Introductory Psychology Lecture Notes

the following content is provided by MIT opencourseware under a Creative Commons license additional information about our license and MIT open courseware in general is available at ocw.mit.edu okay are there any of those forms still out there all right now that we've done the really exciting part let's let let's try uh let's try saying something about what this what this course is about um and why you bothered to try to get yourself lotteried in many many many other forms last chance many many many MIT courses are of the form you know when you're going to go to the first class you get the syllabus you look at the list of topics you say I don't know anything about these topics but I sure hope that by the end of the course I know something about these topics intro psych class is different from that because if you take a look at the list of of topics in the course which you can find by the way on the back page of the syllabus but you don't need to go looking for it right now you will discover you know memory learning cognition emotion um uh personality intelligence a whole set of topics that you already have some notion about there are terms that you use in in in everyday speech that you can converse about perfectly happily the job of this course is to dig behind um the uh what what you would know in what's known as Folk psychology folk psychology is a uh a term coined in the 19th century to refer to the psychology that folk know as opposed to the psychology that one would learn in the in the academy like you are here it what we used to say actually when when the term was defined for me in graduate school I think somebody said um folk psychology that's the psychology that your grandmother knows that doesn't work so well because your grandmother May well have a PhD in Psychology these days folk psychology is what the psychology that you would know without bothering to take a course like that this like the psychology you just pick up on the street um this course is designed to go beyond go beyond that well yeah let me let me let me uh dig up an example let me close the door and um so let's as a um as as an example I could assert oh let's see I I need uh I need a person well that's this is this is why one sits in the front right you're a person that's very good what's your name Your Mark okay who is that woman sitting next to you this is Laura okay I could say that Mark loves Laura it may or may not be true for all I know Marcus it is true this is um this is uh um well this is this is going to be a more interesting example than sometimes um but all right if I assert that um that that Mark loves Laura without much knowledge of either Mark or Laura here you have this is not a sentence that's a that that's a that that's hard for you to understand um but what is it that we're we're actually talking about um so what you know what what all right what's love um I think I didn't check I was gonna check this morning but I I didn't check I think that the probably the the line you would get in in uh um in a dictionary would assert that love is an emotion and then it would go on to describe what kind of an emotion is but it's a it's an odd emotion um if it is an emotion um if you think about other emotions that are pretty straightforward let's say sadness or happiness um to give two straightforward examples you know what sadness and happiness feel like they have a distinctive feeling to them um there is a distinctive feeling to being in love there's no doubt that that there's a feeling aspect It's actually an interesting question why we use the same word feeling to talk about feeling in love and feeling the table what what is it what what's the what's the commonality there but the feeling of being in love is not in the same is not simple in the same way that the feeling of sadness or the feeling of happiness is for instance you can be sad or happy in love right that you you can you can be in love and the experience of that could be either sad or happy the experience of being sad cannot be either sad or sad is sad it's innocent in some sense an atomic um sensation in a way that that uh that love does not appear to be um you can wake up in the morning feeling sad disembodied sort of sadness or disembodied sort of happiness can't really it's hard to imagine what it would be to wake up and say I feel love it's not clear that that makes it sort of a quasi-religious sense that you could get to it you know I feel loved for the whole universe or something like that's lovely but um you see you see the distinction so maybe it's not an emotion in the simple sense that sadness or happiness is um maybe it's a way of thinking about your current state you know I feel happy and my heart is pounding and I'm sitting next to oh god I've forgotten her name already uh Laura Lara no you l-a-r-a Lara and Mark they both have two they have two letters in common That's the basis for this relationship the um anyway you know where was I um the uh you're not gonna wake up feeling a disembodied sense of love maybe you're thinking maybe what it is is a thought about the state that you are currently in so maybe it's a cognition rather than an um an emotion but if it's a cognition it's a different kind of cognition from what you might think of as a sort of an atomic cognition because it has this aspect of feeling to it um that that other cognitions don't like um what's the capital capital of Equatorial Guinea I have no idea but it's a thought that I I can think about that fact it doesn't carry with it any deep feeling unless it turns out to be a question on the final exam um the um but you can have thoughts that aren't aren't colored in this emotional kind of a way so it's not a simple cognition um it might be more useful to call it a motivation than to call it a um an emotion motivations are like emotions in the sense of having this affective affect is the sort of jargony term for for feeling um this affective component to it um but the sorts of things that get talked about as motivations are things like thirst so it being warm I'm thirsty that's a faintly unpleasant State and I a motivation is something that motivates me to do something to change uh to change my state and you know hunger another another good example so what is what kind of motivation would love Be Love might be who an object of some sort and it's I knew I shouldn't have caught that cold from that third grader in my house um it's a motivation that if love is a motivation what it's motivating you to do is to perhaps get closer um to uh to possess the object of design now Mark and Lara busy sitting there saying oh boy that doesn't sound so good but love of course can be used not just in the mark and Lara sense but you know you can love your laptop or something like that and and you know have we won't go there Mark it's okay um but but that does lead you those are two clearly sort of different senses of of love and and or at least your your your chortling suggests that you think of them in different senses you might ask what love is for yeah the motive if thirst is if thirst is a motivation it's because you need liquid in order to be alive right and you don't drink stuff you're going to be dead um what's love well the the usual answers to that these days and psychology would come out of the chunk of psychology that's called evolutionary psychology that sees these core motivations if you like as things that evolved over the um history of the species and of life in general to serve um useful purposes for the organism in this case um Love is presumably in service of that great evolution missionary good which is to get your genes into the Next Generation that the goal that your goal if you're a thorough going evolutionary psychologist your goal in life basically is to get genes into the next um generation to perpetuate your genes and you know the the the sex and reproduction thing is a good way to do that it's not the only way to do that it's important to note how many of you are only children well actually let's go the other way how many of you have siblings okay one way for you to gain this sort of evolutionary immortality of getting your genes into the next generation is to be a really good aunt or uncle right you protect and preserve that little niece or nephew of yours and they're carrying a bundle of your jeans too so it's not that that that you know having and and raising children is the only evolutionary route to uh uh to the future but it it is a good one and um and and the love business would seem to be related to that but it's not necessary um if you think about it well all right spiders let's think of spiders um spiders the the reproduction thing works fine with spiders um it's not clear it's not clear how much love and romance there is involved here it's not clear for a couple of reasons one of them is it's very unclear what's going on in the mind of an animal in general you just don't have any access in fact or at least you have only the barest of sort of inferential access in fact I don't have any access to what's going on inside your mind it is an assumption on my part that you guys have mental lives like mine you could be with the philosophers what is in philosopher jargon you could all be zombies which in if you're doing philosophy means you're things that look human behave like they're human but aren't human because there's nothing happening in there if there's no you know you could be cunningly designed machines I don't know that but it's a useful assumption uh that that your mental life and my mental life is similar it is not a terribly useful assumption that my mental life and the spider's mental life are similar um and in any case if you look at spider um Behavior it doesn't look much like romantic love I mean the guy spends most of his time trying to avoid being killed by the by the females by who is typically much bigger he does a variety of courtships we'll talk about this later in the term but I cannot resist um their variety of spider species where they did where the spider does engage in a lot of courtship Behavior the male spider he brings her presence um like he brings her a dead fly the reason he brings her a dead fly is if she's busy chowing down on the Dead Fly she doesn't bite his little head off um and it's all it's not desperately romantic um but in any case it does work perfectly well for reproduction it suggests that there might be when you're talking about love Lane uh potential mates to be made between love and and uh well lust or some sort of sex drive or something like that um there is evidence um at a neurochemical level that these are distinct um the chemical Pathways in the brain that are involved in romantic love seem to be those that are also involved in parent-child bonds of attachment they involve um chemicals like well they're they're your brain generates opioid chemicals um which are like opium which is why opium is is a powerful uh drug when taken externally of taken from the from the outside but in any case the um bonds of Love involve those those chemicals um the bonds of lust um involve things like testosterone and other androgens and estrogens um that they may have talked about at endless length in high school biology or something of that sort but there's evidence that these are separate how did they come to together well evolutionary psychologists suggest that the link might be that if you bring um uh if you bring love to bear this romantic bonding this attachment to Bear then you've got pairs of um of people who stick around stick to each other in ways that are good for um the beginning and raising of children and that maybe um this bonding between parent and child got co-opted into being romantic love between potential mates another way of putting it would be to say well maybe romantic love exists straight straight just is not compatible with civilization if people are just simply acting on their uh you know evolutionarily based desire to mate it's hard to run a civilization it's hard to run a university for instance because people are busy so what you've got to do what you've got to do is if you're going to run a civilization you have to find some way to channel that sex drive into other activities so that the rest of civilization can can keep going now if you start talking in those terms you're talking in terms that you will see are very much like what Freud said Freud argued that um uh that things like romantic love are necessary in order to have a civilization and the absence that that uh yeah if