disease but there's case studies done on these people with what's called erbach vice disease it's u r b a c h dash w i e t h e which is pretty interesting erbach vice disease it's a genetic disorder like i said extremely rare and what happens is for people that have this disease they get a calcification of their amygdala right on both sides of their brain so essentially if it's calcificate is calcified you know i mean it stops working so they basically lose this ability to process things like fear and anger and you can see what their lives are like without without feeling afraid and without feeling angry so some things i wrote down from this article to tell you guys about was that in these case studies they looked at six in this article so just six people but what they had in common was they didn't feel fear they weren't afraid of anything right they had no fear um they put them through different trials to see if they were afraid of things like public speaking um death uh heart beating too fast or being being judged negatively in social situations or when people were dangerous and were actually like confronting them if it was actors like confronting them with weapons and things like that they didn't they didn't react with a fear response which is really interesting right so instead you know what i was interested in they finally said at the end of the article was well how did they react like what do they actually do in those situations and uh instead instead of fear they were curious right almost like the opposite of what you want you know if you know like okay that thing is scary i should be scared of it then you would avoid it they have the opposite response they have like you know a curiosity so like the cognitive parts are curious and then behaviorally they approach the thing that they're afraid of which is interesting some of them said that they were even excited about it others just said they were kind of like almost like uh you know not conscious of their behavior they're just acting kind of automatically and approaching the thing that would scare the rest of us right oh the other thing that they don't know why still at least as far as i could tell from the research that i was reading is that uh they also it affects their vocal cords so people that have this herbac wife disease for some reason it you know affects their processing of fear but then also their vocal cords would give gave them all this very similar voice it's kind of like a hollow sounding like like child's voice really bizarre there is a cool podcast about this maybe i'll maybe i'll try to find it and post it for you through invisibilia is what's the name of the podcast used to be on npr if it's still on but they interviewed somebody that had or two people i think that had this disease and you could you can hear their voice you know i guess i could try to mimic it for you but you know it's like something like this it was like real hollow and like baby like it was really strange to hear someone talk that way and then also to know that person doesn't feel fear if that's interesting to you but the vocal cord thing the scientists are not so sure why um still but it doesn't look like it's something you can develop right they're going to develop urban vith disease unless you have a strong genetic predisposition for it okay let's move on so we got the amygdala i think fear and anger and let's move to the hypothalamus and this image i'm using in the sketch it's that light blue area here i don't know if you can see my mouse cursor or not but if you can i'm trying to kind of circle around it hover around it so that's your hypothalamus um it's important for like maintenance let's say a regulation of lots of activities like those that have to do with hunger and thirst and the overall regulating the temperature of your body the control of your emotions like a lot of that comes from the hypothalamus another big thing is that it governs the endocrine system right so it governs the pituitary gland which is kind of like in charge of the entire endocrine system all your hormones right but the way it's always well you could think about this and this is always the joke that you know psychologists make that not only is the regulator of your you know basic biological needs controls your autonomic nervous system um that means it regulates the four the four f's right so it regulates fight flight feed and fu ornicate yeah you thought i was gonna say but there you go right so all of those types of urges those things that help you regulate the feeling of hunger and then when it's satiated the feeling of thirst and when it's satiated um the feeling of fight or flight and like kind of when that passes through the autonomic nervous system and also um with the urge for procreation or i wouldn't say that now for sex right the urge for sex and the way they would learn this uh this one there's some really old studies where they would actually take different monkeys and they would lesion parts of their hypothalamus and they found out oh okay if we stimulate this area then what happens is they have like this uncontrollable desire to eat and eat and eat and it kind of doesn't turn off and if you would allow them you know they would just keep eating until they died same thing with like sex they would keep having sex until until they died essentially and if you stimulated other parts of the hypothalamus and you got the opposite response like they no matter what they wouldn't eat no matter what they wouldn't want to have sex they wouldn't drink right so we learned you know scientists learned about the hypothalamus in that way by stimulating and damaging these areas um different types of animals and then we've seen through some case studies that you know works the same way in people since we have very similar structures all right so that's a big one um this is you know the stimulation of the the pleasure center of the brain to you know what what feels good to you so you know it has an effect on your dopaminergic and serotonergic systems if it feels good like that euphoric good that's dopamine if it feels good a more satiating way that's more related to serotonin and then some of these classic studies they would stimulate these areas and rats you know and they could press the lever as many times as they want to get to get that area to stimulate that area in their brain what they found was like these wraps would just keep pressing the lever and never stop until you know physically they couldn't take it okay so another thing we take for granted right these little areas of our brain things can go haywire all this regulation can you know can be maladaptive i'm missing here okay oh yeah the