you're a spider you don't need um you don't need romantic love um but you're also not going to have well spider civilization is is somewhat um somewhat more limited now um how does Laura know that Mark loves her well he said so right well cool I can say so too right I love you um I might I might even sort of kind of mean it in this sort of generic I love all of humanity kind of sense but it's obviously different now uh there there are various other ways that he can be indicating the fact that he is in love with her um but she's gotta figure this out is he really in love with me or is he just kinda actually he's got to figure it out too am I really in love with her her act of perception it would be perfectly possible for her to be wrong right she looks at him she thinks he's in love with me and he's thinking I'm not in love with her I'm just faking you know right could be now could it go the other way could he be thinking I'm in love with her and it not be true I'm is is that logically is that logically possible now and who could tell you that it wasn't true your mother you don't really love her well you know you probably wouldn't buy that anymore but you would have once um if you plot uh let's see how we gonna do this all right well this is age I know this axis is age um so if you plot the percentage of people who say you at you ask kids who knows your inner emotions the best um you or you can give it an open-ended question but the real categories are you or Mom and Dad um it turns out so if this is you and this is Mom and Dad um that function crosses the 50 point at the surprisingly late age of early adolescence before that um the majority of kids are will assert that Mom and Dad know their um emotions better than they themselves know it that be the case well it's it's not it it's um again once you have kids of your own because you're looking at your kid um and and you know you're like your your four-year-old kid and your kids doing yeah and you say gotta go to the bathroom no I've got to go to the bathroom you gotta go to the bathroom uh I don't have to go to the bathroom you sure you don't have to go to the bathroom no no okay I guess you don't have to go to the bathroom let's all get in the car um and so if the kid is a little self-reflective he thinks hey wait a minute first of all not only do I have to go to the bathroom but you know Mom and Dad they like knew that before I did that cool that's also a little scary because I thought a whole bunch of other things I wonder if they know those things too eventually you figure out not I didn't know that stuff which is just as well for all concerned um but um the returning to the love example the point is that you need to know that you need to perform an act of perception to decline decide that somebody else loves you and you need to do do an act of sort of self-perception to decide that you love somebody else um you might also ask yourself at that point well what is it that you love physical attributes that's considered sort of crass and you know even worse would be to say I love her for her money and possessions all right that sounds terrible but if you ask yourself what are you watching on TV there's a continuous pairing of love sex and cars soda anything right what you know that I can't think of any particular ads at the moment because I don't watch enough TV I'll ask my kids if they're any good Texan soda ads on at the moment but there certainly have been um in any case typically we say things like you know I love her for her mind or something like that now you could can you could love your laptop for its mind too um it doesn't seem to be quite the uh the the the same thing um now all right so there's a question of what it is that you might love where is that love if um in you does that question make any sort of sense well there's a traditional answer to that if you asked um where love lives the sort of conventional out there um in several hundred years ago probably would be simpler kind of answer would be liver is good too but that that's only if you're the the cool white virgin snows upon my heart have abated the arter of my liver says the prince guy in in in in Shakespeare's um Tempest um there's this notion that that very much a folk psychological notion that emotions are resident in the viscera um and that makes a degree of sense because um when you see the object of your heart's desire you know it's your heart's desire because your heart goes thump right now you think that if love is localized um you know if there is some chunk of of you that is it is your love for whoever this significant other might be where is that likely to be brain somebody muttered up there yeah it's probably in your brain um you can imagine why that was a hard notion to come by because you know you look at the object of your desire and you don't suddenly say ah my head um and you probably won't be saying rain-shaped chocolates to anybody at Valentine's Day either um but it is a it is an interesting question to ask whether or not all right brain maybe is it localized enough that there's some little piece of brain that we could go to and say you know Mark's love for Lara is there and if we went in and pulled that board out of out of his uh out of his computer that you know he'd know who Laura was and he'd know everything else but he just wouldn't be in love anymore is that local is that level of localization um plausible um is the love normal is his love Mark loves Lara for her mind um is that normal suppose he loved her for her foot would that be normal what's the difference why would one be and if it wasn't normal who gets to decide that it's normal do we as a community get to decide does does the family get to decide is there some objective way to decide whether something is or is not normal and if it's not normal what do we get to do about it do we get to um uh you know if it's not if if it's not normal and uh would drugs fix it um would surgery fix it would some sort of therapy fix it um look well you look you can see what's going on here from a simple uh sort of statement like you know Mark loves Laura we can get to essentially any of the sort of topics that will show up in a course like this any of you could have done we we wouldn't have had to use love as the particular example behind any of these things that we um use perfectly comfortably in everyday life is a large set of very interesting questions only a very few of which of course I can manage too address in an introductory level course but the goal here would be to give you some sort of um overview of the sorts of topics and the sorts of answers that um modern academic psychology has uh has come up with um the way that we do that is through lectures through recitations which are uh not should not be treated as optional we expect you to be there they're not just like reviews for the exam or you know there aren't problem sets in an introductory site class the way they would be in chemistry or something you're expected to be there they're an integral part of the course and there's the textbook it's a good idea to to look at it um I won't go into a lot more detail about the mechanics of the course the syllabus will tell you um most of what you want to know and it's a really good idea to actually take a look at the syllabus and take a look at the writing assignments um because you know they have due dates attached to them and and things like that um I will answer any uh blazingly mechanical questions about the course if if they have occurred to anybody at the moment otherwise I will plunge into the brain in a moment um after satisfying my thirst motivation yet more the um okay let me say that the sort of ideological grounding of this course is that the course like academic psychology generally is materialist in its in its ideology what does that mean what that means is that um the mind is what the brain does and uh that if you have thoughts if you have feelings if you have memories that they these things arise out of the brain this is not to say they are necessarily that they did if if we wanted to teach a straight Neuroscience course we just teach you about the brain um but it is to say that [Music] um it is in distinction to another old philosophical position which is dualism which says that the mind is somehow an immaterial something that is separate from the brain it interacts with you it interacts with your uh with your with your body but is is separate um the reason for talking about the brain for this lecture in the chunk of the next lecture is this notion that um the the mind is what the uh um what the brain does and um well if we want to find out what the brain does Let's see we could make a little bit of a list here you go up oh we got to get rid of a little more of whatever that was um so I uh do I have a copy of the handout here somewhere yes okay so I can ask because it just has four broad classes of methods on the handout without describing them um how might we go about finding out what the uh what the brain does oh this reminds me to say anytime during the course of the term if you got a question comment or whatever feel free to raise your hand and and um I will attempt to um answer it if I think we're being hopelessly uh you know diverted from where I think we need to get in the lecture I may have to cut off discussion but I I'm more than happy to have the opportunity um so don't just because it's a great big lecture don't feel that you just got to sit there and not um not do anything interactive like raise your hand um of course if you raise your hand you might end up exposing the details of your romantic engagements with the person sitting next to you but that's a risk you'll have to take um anyway if uh if you wanted to find out how the mind how the brain worked what the brain did how can you go how could we go about doing that anybody got yes you could cut the brain open look at it okay that that's that's uh that's option zero on my list of one to four um no it's not not because it's um it's trivial in any sense but I'm I'm looking for techniques that get more at the function than at the structure but there is a certain amount that you do learn from just looking at the structure in fact Descartes one of the founders of the dualist view looked at the anatomy of the brain thought you know if the immaterial mind and soul are interacting with the brain well the brain is a doubled structure right it's got these two sort of symmetrical hemispheres the that interaction between um the immaterial soul and the body must be at one point he looked at the anatomy saw the pineal gland which is a piece of brain lying on the midline and thought because there's only one of those that must be the point so you can make inferences from structure alone that particular inference is wrong but um but you could do it yes the person in front there yes you here um okay MRI we will make that into the larger category of of Imaging techniques um for for psych purposes the most uh dramatic version of this is so-called fmri for functional magnetic resonance imaging this is the new entry on the list really um a remarkable breakthrough in the time that I've been teaching this course is the ability to now look at the structure and some aspects of the function of the brain in intact um you know alive awake human beings you simply couldn't do that anymore and that's a remarkable well it's a remarkable Boon for psychology and and a huge advance for um medicine so for instance um if you had a brain tumor there are symptoms of having a brain tumor but the only way to find out if you actually had a tumor because you'd want to take this tumor out if you could the only way to find out um yeah a generation ago was to to do exploratory surgery and and open up the brain and see where the thing was now you'd be in an MR scanner you know by the end of the day and and and we'd know um so yes very useful technique um you're gonna offer me another one yeah okay so we'll we'll put this under the category of lesions brain damage um if this is the newest that this is probably the oldest of the of the um basic techniques if you damage brains um in the same way uh you end up getting symptoms that are similar across people and even across species in um in many cases and that is a tip-off that um first of all that the brain has something to do with mental life and that specific bits of brain have specific things to do with specific aspects of mental life the real um advances in this sort of research um and this sort of understanding of the brain came oh I guess