hypothalamus or the hippocampus we'll come back to the hippocampus more in in chapters down the line but for now just think you think hippocampus think memory okay right so now let's look at the the cortex let's look at the cortices here and these are the the cortex is where thoughts become to be more there's more integration there's more but there's also more specialization within the cortex and and a lot of interconnection still so you have all these interconnected neural cells that cover your cerebral hemispheres and you think about these as like the cortex is the the ultimate control and information processing center like on the planet right like brains are just amazing that way there's so much more we need to learn about them so this class we're making it simple we're just going to look at these in terms of lobes and talk about these general areas of the cortices and what they're associated with and you you might have picked some of this information up on on your way through your studies or even just through popular media okay so the four lobes let's look at the occipital first so it's the dark blue area of the brain in this image that i've got up for you you know it's the back of your head this is your primary visual cortex so if you feel kind of if you feel the back your head some people even have like a pronounced area of their skull back there you know where you kind of have that if you're like me i might have a shaved head so it's easy to feel they have this kind of divot and then just above that like my skull kind of protrudes out a little bit and it's covering up that occipital lobe in the back of my head like a crucial part of our our sensory experiences is vision and it's also the densest area of your skull so that might be you know nature's way of of us evolving to protect those visual centers because after all we're a very visual species okay so that area is protected from there after processing vision then the information goes to different parts of the brain some of it you know different parts of the brain for different types of visual information right so like where something is in space versus what something is are not the same pathway within your brain leaving the occipital lobe so that's interesting right so you could have damage and and be able to tell where something is but not what it is or the opposite you could have damage and not know what something is but you're aware of where it is bizarre huh and we'll talk a little bit more about that um i believe in the next couple chapters when we get to sensation perception okay so occipital lobe think vision right if you have damaged your occipital lobe it's going to impair your vision all right now moving kind of upward from the back so if you have your hand on the back of your head kind of move it up to the kind of crown of your head is what's called sometimes right up here in the kind of top back that's like right where my worst bald spot is right there i can feel it it's like oh i got hairs growing back and then nothing that's the spot that's my parietal lobe underneath there this is the somatosensory processing center of your brain so it's kind of in front of the occipital lobes and on top and on in front your sense of touch is integrated here with a lot of visual information and information about where your body is in space there's also i think i have on the next slide but if you can see my mouse here right where the green area of the parietal lobe comes in contact with in this picture right with the frontal lobe and purple like that area right there um that's an it's an in an area there where you get a lot of integration about um like your your motor cortex and your frontal lobe and then your sense of touch from your parallel where they communicate back and forth and it creates this sensory strip that goes really you know over the brain on both hemispheres right and left and this one has been pinpointed so well that you can put you know electrodes and different parts of the brain there and stimulate them and people will get like you know phantom sensations in different parts of their body or or if it's you know stimulated enough in the frontal lobe you know the more motor cortex actually get like movement they don't actually move that area of their body um so there you go important parts there so let's see let's look at so parietal think you know really the prologue um sense of touch and integrated with visual info bodies positioned in space and and integrated strongly with movement as well right so a lot of integration in these areas but think like touch primarily right occipitals vision parietal is your you know somatosensory and then the temporal lobes those are easy to find because you think auditory think ears and then right above your ears by your temples and going back to the occipital lobe that's your temporal lobe there kind of above your ears and going back toward your occipital lobe in the back so let's think about think about temples think temporal lobes right by your ears think auditory easy to remember that one um yes it's a major major auditory processing cortex uh damage this area may impair things like speech or language comprehension and and hearing kind of globally as well right and a lot of that is in the left hemisphere in fact the majority of it's on the left for certain types of what are called aphasia which is damage to areas of the left temporal lobe that can affect speaking or can affect understanding speech okay now let's look to the frontal the frontal lobe here this is in purple and this is the largest lobe and like i said before this is your primary motor cortex so very important for movement you know and muscle movement and then when we get into you know prefrontal prefrontal lobe then we're looking at things even more complex like uh empathy for example your your ability to kind of imagine what it's like to have the experience of somebody else you know without having to have it yourself or that's in the prefrontal cortex um but also the frontal or the prefrontal cortex is important for what we call a personality so if you think of personality as like a like a strategic behavioral plan that you have like here's my my go-to kind of script for how i behave to these types of situations and not everybody does that the same way but you probably have a way that you react to different types of situations like here's my go-to reaction for whatever reason you know it's it could be an automatic response where you know it is like only stemming from your biology but it's probably if we're talking about the frontal lobe it was more of a learned response there so if you think of personality as like a collection of those learned