mid to late 19th century when um with advances both in medicine and in uh I suppose what you could call military technology in earlier times if you got a penetrating wound to the brain odds were that you were simply going to be dead um but by the mid to late 19th century people were surviving with penetrating brain injuries came clean and um uh bullets were um could be leaving comparatively small lesions and so it became increasingly clear that different bits of brain damage did um different things um let me find myself a place to draw another picture here I need I need a brain so here we go one quick this is your brain just to orient things here Okay so front back bottom top um if I'm facing that way this would be looking at the outside surface of the left hemisphere there right you got two cerebral hemispheres about this size stuck inside your head um this is uh the brain's got lots of wrinkles there are a couple of large ones that I'm drawing here for my purposes because the the cerebral hemispheres are are conventionally divided up into four lobes um the terms for which are written on the handout so I can just give you the initials rather than writing out the whole thing conveniently the frontal lobe is at the front after that you just simply have to learn them temporal lobe down at the bottom occipital lobe at the back and the parietal lobe on the other side of this big Central sulcus that divides the frontal from the parietal um lobe what was found I think originally in the franco-prussian war if memory serves 1870s was that if you got whoops um lesions to the back of the the brain here to the cortex so the wrinkled outside surface is known as cortex that's from the Latin word for cork which is what anatomists thought it looked like um if you get lesions back here um you get problems with your vision very specifically and if you get um if you got a great big lesion that took out the entire occipital cortex on both sides you'd be functionally blind but if you got a small lesion let's say in the left hemisphere you would have a small region of blindness and it would always be on the right side of the visual world um and that's relative to where you're actually looking look at fixating at the moment so if I say it on this guy there who I'm now staring at um then if I had a lesion in my left hemisphere some region out here I would be blind if the lesion was in my right hemisphere the blind region would be on the on the opposite side on the um on the left um that's the sort of thing that you could discover from lesion studies and um so lesions happen when you get brain injury from say a bullet lesions happen from Strokes um one of the great advances one of the great advantages to Imaging Technologies is that in the 1870s or even until quite recently the only way you knew about where the lesion exactly was was if the patient died and came to autopsy you could look at the brain and look what was damaged now you can look at that brain in an intact individual and see where the um see where the damage um where the damage might be um so damage to the brain can tell you something about it's got the drawback that you're you're trying to infer normal function from an abnormal brain at that point um and that's uh not perfectly not not perfectly straightforward um but it does provide and is perhaps the oldest technique for providing lots of information yes you're about to give me another method um okay behavior is is item well if that's zero then a behavior is going to be uh five um and we'll spend an awful lot of the course talking about behavioral measures but in Behavior you know without going in and and doing something with rain as a black box at that point um yeah it may tell you something about the brain in connection with the rest of this but we're looking for techniques that are specifically about studying brain itself yes wake surgery I know this sounds cool yeah yeah keep going I'm aware we're what did you happened what's this what's the surgery part I can I I can feel it I'm just trying to see if I'm if there's a six here that I'm just not thinking of that that would be cool otherwise I can sort of oh yeah actually that's one I didn't put in typically which is that you can go in and start infusing stuff uh into chemicals into the brain and and changing um Behavior I um do I want to say anything more about that at the moment I'll use that one thank you we'll call this stimulation in general uh stim you Nation you can go in and stimulate brain so that I was gonna I was I was gonna do that um and segue from from the chemical stimulation to electrical stimulation but you got there for me um you can go in and stimulate the brain electrically in rats but you can also do this in humans um yeah in fact uh so back in the 1950s um Wilder Penfield psychologist is working with um some neurosurgeons up in Montreal and what they were doing was um they were doing neurosurgery on um patients with intractable epilepsy epilepsy is a an electrical storm in the brain basically um and um and often is started by a piece of abnormal or damaged tissue that acts as a generator and then when sort of an abnormal electrical activity spreads from that point of generation across the across the brain or across some chunk of the brain and causes a seizure lapse of awareness the sort of symptoms that you get in epilepsy often this is controllable by drugs but in some cases it's not the treatments of uh that can be tried is to go in and try to lesion this little chunk of brain if you take out the generator you can often reduce the um the severity or eliminate the uh eliminate the seizures um but if you're gonna take brain tissue out you got to be really careful um because well actually where I put this as a is a is a pretty good example we knew from lesion studies going back again into the 19th century that areas around here um were that go by names like broca and Wernicke's area which are um the names of 19th century neurologists actually vitally import ant in the production and understand of language those areas exist in the left hemisphere of the brain so this is a left hemisphere of the brain that'll work work fine and if they're damaged by stroke you will have trouble with understanding language or um or producing language or both depends on the exact nature of the stroke um but very very bad lesions to have so if you were to discover that the um the epileptogenic focus the piece of bad tissue was sitting in there um you would say look I'm sorry the you know we don't want to do this surgery because while I could perhaps reduce the frequency of your seizures um it's going to mean that you're you've got real problems with language and that trade-off is not worth it on the other hand if if the generator was here um say look I can reduce the the frequency of your seizures and you'll have a a relatively small area of blindness out in the uh right visual field somewhere say look I'm not thrilled about being blind in some part of my visual field but that trade-off is worth it so you need to know where you are in the brain in order to do this sort of surgery and what Penfield did was to stimulate the brain of awake individuals in effect to ask you know what's this bit of brain doing now how can you do that doesn't that kind of hurt a lot um the answer is that um they're under local anesthetic to get through the skull and the outer surface the the membranes across the surface of the of the um of the brain uh because in case you hadn't noticed you know digging holes with a sharp stick in your skull really hurts um but once you get to brain there are no pain receptors in the brain itself there's nothing um once once you've got the brain exposed you can do anything you want to the brain and and and and the Brain won't particularly complain um I don't suggest you try this but um but you could um now why well let's step back why have pain receptors at all what what's pain good for yeah yeah Pain's there to keep you from hurting yourself yeah if you don't have pain and your hands on the hot stove you say oh I'm cooking my hand that's you know big deal in fact people who are there are rare cases of people who are congenitally insensitive to pain and it's it's bad news they end up injuring themselves um that being the case why not have pain receptors in your brain you know if you sort of thinking sort of evolutionary terms by the time the bear is chewing on your brain you know you might as well just kind of go with the experience because it's had her much um so the advantage here is that you can go in and stimulate um brain tissue and it's not a bad it's it's somewhat from the sound of a somewhat uncanny experience but it's not an unpleasant experience and so all right so what Penfield did you know stick a little electrode say here and and put a little electrical current there and what the patient would report if it was here this is to the parietal side of this big Central sulcus what the bro what the what the patient would uh report is I I feel it it feels like you're touching my foot okay move the electrode a little bit oh now it feels like you're sort of touching me in my the middle of my back um you know now it feels like you're touching my hand no no that's the end of my nose and what what Penfield found was that the surface of body was lay out across the surface of the brain in in the left hemisphere would actually be the surface of the right side of the body I don't know what that is um and and it is feet up head down as I recall um but that chunk of brain which is called somatosensory cortex the terms on the handout somewhere um represents the skin now uh I haven't drawn a terribly realistic picture here but the actual map is hugely distorted yes it's something okay oh don't do that pay no attention to the man behind the curtain um anyway okay so this this map known as the homunculus for the little man in the head um the sensory homunculus specifically is is massively distorted um some chunks of your skin are heavily over represented in the brain some are heavily underrepresented so what's over represented hands and face and on the face lips lips and tongue and things like that so um somewhere in gleman I'm I'm like in the chapter you'll read tonight with luck um there's a picture people love making little models of the homunculus right so to project it back out into the world and and what would it look like if this was a one for one mapping and you get this guy with you know huge lips and huge hands and a little tiny back um and the way to get a feeling for this is to ask yourself if you were trying to figure out uh what something felt like how would you go about doing that well you would go and explore it with your hands a little kid less restrained than you would also probably put it in its mouth and and feel it that way what what you wouldn't do is you know rub it against your back or something like uh like that because it's the hands and the lips and stuff that have the very dense um sensory skin receptors and and it's sparser in your on your back now you will also you you can test the the prudary of your introductory psych text by checking out um whether the homunculus is anatomically correct um the the genitalia are well represented in the sensory homunculus also my recollection is that they are well represented in glitman there are texts where it's kind of oh I have actually there's one great version where he uh where where the uh homunculus is wearing like a little uh a towel um I've seen that once that was cute like um you're touching them on their skin uh if you go around to the uh to the right hemisphere they'd feel the stimulation down the left side of the body go to the other side of this uh into the frontal lobe and instead of saying oh I feel like you're you're touching my my leg um the leg would twitch place it is right yes left hemisphere right leg or you move a little further the arm would twitch or just one muscle in the arm or something like that here you've got a motor homunculus laid out across the uh the across motor cortex and this chunk of the brain is important in the generation of voluntary um movements again it's a distorted map hands very overrepresented if you're a monkey feet are very overrepresented but you who cannot hang upside down from a tree by your feet or your tail or whatever your feet are comparatively um impoverished in their represent representation tongue and and and vocal apparatus heavily over represented um so same sort of story sensory and um and motor now these days you don't even need to um uh go and cut open the skull to do this sort of thing um transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS for short involves generating a large magnetic field close to the skull um as your physics background will tell you that generates an electrical field if you've shaped the magnetic field right you can generate an electrical field underneath in the brain tissue and basically produce the same sort of brain stimulation that you would that Penfield was producing in an open skull with the same results Nancy kanwisher who's a a professor in the uh Department here used to be up at Harvard got on the front of the Harvard Gazette for teaching her intro class with a a TMS stimulator in hand and say you know want to see where my motor cortex is um I I know I'm not going to do that sorry the reason I'm not going to do that by the way is I'm a chicken it's TMS is undoubtedly it almost undoubtedly safe you know lots of people do it um but it sounds too much like things that I learned about when I was taking intro psych that were used to generate epileptic Foci in you know like rats you know let's stimulate and now the rat's got epilepsy I don't and it doesn't seem to happen in TMS but I'm a chicken when it comes to my brain yes um could I um yeah um where we'll find out if I can spell homunculus uh Paul's in a urine oh you home monk yes it must be home monk U plus one of the reasons for handouts by the way um is so that when people ask me can I please spell it it's on the handout somewhere because the answer is no I can't um so the homunculus derived from the Latin for a little man in the head um but and and I apologize to the women I was trying to figure out today what what what what the little woman in the head would be but my Latin has waned since I took it in college maybe it's the femunculus I'm not sure um but in any case that's um that that um the so and then the stimulation that that's that's stimulation techniques um I still I'm I'm shopping for one more useful technique here anybody care to offer me another uh another technique for figuring out what's going on in the brain okay well the case studies are typically these lesion studies right somebody has something wrong with them and we try to figure out what's wrong with them that goes way back by the way um the early efforts to figure out what bits of brain did um come from the uh phrenologists early 19th century from all o g um if you know anything about phrenology you learned it from the Cartoon Network right because you watched Bugs Bunny beat Elmer Fudd over the head right and then the bumps showed up and you felt the bumps ah looking at me like what's he talking about right or or you know it because there's a wide any of these umpteen cartoons um or or sculptures where you have a head that's got little functions all over it right you know like this is yeah yeah okay good somebody's I'm not just making up weird stuff um the the the phrenologists believed that the shape of the skull reflected the underlying shape of the um uh of the brain that bigger meant more of that particular function which is rather like this I mean it's not a completely wacko assumption um and um and they then use a sort of a case study system to try to figure out what different parts of the brain did so um if you wanted to know where criminality was in the brain you go and find yourself some criminals and check where they got big chunks of their brain and that's where those sort of maps came from it's a rather ad hoc sounding kind of process um now uh so amativeness lust is typically located back here the reason it's located back here is because spurtzheim one of the founders of phrenology had in his um uh care a how did he describe it I think he's she's described as a passionate Widow and every time he puts his birth time put her his hand on the back of her neck it became red and inflamed and he therefore concluded that that's where lust lived it turns out though that if you read old phrenology text the original phrenology text they read not unlike introductory psych text or introductory you know brain science text with a few unfortunate assumptions like the notion that skull shape reflects underlying brain shape which it does not very well um there was yes pink person um okay well that's so um we'll put the looking at the sales part on under the anatomy my wife would hate this my wife is a neuroanatomist that's what she does for a living she would want many categories for that um all by itself but yes so you can go look at um certainly as um well you can use this in a number of contexts if you're going to go stimulate these days if you're going to go stimulate brain cells you might be doing it on a slice of brain in a dish um to see how it's connected to the next one and you would be looking at the individual cells under a microscope while you were doing that yes okay that's a another candid candidate for five but uh um but I will actually if you take a look at um that allows me to make a somewhat different point on the handouts the writing assignments that you get in this course this year will um uh have as their starting point readings that live on the on the Stellar website for the course oh they particularly will if I ever give Mara the disc to put them up there um I'll have to remember that um the one that's on for this lecture this if one wanted to write based starting from this lecture uh it is actually a genetic study turns out that there are two flavors of bowl out there little rodent-like animal um some bowls are promiscuous some voles are not promiscuous they just hang out with one I guess Lady Vols that's a basketball team isn't it anyway the I guess they're balls not voles anyway um the claim of a new paper this year is that um manipulation of a single Gene is is able to turn promiscuous voles into faithful voles so in that sense yes absolutely genetics are a new tool for for getting to this it's not what I'm fishing for I'll take one more bit of fishing Expedition and then I'll just all right that'll be that's that's fine too in Vol land yes it's the male Bulls who are promiscuous yeah I mean and they're manipulating the the the sexual behavior of the male voles the female Bulls don't have the the big a symmetry the the two species of voles don't have the big asymmetry in their behavior to start with apparently so yeah I think it's it's a guy thing more on that later in the term yes yeah reading brain signals we'll we'll call that recording um in some fashion or other if you can stick an electrode into the brain and stimulate you can also stick up electrode into the brain and uh record from brain tissue and ask what a particular uh cell or bunch of cells are are doing you can do this at a large scale level in um you know walking around human beings um or Animals by putting electrodes on the skull you can read masked activities of large numbers of neurons off the surface of the skull um and um that that's a so-called electroencephalogram EEG um but uh and that's very useful for instance in telling the difference between different wake and sleep States if you are deeply asleep the sort of sleep that when the alarm clock goes off you know where am I if you look at the EEG you find big slow waves all the cells are active and then all the cells are quiet and they're all firing together when you're um and looking at a uh an awake individual the the waveform is much uh smaller amplitude and higher frequency because you know the the calculus piece of your brain is currently napping and the psychology piece is wide awake and and and various bits are doing things out of synchrony with each other so you can see that from Mass recordings but if you now go and stick an electrode let's let's suppose we go and stick an electrode into well this let's take the same cell that that you know I stimulate here and the the the the patient said you know I feel that in my toe If instead of stimulating you record you find out that that cell doesn't change its Behavior at all over a huge range of possible things that the organism could be doing but if you poke the toe that cell says here I am I'm I'm interested in that and exactly that you go poke the armpit or something the cell doesn't care you poke the other you know the next toe over the cell doesn't care you poke one particular toe let us say that cell will care take a cell out here somewhere and um that cell will care only if you put visual stimuli in a particular little spot in the right side of visual space in a very particular part of visual space move over a little bit and it'll want stimulation in a different piece of visual space move elsewhere in the brain and now rather than liking say just something simple like a line moving around a cell down here um this is typically done in things like monkeys and so that cell might be very interested if you show it the hand of a monkey right ah sells thrilled show it you know a hunk of chalk I don't care um you know nearby one might like the face of a monkey and so on so you can find out what individual cells are interested in by recording their activity there are some significant drawbacks to this which is that you can only one of them is that you can only sample from a tiny fraction of the cells even in an area that you are interested in how many cells do you think how many neurons do you think there are in the brain so the the the answer is yes a lot is is a good answer but the answer is going to be expressed in terms of 10 to the X what's X would you guess well the 24s are a little high and the nines are a little low um when I asked this question when I was in graduate school um I got the the answer that there are uh a pro Nobody Knows the answer for sure because you know how who's going to go and count um that oops that there are 10 to the 12th neurons in the brain and of these I didn't even tell you on this picture but here we can draw a tail on this thing um hanging off the back of the brain sort of underneath the back is is the cerebellum it means little brain um important in learning and motor control sorts of things um we're not going to say much about it here sadly but what my professor said was there are oops 10 to the 12th neurons in the brain of these 10 to the 13th are in the cerebellum uh the the quick on the uptake crowd uh picked up that there's a problem here right what he was trying to tell me was not that he didn't understand um math but that look we don't even really know to an order of magnitude how many cells there are in the brain um but that Lots on this order how many cells sell cord from in um in a study of some function in the brain you know heroic single unit single cell recording studies might have um uh you know on the order of 10 to the second 100 cells recorded from moreover if you're going to stick an electrode in the brain the cells that it encounters are going to be biased by things like size you're more likely to get big sales than little cells and big cells do things that are different than little cells um do in the brain so it's not you can imagine that it would be difficult to figure out um what your laptop did by recording from I you know single components on the motherboard um that wouldn't be particularly easy um it gets significantly worse when you try to uh um do that in in the brain as a as a whole um the best the things we know best about in the brain are things where we can bring all of these techniques bare and get um what what would be called converging evidence converging data on it um evidence from multiple different sources and then corroborate that by looking at at um Behavioral behavioral measures oh let me say um well all right this this is the moment in the lecture where my wife where where I I really feel my wife looking over my shoulder in two minutes I will polish off the rest of the brain um so that's just the surface of the brain right you know the the brain is a 3D structure one way to to very grossly think about the the overall structure of the brain is that um if there's cortex that lying underneath cortex is what but if are a bunch of structures that often get called limbic structures this is really an outdated term it comes from the word for ring and it was the notion that there was a circuit of structures lying under the brain under the cortex but there's a a collection of structures whose who will show up later in the term um with names like the amygdala from the Latin for um almond uh hippocampus Latin for almond or Greek for almond I'm not sure at the moment um hippocampus from the word for seahorse not because you have almonds or sea horses in your brain but because the shapes of these things are faintly reminiscent of such things out in the real world um and other structures that turn out to be vitally important in emotional um in your emotional life and in um in memory hippocampus will show up later as as as critical in memory underneath there and heading on down into spinal cord oh I don't know let's call it the core today or something um are a set of structures um that uh well we tend to spend a lot of time in Psychology talking about the cool stuff happening up in the cortex and stuff like that but the stuff you really don't want to lose the stuff we don't know about from lesion studies is down here because something in your brain has to say to your heart beat beat that piece of brain goes you've got really big trouble there's another piece down there that says time to breathe time to breathe again I mean it's not glamorous work but you know somebody so there's a whole set of stuff here running vegetative processes and also important not not just for you know pacemaker kinds of things but also for General uh issues of arousal um and and um sleep and wakefulness those sort of things uh so that is an embarrassingly brief tour of of of of the you can spend your life on neuroanatomy trust me my wife does um we'll come back and talk about single cells on Tuesday