responses that make you unique in who you are damage to your your frontal lobe and especially in parts your prefrontal cortex can really change that can change the way that you kind of automatically react or that you've learned to react like or say implicitly or unconsciously react to reactions you know that can change so that damage these areas can also affect your ability to plan for the future to pay attention to organize information and like i said your personality is too there's been some famous famous people who have had damage to these areas and had impairment and it's changed them for the rest of their lives so i'm thinking of some celebrities right now like roseanne barr is one you know and i can't remember where i was reading this about her but she had she was hit by a car when she was in high school and she lost things like her impulse control so she wasn't always like this impulsive loudmouth kind of comedian person you know she wasn't like that really until after this car accident and then it affected her impulsivity but other things too she kind of lost some ability so think about the right hemisphere now to do like math and i guess she was really good at math and prided herself on on her mathematical kind of intellect and lost those kinds of abilities after she had frontal lobe damage from being hit by a car same with gary busey i don't know if you know that actor he was on some reality shows um before that he actually was a famous actor some of you are too young to know that and he was like a different person after he was in a motorcycle accident where um and he he's going to therapy about it and his documentary about him i watched it was very interesting where it started really like he kind of first wasn't aware of why people were treating him differently until he realized like oh my responses to these other people are not like everybody else's response it's like oh you know someone was telling him a sad story and he's just kind of looking at him like he's gleeful you know and kind of laughing about it he lost some of the ability to like empathize with that person to understand the emotions they were expressing um and you had to kind of ask them questions and and clarify like hey i do i do care i just don't know i don't always know that i'm showing it appropriately right but but he could kind of work on it and get better at which was kind of which was interesting right but big difference for him like before and after that motorcycle accident and damage to his frontal lobe all right now oh here it is this was talking about you know your somatos sensory cortex and your primary motor cortex right here and green and purple kind of running together this strip across your brain and that's we get a lot of integration of that information about you know what you're feeling on your body that tactile sensation that physical sensation of being touched and what things feel like and i mean you can do a lot of that it's pretty amazing when you can touch whatever's in front of you can feel if it's hot it's cold it's smooth or if it's textured right you can tell if it's hard or soft like you pick up all that automatically and then a lot of that how you respond to it right when you push harder or you pull away if it's hot right all that has to do with integrating information between your parietal lobe and your frontal lobe okay oh here we go all right so these slides are in here somewhere the other one i was talking about earlier too about your temporal lobe especially in the left hemisphere i mentioned aphasia um aphasia look at that on the slide there it is it's really a language impairment issue so there's different types of aphasia you can see in this area there's the broca's area there's the vernix area if you want to say it i think veronique was i camera austrian or german that's why i'm not saying wernick's i'm trying to show some respect but broca's area and vernix area discovered were two separate areas where you could have different types of aphasia and they discovered that some people who had damage to the broca's area they had impairment in their own ability to speak right and that comes in different different forms there's different types of damage to broca's areas and different types of aphasia as a result or sometimes there's you know not a lot of words created at all sometimes it's more like word salad sometimes it's just becoming like sounds um and then there's the varnish area which is impaired understanding of language so that's a strange one because people can have you know what they learned was that people when people had like a issues that were more gradual with damage to their veronique's area they started to lose understanding that meant they had a lot of practice with speaking so they could speak okay but they understand what was being said to them uh if it resembled a language at all right and then we'll also learn that okay language has these kind of basic rudimentary patterns to speech and language across cultures no matter what the language is there's like these rules to language if you presented information to them that had rules like there are in language then they had a really difficult time like following directions or understanding was being asked of them to do but they could express that to you right they could their speech wasn't impaired so that's interesting learn these two areas related to language but in different ways and you can have damage to one of those areas and not the other pretty interesting it makes me think all right if you had to choose yeah you guys think about that if you had to choose uh and you had to give one of these up right or maybe think of this way which one would you keep would you keep the ability to speak and create language or or would you keep the ability to understand language that's a tough one oh there's no good answer there right but i think if i had to pick man i don't know it'd be really frustrating either way really but i think i feel like you would feel or for me i would feel more lost if i couldn't comprehend and understand language that would be scarier i think than not being able to speak like it's still right then maybe i'd be okay or if i could still like do charades and express language i could pantomime it out then i'd be all right i think that i think i would keep my broca's hmm i don't know ask me tomorrow i might have a different answer okay so let's move on to um hemispheric specialization now and i'm showing you this picture because i want you to see down through the top of the brain so we imagine that we've sliced off the top of someone's brain and we're looking straight down at it that's what we're looking at here and you see