the following content is provided by MIT opencourseware under a Creative Commons license additional information about our license and MIT open courseware in general is available at ocw.mit.edu okay are there any of those forms still out there all right now that we&#39;ve done the really exciting part let&#39;s let let&#39;s try uh let&#39;s try saying something about what this what this course is about um and why you bothered to try to get yourself lotteried in many many many other forms last chance many many many MIT courses are of the form you know when you&#39;re going to go to the first class you get the syllabus you look at the list of topics you say I don&#39;t know anything about these topics but I sure hope that by the end of the course I know something about these topics intro psych class is different from that because if you take a look at the list of of topics in the course which you can find by the way on the back page of the syllabus but you don&#39;t need to go looking for it right now you will discover you know memory learning cognition emotion um uh personality intelligence a whole set of topics that you already have some notion about there are terms that you use in in in everyday speech that you can converse about perfectly happily the job of this course is to dig behind um the uh what what you would know in what&#39;s known as Folk psychology folk psychology is a uh a term coined in the 19th century to refer to the psychology that folk know as opposed to the psychology that one would learn in the in the academy like you are here it what we used to say actually when when the term was defined for me in graduate school I think somebody said um folk psychology that&#39;s the psychology that your grandmother knows that doesn&#39;t work so well because your grandmother May well have a PhD in Psychology these days folk psychology is what the psychology that you would know without bothering to take a course like that this like the psychology you just pick up on the street um this course is designed to go beyond go beyond that well yeah let me let me let me uh dig up an example let me close the door and um so let&#39;s as a um as as an example I could assert oh let&#39;s see I I need uh I need a person well that&#39;s this is this is why one sits in the front right you&#39;re a person that&#39;s very good what&#39;s your name Your Mark okay who is that woman sitting next to you this is Laura okay I could say that Mark loves Laura it may or may not be true for all I know Marcus it is true this is um this is uh um well this is this is going to be a more interesting example than sometimes um but all right if I assert that um that that Mark loves Laura without much knowledge of either Mark or Laura here you have this is not a sentence that&#39;s a that that&#39;s a that that&#39;s hard for you to understand um but what is it that we&#39;re we&#39;re actually talking about um so what you know what what all right what&#39;s love um I think I didn&#39;t check I was gonna check this morning but I I didn&#39;t check I think that the probably the the line you would get in in uh um in a dictionary would assert that love is an emotion and then it would go on to describe what kind of an emotion is but it&#39;s a it&#39;s an odd emotion um if it is an emotion um if you think about other emotions that are pretty straightforward let&#39;s say sadness or happiness um to give two straightforward examples you know what sadness and happiness feel like they have a distinctive feeling to them um there is a distinctive feeling to being in love there&#39;s no doubt that that there&#39;s a feeling aspect It&#39;s actually an interesting question why we use the same word feeling to talk about feeling in love and feeling the table what what is it what what&#39;s the what&#39;s the commonality there but the feeling of being in love is not in the same is not simple in the same way that the feeling of sadness or the feeling of happiness is for instance you can be sad or happy in love right that you you can you can be in love and the experience of that could be either sad or happy the experience of being sad cannot be either sad or sad is sad it&#39;s innocent in some sense an atomic um sensation in a way that that uh that love does not appear to be um you can wake up in the morning feeling sad disembodied sort of sadness or disembodied sort of happiness can&#39;t really it&#39;s hard to imagine what it would be to wake up and say I feel love it&#39;s not clear that that makes it sort of a quasi-religious sense that you could get to it you know I feel loved for the whole universe or something like that&#39;s lovely but um you see you see the distinction so maybe it&#39;s not an emotion in the simple sense that sadness or happiness is um maybe it&#39;s a way of thinking about your current state you know I feel happy and my heart is pounding and I&#39;m sitting next to oh god I&#39;ve forgotten her name already uh Laura Lara no you l-a-r-a Lara and Mark they both have two they have two letters in common That&#39;s the basis for this relationship the um anyway you know where was I um the uh you&#39;re not gonna wake up feeling a disembodied sense of love maybe you&#39;re thinking maybe what it is is a thought about the state that you are currently in so maybe it&#39;s a cognition rather than an um an emotion but if it&#39;s a cognition it&#39;s a different kind of cognition from what you might think of as a sort of an atomic cognition because it has this aspect of feeling to it um that that other cognitions don&#39;t like um what&#39;s the capital capital of Equatorial Guinea I have no idea but it&#39;s a thought that I I can think about that fact it doesn&#39;t carry with it any deep feeling unless it turns out to be a question on the final exam um the um but you can have thoughts that aren&#39;t aren&#39;t colored in this emotional kind of a way so it&#39;s not a simple cognition um it might be more useful to call it a motivation than to call it a um an emotion motivations are like emotions in the sense of having this affective affect is the sort of jargony term for for feeling um this affective component to it um but the sorts of things that get talked about as motivations are things like thirst so it being warm I&#39;m thirsty that&#39;s a faintly unpleasant State and I a motivation is something that motivates me to do something to change uh to change my state and you know hunger another another good example so what is what kind of motivation would love Be Love might be who an object of some sort and it&#39;s I knew I shouldn&#39;t have caught that cold from that third grader in my house um it&#39;s a motivation that if love is a motivation what it&#39;s motivating you to do is to perhaps get closer um to uh to possess the object of design now Mark and Lara busy sitting there saying oh boy that doesn&#39;t sound so good but love of course can be used not just in the mark and Lara sense but you know you can love your laptop or something like that and and you know have we won&#39;t go there Mark it&#39;s okay um but but that does lead you those are two clearly sort of different senses of of love and and or at least your your your chortling suggests that you think of them in different senses you might ask what love is for yeah the motive if thirst is if thirst is a motivation it&#39;s because you need liquid in order to be alive right and you don&#39;t drink stuff you&#39;re going to be dead um what&#39;s love well the the usual answers to that these days and psychology would come out of the chunk of psychology that&#39;s called evolutionary psychology that sees these core motivations if you like as things that evolved over the um history of the species and of life in general to serve um useful purposes for the organism in this case um Love is presumably in service of that great evolution missionary good which is to get your genes into the Next Generation that the goal that your goal if you&#39;re a thorough going evolutionary psychologist your goal in life basically is to get genes into the next um generation to perpetuate your genes and you know the the the sex and reproduction thing is a good way to do that it&#39;s not the only way to do that it&#39;s important to note how many of you are only children well actually let&#39;s go the other way how many of you have siblings okay one way for you to gain this sort of evolutionary immortality of getting your genes into the next generation is to be a really good aunt or uncle right you protect and preserve that little niece or nephew of yours and they&#39;re carrying a bundle of your jeans too so it&#39;s not that that that you know having and and raising children is the only evolutionary route to uh uh to the future but it it is a good one and um and and the love business would seem to be related to that but it&#39;s not necessary um if you think about it well all right spiders let&#39;s think of spiders um spiders the the reproduction thing works fine with spiders um it&#39;s not clear it&#39;s not clear how much love and romance there is involved here it&#39;s not clear for a couple of reasons one of them is it&#39;s very unclear what&#39;s going on in the mind of an animal in general you just don&#39;t have any access in fact or at least you have only the barest of sort of inferential access in fact I don&#39;t have any access to what&#39;s going on inside your mind it is an assumption on my part that you guys have mental lives like mine you could be with the philosophers what is in philosopher jargon you could all be zombies which in if you&#39;re doing philosophy means you&#39;re things that look human behave like they&#39;re human but aren&#39;t human because there&#39;s nothing happening in there if there&#39;s no you know you could be cunningly designed machines I don&#39;t know that but it&#39;s a useful assumption uh that that your mental life and my mental life is similar it is not a terribly useful assumption that my mental life and the spider&#39;s mental life are similar um and in any case if you look at spider um Behavior it doesn&#39;t look much like romantic love I mean the guy spends most of his time trying to avoid being killed by the by the females by who is typically much bigger he does a variety of courtships we&#39;ll talk about this later in the term but I cannot resist um their variety of spider species where they did where the spider does engage in a lot of courtship Behavior the male spider he brings her presence um like he brings her a dead fly the reason he brings her a dead fly is if she&#39;s busy chowing down on the Dead Fly she doesn&#39;t bite his little head off um and it&#39;s all it&#39;s not desperately romantic um but in any case it does work perfectly well for reproduction it suggests that there might be when you&#39;re talking about love Lane uh potential mates to be made between love and and uh well lust or some sort of sex drive or something like that um there is evidence um at a neurochemical level that these are distinct um the chemical Pathways in the brain that are involved in romantic love seem to be those that are also involved in parent-child bonds of attachment they involve um chemicals like well they&#39;re they&#39;re your brain generates opioid chemicals um which are like opium which is why opium is is a powerful uh drug when taken externally of taken from the from the outside but in any case the um bonds of Love involve those those chemicals um the bonds of lust um involve things like testosterone and other androgens and estrogens um that they may have talked about at endless length in high school biology or something of that sort but there&#39;s evidence that these are separate how did they come to together well evolutionary psychologists suggest that the link might be that if you bring um uh if you bring love to bear this romantic bonding this attachment to Bear then you&#39;ve got pairs of um of people who stick around stick to each other in ways that are good for um the beginning and raising of children and that maybe um this bonding between parent and child got co-opted into being romantic love between potential mates another way of putting it would be to say well maybe romantic love exists straight straight just is not compatible with civilization if people are just simply acting on their uh you know evolutionarily based desire to mate it&#39;s hard to run a civilization it&#39;s hard to run a university for instance because people are busy so what you&#39;ve got to do what you&#39;ve got to do is if you&#39;re going to run a civilization you have to find some way to channel that sex drive into other activities so that the rest of civilization can can keep going now if you start talking in those terms you&#39;re talking in terms that you will see are very much like what Freud said Freud argued that um uh that things like romantic love are necessary in order to have a civilization and the absence that that uh yeah if you&#39;re a spider you don&#39;t need um you don&#39;t need romantic love um but you&#39;re also not going to have well spider civilization is is somewhat um somewhat more limited now um how does Laura know that Mark loves her well he said so right well cool I can say so too right I love you um I might I might even sort of kind of mean it in this sort of generic I love all of humanity kind of sense but it&#39;s obviously different now uh there there are various other ways that he can be indicating the fact that he is in love with her um but she&#39;s gotta figure this out is he really in love with me or is he just kinda actually he&#39;s got to figure it out too am I really in love with her her act of perception it would be perfectly possible for her to be wrong right she looks at him she thinks he&#39;s in love with me and he&#39;s thinking I&#39;m not in love with her I&#39;m just faking you know right could be now could it go the other way could he be thinking I&#39;m in love with her and it not be true I&#39;m is is that logically is that logically possible now and who could tell you that it wasn&#39;t true your mother you don&#39;t really love her well you know you probably wouldn&#39;t buy that anymore but you would have once um if you plot uh let&#39;s see how we gonna do this all right well this is age I know this axis is age um so if you plot the percentage of people who say you at you ask kids who knows your inner emotions the best um you or you can give it an open-ended question but the real categories are you or Mom and Dad um it turns out so if this is you and this is Mom and Dad um that function crosses the 50 point at the surprisingly late age of early adolescence before that um the majority of kids are will assert that Mom and Dad know their um emotions better than they themselves know it that be the case well it&#39;s it&#39;s not it it&#39;s um again once you have kids of your own because you&#39;re looking at your kid um and and you know you&#39;re like your your four-year-old kid and your kids doing yeah and you say gotta go to the bathroom no I&#39;ve got to go to the bathroom you gotta go to the bathroom uh I don&#39;t have to go to the bathroom you sure you don&#39;t have to go to the bathroom no no okay I guess you don&#39;t have to go to the bathroom let&#39;s all get in the car um and so if the kid is a little self-reflective he thinks hey wait a minute first of all not only do I have to go to the bathroom but you know Mom and Dad they like knew that before I did that cool that&#39;s also a little scary because I thought a whole bunch of other things I wonder if they know those things too eventually you figure out not I didn&#39;t know that stuff which is just as well for all concerned um but um the returning to the love example the point is that you need to know that you need to perform an act of perception to decline decide that somebody else loves you and you need to do do an act of sort of self-perception to decide that you love somebody else um you might also ask yourself at that point well what is it that you love physical attributes that&#39;s considered sort of crass and you know even worse would be to say I love her for her money and possessions all right that sounds terrible but if you ask yourself what are you watching on TV there&#39;s a continuous pairing of love sex and cars soda anything right what you know that I can&#39;t think of any particular ads at the moment because I don&#39;t watch enough TV I&#39;ll ask my kids if they&#39;re any good Texan soda ads on at the moment but there certainly have been um in any case typically we say things like you know I love her for her mind or something like that now you could can you could love your laptop for its mind too um it doesn&#39;t seem to be quite the uh the the the same thing um now all right so there&#39;s a question of what it is that you might love where is that love if um in you does that question make any sort of sense well there&#39;s a traditional answer to that if you asked um where love lives the sort of conventional out there um in several hundred years ago probably would be simpler kind of answer would be liver is good too but that that&#39;s only if you&#39;re the the cool white virgin snows upon my heart have abated the arter of my liver says the prince guy in in in in Shakespeare&#39;s um Tempest um there&#39;s this notion that that very much a folk psychological notion that emotions are resident in the viscera um and that makes a degree of sense because um when you see the object of your heart&#39;s desire you know it&#39;s your heart&#39;s desire because your heart goes thump right now you think that if love is localized um you know if there is some chunk of of you that is it is your love for whoever this significant other might be where is that likely to be brain somebody muttered up there yeah it&#39;s probably in your brain um you can imagine why that was a hard notion to come by because you know you look at the object of your desire and you don&#39;t suddenly say ah my head um and you probably won&#39;t be saying rain-shaped chocolates to anybody at Valentine&#39;s Day either um but it is a it is an interesting question to ask whether or not all right brain maybe is it localized enough that there&#39;s some little piece of brain that we could go to and say you know Mark&#39;s love for Lara is there and if we went in and pulled that board out of out of his uh out of his computer that you know he&#39;d know who Laura was and he&#39;d know everything else but he just wouldn&#39;t be in love anymore is that local is that level of localization um plausible um is the love normal is his love Mark loves Lara for her mind um is that normal suppose he loved her for her foot would that be normal what&#39;s the difference why would one be and if it wasn&#39;t normal who gets to decide that it&#39;s normal do we as a community get to decide does does the family get to decide is there some objective way to decide whether something is or is not normal and if it&#39;s not normal what do we get to do about it do we get to um uh you know if it&#39;s not if if it&#39;s not normal and uh would drugs fix it um would surgery fix it would some sort of therapy fix it um look well you look you can see what&#39;s going on here from a simple uh sort of statement like you know Mark loves Laura we can get to essentially any of the sort of topics that will show up in a course like this any of you could have done we we wouldn&#39;t have had to use love as the particular example behind any of these things that we um use perfectly comfortably in everyday life is a large set of very interesting questions only a very few of which of course I can manage too address in an introductory level course but the goal here would be to give you some sort of um overview of the sorts of topics and the sorts of answers that um modern academic psychology has uh has come up with um the way that we do that is through lectures through recitations which are uh not should not be treated as optional we expect you to be there they&#39;re not just like reviews for the exam or you know there aren&#39;t problem sets in an introductory site class the way they would be in chemistry or something you&#39;re expected to be there they&#39;re an integral part of the course and there&#39;s the textbook it&#39;s a good idea to to look at it um I won&#39;t go into a lot more detail about the mechanics of the course the syllabus will tell you um most of what you want to know and it&#39;s a really good idea to actually take a look at the syllabus and take a look at the writing assignments um because you know they have due dates attached to them and and things like that um I will answer any uh blazingly mechanical questions about the course if if they have occurred to anybody at the moment otherwise I will plunge into the brain in a moment um after satisfying my thirst motivation yet more the um okay let me say that the sort of ideological grounding of this course is that the course like academic psychology generally is materialist in its in its ideology what does that mean what that means is that um the mind is what the brain does and uh that if you have thoughts if you have feelings if you have memories that they these things arise out of the brain this is not to say they are necessarily that they did if if we wanted to teach a straight Neuroscience course we just teach you about the brain um but it is to say that [Music] um it is in distinction to another old philosophical position which is dualism which says that the mind is somehow an immaterial something that is separate from the brain it interacts with you it interacts with your uh with your with your body but is is separate um the reason for talking about the brain for this lecture in the chunk of the next lecture is this notion that um the the mind is what the uh um what the brain does and um well if we want to find out what the brain does Let&#39;s see we could make a little bit of a list here you go up oh we got to get rid of a little more of whatever that was um so I uh do I have a copy of the handout here somewhere yes okay so I can ask because it just has four broad classes of methods on the handout without describing them um how might we go about finding out what the uh what the brain does oh this reminds me to say anytime during the course of the term if you got a question comment or whatever feel free to raise your hand and and um I will attempt to um answer it if I think we&#39;re being hopelessly uh you know diverted from where I think we need to get in the lecture I may have to cut off discussion but I I&#39;m more than happy to have the opportunity um so don&#39;t just because it&#39;s a great big lecture don&#39;t feel that you just got to sit there and not um not do anything interactive like raise your hand um of course if you raise your hand you might end up exposing the details of your romantic engagements with the person sitting next to you but that&#39;s a risk you&#39;ll have to take um anyway if uh if you wanted to find out how the mind how the brain worked what the brain did how can you go how could we go about doing that anybody got yes you could cut the brain open look at it okay that that&#39;s that&#39;s uh that&#39;s option zero on my list of one to four um no it&#39;s not not because it&#39;s um it&#39;s trivial in any sense but I&#39;m I&#39;m looking for techniques that get more at the function than at the structure but there is a certain amount that you do learn from just looking at the structure in fact Descartes one of the founders of the dualist view looked at the anatomy of the brain thought you know if the immaterial mind and soul are interacting with the brain well the brain is a doubled structure right it&#39;s got these two sort of