that that piece in the middle right in the middle there that looks like right here that almost looks like a piece of bone right that actually is is all these axon fibers right when we talked about neurons before the long arm that axon that's what all these are they're just densely connected right so it almost looks like like really thick axons you're looking at some of them are thick but really these are all bundled together and they're communicating back and forth to the right and left hemispheres of the brain you know extremely fast so that it's kind of you know it's a false dichotomy i believe that we call people right brain people or left brain people because it kind of implies that you know one of your hemispheres isn't what isn't carrying its weight right or that it's not getting information or something like this and that's i mean that could be the case but for most of us it's not right most of us are all brained people we've got this this area almost like as thick as bone where these axon fibers are densely connected to each other communicating back and forth across the hemispheres and this area here is called the corpus callosum and it connects the two hemispheres together and though they're well there is specialization in separate halves of the brain um you know the connections are so dense that you should think of your brain is all like all one unit right um okay now i was going to tell you oh just tell you this so if you for some people they do have this area this corpus callosum that thick piece in the middle they do have that severed right so they have surgery where they actually cut it so there's less communication going between the right and left hemispheres of the brain in some cases like very little at all at least up in the cortices right um cortices and part of the midbrain too but you know that's that's rare that that would happen and typically if that occurs if that surgery takes place it's because people have severe epilepsy um epilepsy oh by the way i have epilepsy i haven't told you that and epilepsy is the different forms of seizures that people have therefore there's different types of epilepsy depending on like where you're affected how it impacts you how much of your brain is affected so like for me when i have seizures i have grand maul seizures but it's not it hasn't been able i haven't had a neurologist yet they could pinpoint like exactly what part of my brain the seizures are kind of coming from every time they look at my brain it looks normal to them so they've never i've never been in an mri mri when i've had a seizure and then the catch-22 is i'd be moving around so much because of the seizure they wouldn't get a good picture of it probably anyway but if when people have seizures and they've tried other things they've tried different types of treatments whether it's like you know diet behavioral and of course medications to help you know decrease or stop the seizures and nothing works then they might be candidates for you know split brain type of surgery to stop the caesar seizures because then you essentially don't have the chemical information is like cut in half by how much is communicated holistically with your brains they're severing the right and left hemispheres in those types of severe situations and then it's like it's almost like you do have two brains in your head and then they still communicate right the two halves of your brain but they do it out here it's almost like it's like you do the communication with your body but it doesn't happen internally right so it's like you learn from the communication with your body instead of like there being a constant interaction going back and forth between you internally and what you do externally in the outside world right so it's like you watch what you do in the outside world and you go huh why is my hand doing that right it takes time so when people have this type of surgery done it takes time for them to kind of learn how to function among other things just healing from the surgery but kind of learn how to function um not as long as you would think but for a while there there's some some really strange type of phenomena that can go on so i've seen videos where this man is trying to uh put a shirt on he's trying to button his shirt all the way up right and while one hand is like putting the buttons in place the other one is like undoing the buttons like right after it and he's not really aware that it's happening except for you can see it happening you can look down and see it but internally he's not aware of it happening like really strange issues like that so speaking of if that is interesting to you which i figured it would be i want you to go check out a video that i've put on our canvas page and i think i have in my slideshow because it doesn't really work too well there's no need for us to watch it right now and talk about it but it's right here and this is an older video but here's uh dr gazzonega and he's going to walk you through kind of everything i was just explaining and then show you some of his own research involving a split brain patient of his so you get to hear the patient talk about what it's like and then see him go through some studies and you can there's even parts where you can see him drawing with his hands or he's kind of like unaware of like what his hand is doing because his right left hemispheres are not really you know quote-unquote talking to each other okay so let's look at you know given that you're we're all whole-brained people there is cerebral specialization and so it's worth just looking at people always interested in this topic so you do have these two you know specialized halves that are connected by the corpus callosum that i mentioned earlier um the left hemisphere you know if you want to be kind of crude about this and it's not like this is the only place that these things happen in your brain but these are like extremely important parts of your brain you know for for processing uh this type of information so on the left you got like language speech and reading and writing and like logical thought your mathematical abilities you know a lot of that is in the left hemisphere right now in the right hemisphere it's more global processing a lot of like emotional expression and particularly negative emotions um also spatial per perception kind of where things are in space and how the size of things that you're looking at are uh oh a big one is the pattern recognition for faces so a lot of visual information in there right we're recognizing faces other patterns even patterns and things like song like in other types of emotions that's a lot of your right hemisphere processing other things as