symmetrical hemispheres the that interaction between um the immaterial soul and the body must be at one point he looked at the anatomy saw the pineal gland which is a piece of brain lying on the midline and thought because there&#39;s only one of those that must be the point so you can make inferences from structure alone that particular inference is wrong but um but you could do it yes the person in front there yes you here um okay MRI we will make that into the larger category of of Imaging techniques um for for psych purposes the most uh dramatic version of this is so-called fmri for functional magnetic resonance imaging this is the new entry on the list really um a remarkable breakthrough in the time that I&#39;ve been teaching this course is the ability to now look at the structure and some aspects of the function of the brain in intact um you know alive awake human beings you simply couldn&#39;t do that anymore and that&#39;s a remarkable well it&#39;s a remarkable Boon for psychology and and a huge advance for um medicine so for instance um if you had a brain tumor there are symptoms of having a brain tumor but the only way to find out if you actually had a tumor because you&#39;d want to take this tumor out if you could the only way to find out um yeah a generation ago was to to do exploratory surgery and and open up the brain and see where the thing was now you&#39;d be in an MR scanner you know by the end of the day and and and we&#39;d know um so yes very useful technique um you&#39;re gonna offer me another one yeah okay so we&#39;ll we&#39;ll put this under the category of lesions brain damage um if this is the newest that this is probably the oldest of the of the um basic techniques if you damage brains um in the same way uh you end up getting symptoms that are similar across people and even across species in um in many cases and that is a tip-off that um first of all that the brain has something to do with mental life and that specific bits of brain have specific things to do with specific aspects of mental life the real um advances in this sort of research um and this sort of understanding of the brain came oh I guess mid to late 19th century when um with advances both in medicine and in uh I suppose what you could call military technology in earlier times if you got a penetrating wound to the brain odds were that you were simply going to be dead um but by the mid to late 19th century people were surviving with penetrating brain injuries came clean and um uh bullets were um could be leaving comparatively small lesions and so it became increasingly clear that different bits of brain damage did um different things um let me find myself a place to draw another picture here I need I need a brain so here we go one quick this is your brain just to orient things here Okay so front back bottom top um if I&#39;m facing that way this would be looking at the outside surface of the left hemisphere there right you got two cerebral hemispheres about this size stuck inside your head um this is uh the brain&#39;s got lots of wrinkles there are a couple of large ones that I&#39;m drawing here for my purposes because the the cerebral hemispheres are are conventionally divided up into four lobes um the terms for which are written on the handout so I can just give you the initials rather than writing out the whole thing conveniently the frontal lobe is at the front after that you just simply have to learn them temporal lobe down at the bottom occipital lobe at the back and the parietal lobe on the other side of this big Central sulcus that divides the frontal from the parietal um lobe what was found I think originally in the franco-prussian war if memory serves 1870s was that if you got whoops um lesions to the back of the the brain here to the cortex so the wrinkled outside surface is known as cortex that&#39;s from the Latin word for cork which is what anatomists thought it looked like um if you get lesions back here um you get problems with your vision very specifically and if you get um if you got a great big lesion that took out the entire occipital cortex on both sides you&#39;d be functionally blind but if you got a small lesion let&#39;s say in the left hemisphere you would have a small region of blindness and it would always be on the right side of the visual world um and that&#39;s relative to where you&#39;re actually looking look at fixating at the moment so if I say it on this guy there who I&#39;m now staring at um then if I had a lesion in my left hemisphere some region out here I would be blind if the lesion was in my right hemisphere the blind region would be on the on the opposite side on the um on the left um that&#39;s the sort of thing that you could discover from lesion studies and um so lesions happen when you get brain injury from say a bullet lesions happen from Strokes um one of the great advances one of the great advantages to Imaging Technologies is that in the 1870s or even until quite recently the only way you knew about where the lesion exactly was was if the patient died and came to autopsy you could look at the brain and look what was damaged now you can look at that brain in an intact individual and see where the um see where the damage um where the damage might be um so damage to the brain can tell you something about it&#39;s got the drawback that you&#39;re you&#39;re trying to infer normal function from an abnormal brain at that point um and that&#39;s uh not perfectly not not perfectly straightforward um but it does provide and is perhaps the oldest technique for providing lots of information yes you&#39;re about to give me another method um okay behavior is is item well if that&#39;s zero then a behavior is going to be uh five um and we&#39;ll spend an awful lot of the course talking about behavioral measures but in Behavior you know without going in and and doing something with rain as a black box at that point um yeah it may tell you something about the brain in connection with the rest of this but we&#39;re looking for techniques that are specifically about studying brain itself yes wake surgery I know this sounds cool yeah yeah keep going I&#39;m aware we&#39;re what did you happened what&#39;s this what&#39;s the surgery part I can I I can feel it I&#39;m just trying to see if I&#39;m if there&#39;s a six here that I&#39;m just not thinking of that that would be cool otherwise I can sort of oh yeah actually that&#39;s one I didn&#39;t put in typically which is that you can go in and start infusing stuff uh into chemicals into the brain and and changing um Behavior I um do I want to say anything more about that at the moment I&#39;ll use that one thank you we&#39;ll call this stimulation in general uh stim you Nation you can go in and stimulate brain so that I was gonna I was I was gonna do that um and segue from from the chemical stimulation to electrical stimulation but you got there for me um you can go in and stimulate the brain electrically in rats but you can also do this in humans um yeah in fact uh so back in the 1950s um Wilder Penfield psychologist is working with um some neurosurgeons up in Montreal and what they were doing was um they were doing neurosurgery on um patients with intractable epilepsy epilepsy is a an electrical storm in the brain basically um and um and often is started by a piece of abnormal or damaged tissue that acts as a generator and then when sort of an abnormal electrical activity spreads from that point of generation across the across the brain or across some chunk of the brain and causes a seizure lapse of awareness the sort of symptoms that you get in epilepsy often this is controllable by drugs but in some cases it&#39;s not the treatments of uh that can be tried is to go in and try to lesion this little chunk of brain if you take out the generator you can often reduce the um the severity or eliminate the uh eliminate the seizures um but if you&#39;re gonna take brain tissue out you got to be really careful um because well actually where I put this as a is a is a pretty good example we knew from lesion studies going back again into the 19th century that areas around here um were that go by names like broca and Wernicke&#39;s area which are um the names of 19th century neurologists actually vitally import ant in the production and understand of language those areas exist in the left hemisphere of the brain so this is a left hemisphere of the brain that&#39;ll work work fine and if they&#39;re damaged by stroke you will have trouble with understanding language or um or producing language or both depends on the exact nature of the stroke um but very very bad lesions to have so if you were to discover that the um the epileptogenic focus the piece of bad tissue was sitting in there um you would say look I&#39;m sorry the you know we don&#39;t want to do this surgery because while I could perhaps reduce the frequency of your seizures um it&#39;s going to mean that you&#39;re you&#39;ve got real problems with language and that trade-off is not worth it on the other hand if if the generator was here um say look I can reduce the the frequency of your seizures and you&#39;ll have a a relatively small area of blindness out in the uh right visual field somewhere say look I&#39;m not thrilled about being blind in some part of my visual field but that trade-off is worth it so you need to know where you are in the brain in order to do this sort of surgery and what Penfield did was to stimulate the brain of awake individuals in effect to ask you know what&#39;s this bit of brain doing now how can you do that doesn&#39;t that kind of hurt a lot um the answer is that um they&#39;re under local anesthetic to get through the skull and the outer surface the the membranes across the surface of the of the um of the brain uh because in case you hadn&#39;t noticed you know digging holes with a sharp stick in your skull really hurts um but once you get to brain there are no pain receptors in the brain itself there&#39;s nothing um once once you&#39;ve got the brain exposed you can do anything you want to the brain and and and and the Brain won&#39;t particularly complain um I don&#39;t suggest you try this but um but you could um now why well let&#39;s step back why have pain receptors at all what what&#39;s pain good for yeah yeah Pain&#39;s there to keep you from hurting yourself yeah if you don&#39;t have pain and your hands on the hot stove you say oh I&#39;m cooking my hand that&#39;s you know big deal in fact people who are there are rare cases of people who are congenitally insensitive to pain and it&#39;s it&#39;s bad news they end up injuring themselves um that being the case why not have pain receptors in your brain you know if you sort of thinking sort of evolutionary terms by the time the bear is chewing on your brain you know you might as well just kind of go with the experience because it&#39;s had her much um so the advantage here is that you can go in and stimulate um brain tissue and it&#39;s not a bad it&#39;s it&#39;s somewhat from the sound of a somewhat uncanny experience but it&#39;s not an unpleasant experience and so all right so what Penfield did you know stick a little electrode say here and and put a little electrical current there and what the patient would report if it was here this is to the parietal side of this big Central sulcus what the bro what the what the patient would uh report is I I feel it it feels like you&#39;re touching my foot okay move the electrode a little bit oh now it feels like you&#39;re sort of touching me in my the middle of my back um you know now it feels like you&#39;re touching my hand no no that&#39;s the end of my nose and what what Penfield found was that the surface of body was lay out across the surface of the brain in in the left hemisphere would actually be the surface of the right side of the body I don&#39;t know what that is um and and it is feet up head down as I recall um but that chunk of brain which is called somatosensory cortex the terms on the handout somewhere um represents the skin now uh I haven&#39;t drawn a terribly realistic picture here but the actual map is hugely distorted yes it&#39;s something okay oh don&#39;t do that pay no attention to the man behind the curtain um anyway okay so this this map known as the homunculus for the little man in the head um the sensory homunculus specifically is is massively distorted um some chunks of your skin are heavily over represented in the brain some are heavily underrepresented so what&#39;s over represented hands and face and on the face