well but that's kind of like the things that set these two hemispheres apart from each other right so i think it's important to know like some i teach a stats class at bc and i teach it a lot and i'll have students write to me and they'll tell me like hey i just won't let you know i'm not going to do well in your class because i am a and they just like pick a hemisphere i don't think they even know they'll say i'm a left hemisphere person i'm a left brain person is what they'll say and i'm like do they know that that's where you know they're trying to tell me they don't like math i get it but do they know that's part of the brain that's important in fact maybe crucial for doing well at math but they say it because you know we tell people in our culture and it's not just ours it's many cultures that that your your your preferences are so tied to your hemispheres that you almost have this like biological deficit it's like telling someone to have brain damage i always think who told you that who told you that you're a left-brained person that you can't do math like who would limit you that way and we did a study when i was in college and we wanted to find out like when you hear that the most and once we went to elementary schools and we found that it was pretty much like whatever grade you start doing things like long division or like the the math you're doing starts to get a little more complex and then that's when the teachers start telling kids like oh don't worry about it you're just you're just a left brain person right you can go like write poetry you don't have to worry about doing math leave that to the right brain people i'm thinking where did they hear that right it's so weird like if you told someone hey did you know in fourth grade teachers are telling kids that they have brain damage just to quit and give up on a subject you think what we shouldn't do that to kids well it's kind of the same that's what they're doing essentially by saying oh you don't have that brain you have a different brain it's just as good right but it's a lie right we're all brain people it's like a false dichotomy that you know you only have one hemisphere in your head right okay oh here's a little more right so if you want to see a little more about the left and right on the left you've got what they call a sequential processing is one way to think about it so language speech reading writing logical thought mathematical abilities it was pretty much the same thing as the last slide um emotional expression spatial perception recognition of faces and patterns melodies and emotions okay so i want you to go watch the other video i posted to canvas i think you'll enjoy it really um my students always tell me it's really interesting and that they show people they showed like their families you know the video that i put on canvas um so check that one out i think i think you'll find it interesting and then yeah there's the guys that are in it and if you want to though we can't really do this since you're just watching a video of me you guys can kind of see the functioning of your right and left hemispheres communicating with each other and without having to do surgery without splitting your brains in half right you can you can test this out yourself with something called the stroop test this old test from the 1930s right um and it has a nice correlation with like what your brain is capable of in different hemispheres and how quickly it processes info so i'll just tell you how to play this game if you want to play this with somebody you know you need basically all you need is a stopwatch to do this you can use my slides if you want so you you would do this i'll just walk you through it so if you want to test somebody out first you say before you show them the screen you go hey i'm going to show you uh you know a screen of my on my monitor here my computer or my phone where you have and you go i just want you to read the words out loud just start at the top of the list and just read the list from top to bottom and it'll go blue green red yellow red orange green brown yellow purple red right really easy you know even if they're not a great reader they're really fast at this right and you just time how long it takes them to do it takes like no time at all it's really quick you go okay all right well now i want to show you another another set of information on this one i want you to tell me you know what color you see going from the top to the bottom in this list and then don't show them until you start it and you time them and they go blue green red yellow red orange green brown yellow purple red and that's usually really fast too might take a little bit longer than reading the text but it's pretty easy to do right so you go okay very good now the last trial i'm going to show you oop there we go i want to show you information and i want you to tell me it's going to once you tell me what color ink is used when displaying this information so they'll look at this list and tell them to go top to bottom the same thing and then and then show it to them and start the timer and they'll look at this they have to go green blue yellow red purple brown blue orange red green yellow right you can already tell just for me that takes longer to do right because now you have competing information you automatically want to read the words which is largely you know left hemisphere but i'm asking you to report the colors which is you know right hemisphere specialization and so you get that competition between information it really involves part of your your frontal cortex to go remember the instructions what were you asked to do and then i've got two pieces of information going at one time only report out loud the ones that you were asked and so it takes longer it takes longer to do that way so there you go you can see the right and left hemisphere specialization you know in action without having to undergo any type of surgery okay so that is it for the second chapter in our class i hope you found this interesting again if you want to check out these books go for it receptors is a good one um 30-second brain is a real simple one it's not an academic book like it gives you like a paragraph or two about the brain at each reading and then the guide to the brain that's a good one as well um just to warn you there's a there's a couple of parts in that book where i kind of skeptical i thought is this good science but it was only tiny little portions of it but those three books i enjoyed i thought you might enjoy them as well okay so don't forget to do the discussion assignments and and take the quizzes so far in the class um and i will see you all [Music] next time see ya