lips lips and tongue and things like that so um somewhere in gleman I&#39;m I&#39;m like in the chapter you&#39;ll read tonight with luck um there&#39;s a picture people love making little models of the homunculus right so to project it back out into the world and and what would it look like if this was a one for one mapping and you get this guy with you know huge lips and huge hands and a little tiny back um and the way to get a feeling for this is to ask yourself if you were trying to figure out uh what something felt like how would you go about doing that well you would go and explore it with your hands a little kid less restrained than you would also probably put it in its mouth and and feel it that way what what you wouldn&#39;t do is you know rub it against your back or something like uh like that because it&#39;s the hands and the lips and stuff that have the very dense um sensory skin receptors and and it&#39;s sparser in your on your back now you will also you you can test the the prudary of your introductory psych text by checking out um whether the homunculus is anatomically correct um the the genitalia are well represented in the sensory homunculus also my recollection is that they are well represented in glitman there are texts where it&#39;s kind of oh I have actually there&#39;s one great version where he uh where where the uh homunculus is wearing like a little uh a towel um I&#39;ve seen that once that was cute like um you&#39;re touching them on their skin uh if you go around to the uh to the right hemisphere they&#39;d feel the stimulation down the left side of the body go to the other side of this uh into the frontal lobe and instead of saying oh I feel like you&#39;re you&#39;re touching my my leg um the leg would twitch place it is right yes left hemisphere right leg or you move a little further the arm would twitch or just one muscle in the arm or something like that here you&#39;ve got a motor homunculus laid out across the uh the across motor cortex and this chunk of the brain is important in the generation of voluntary um movements again it&#39;s a distorted map hands very overrepresented if you&#39;re a monkey feet are very overrepresented but you who cannot hang upside down from a tree by your feet or your tail or whatever your feet are comparatively um impoverished in their represent representation tongue and and and vocal apparatus heavily over represented um so same sort of story sensory and um and motor now these days you don&#39;t even need to um uh go and cut open the skull to do this sort of thing um transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS for short involves generating a large magnetic field close to the skull um as your physics background will tell you that generates an electrical field if you&#39;ve shaped the magnetic field right you can generate an electrical field underneath in the brain tissue and basically produce the same sort of brain stimulation that you would that Penfield was producing in an open skull with the same results Nancy kanwisher who&#39;s a a professor in the uh Department here used to be up at Harvard got on the front of the Harvard Gazette for teaching her intro class with a a TMS stimulator in hand and say you know want to see where my motor cortex is um I I know I&#39;m not going to do that sorry the reason I&#39;m not going to do that by the way is I&#39;m a chicken it&#39;s TMS is undoubtedly it almost undoubtedly safe you know lots of people do it um but it sounds too much like things that I learned about when I was taking intro psych that were used to generate epileptic Foci in you know like rats you know let&#39;s stimulate and now the rat&#39;s got epilepsy I don&#39;t and it doesn&#39;t seem to happen in TMS but I&#39;m a chicken when it comes to my brain yes um could I um yeah um where we&#39;ll find out if I can spell homunculus uh Paul&#39;s in a urine oh you home monk yes it must be home monk U plus one of the reasons for handouts by the way um is so that when people ask me can I please spell it it&#39;s on the handout somewhere because the answer is no I can&#39;t um so the homunculus derived from the Latin for a little man in the head um but and and I apologize to the women I was trying to figure out today what what what what the little woman in the head would be but my Latin has waned since I took it in college maybe it&#39;s the femunculus I&#39;m not sure um but in any case that&#39;s um that that um the so and then the stimulation that that&#39;s that&#39;s stimulation techniques um I still I&#39;m I&#39;m shopping for one more useful technique here anybody care to offer me another uh another technique for figuring out what&#39;s going on in the brain okay well the case studies are typically these lesion studies right somebody has something wrong with them and we try to figure out what&#39;s wrong with them that goes way back by the way um the early efforts to figure out what bits of brain did um come from the uh phrenologists early 19th century from all o g um if you know anything about phrenology you learned it from the Cartoon Network right because you watched Bugs Bunny beat Elmer Fudd over the head right and then the bumps showed up and you felt the bumps ah looking at me like what&#39;s he talking about right or or you know it because there&#39;s a wide any of these umpteen cartoons um or or sculptures where you have a head that&#39;s got little functions all over it right you know like this is yeah yeah okay good somebody&#39;s I&#39;m not just making up weird stuff um the the the phrenologists believed that the shape of the skull reflected the underlying shape of the um uh of the brain that bigger meant more of that particular function which is rather like this I mean it&#39;s not a completely wacko assumption um and um and they then use a sort of a case study system to try to figure out what different parts of the brain did so um if you wanted to know where criminality was in the brain you go and find yourself some criminals and check where they got big chunks of their brain and that&#39;s where those sort of maps came from it&#39;s a rather ad hoc sounding kind of process um now uh so amativeness lust is typically located back here the reason it&#39;s located back here is because spurtzheim one of the founders of phrenology had in his um uh care a how did he describe it I think he&#39;s she&#39;s described as a passionate Widow and every time he puts his birth time put her his hand on the back of her neck it became red and inflamed and he therefore concluded that that&#39;s where lust lived it turns out though that if you read old phrenology text the original phrenology text they read not unlike introductory psych text or introductory you know brain science text with a few unfortunate assumptions like the notion that skull shape reflects underlying brain shape which it does not very well um there was yes pink person um okay well that&#39;s so um we&#39;ll put the looking at the sales part on under the anatomy my wife would hate this my wife is a neuroanatomist that&#39;s what she does for a living she would want many categories for that um all by itself but yes so you can go look at um certainly as um well you can use this in a number of contexts if you&#39;re going to go stimulate these days if you&#39;re going to go stimulate brain cells you might be doing it on a slice of brain in a dish um to see how it&#39;s connected to the next one and you would be looking at the individual cells under a microscope while you were doing that yes okay that&#39;s a another candid candidate for five but uh um but I will actually if you take a look at um that allows me to make a somewhat different point on the handouts the writing assignments that you get in this course this year will um uh have as their starting point readings that live on the on the Stellar website for the course oh they particularly will if I ever give Mara the disc to put them up there um I&#39;ll have to remember that um the one that&#39;s on for this lecture this if one wanted to write based starting from this lecture uh it is actually a genetic study turns out that there are two flavors of bowl out there little rodent-like animal um some bowls are promiscuous some voles are not promiscuous they just hang out with one I guess Lady Vols that&#39;s a basketball team isn&#39;t it anyway the I guess they&#39;re balls not voles anyway um the claim of a new paper this year is that um manipulation of a single Gene is is able to turn promiscuous voles into faithful voles so in that sense yes absolutely genetics are a new tool for for getting to this it&#39;s not what I&#39;m fishing for I&#39;ll take one more bit of fishing Expedition and then I&#39;ll just all right that&#39;ll be that&#39;s that&#39;s fine too in Vol land yes it&#39;s the male Bulls who are promiscuous yeah I mean and they&#39;re manipulating the the the sexual behavior of the male voles the female Bulls don&#39;t have the the big a symmetry the the two species of voles don&#39;t have the big asymmetry in their behavior to start with apparently so yeah I think it&#39;s it&#39;s a guy thing more on that later in the term yes yeah reading brain signals we&#39;ll we&#39;ll call that recording um in some fashion or other if you can stick an electrode into the brain and stimulate you can also stick up electrode into the brain and uh record from brain tissue and ask what a particular uh cell or bunch of cells are are doing you can do this at a large scale level in um you know walking around human beings um or Animals by putting electrodes on the skull you can read masked activities of large numbers of neurons off the surface of the skull um and um that that&#39;s a so-called electroencephalogram EEG um but uh and that&#39;s very useful for instance in telling the difference between different wake and sleep States if you are deeply asleep the sort of sleep that when the alarm clock goes off you know where am I if you look at the EEG you find big slow waves all the cells are active and then all the cells are quiet and they&#39;re all firing together when you&#39;re um and looking at a uh an awake individual the the waveform is much uh smaller amplitude and higher frequency because you know the the calculus piece of your brain is currently napping and the psychology piece is wide awake and and and various bits are doing things out of synchrony with each other so you can see that from Mass recordings but if you now go and stick an electrode let&#39;s let&#39;s suppose we go and stick an electrode into well this let&#39;s take the same cell that that you know I stimulate here and the the the the patient said you know I feel that in my toe If instead of stimulating you record you find out that that cell doesn&#39;t change its Behavior at all over a huge range of possible things that the organism could be doing but if you poke the toe that cell says here I am I&#39;m I&#39;m interested in that and exactly that you go poke the armpit or something the cell doesn&#39;t care you poke the other you know the next toe over the cell doesn&#39;t care you poke one particular toe let us say that cell will care take a cell out here somewhere and um that cell will care only if you put visual stimuli in a particular little spot in the right side of visual space in a very particular part of visual space move over a little bit and it&#39;ll want stimulation in a different piece of visual space move elsewhere in the brain and now rather than liking say just something simple like a line moving around a cell down here um this is typically done in things like monkeys and so that cell might be very interested if you show it the hand of a monkey right ah sells thrilled show it you know a hunk of chalk I don&#39;t care um you know nearby one might like the face of a monkey and so on so you can find out what individual cells are interested in by recording their activity there are some significant drawbacks to this which is that you can only one of them is that you can only sample from a tiny fraction of the cells even in an area that you are interested in how many cells do you think how many neurons do you think there are in the brain so the the the answer is yes a lot is is a good answer but the answer is going to be expressed in terms of 10 to the X what&#39;s X would you guess well the 24s are a little high and the nines are a little low um when I asked this question when I was in graduate school um I got the the answer that there are uh a pro Nobody Knows the answer for sure because you know how who&#39;s going to go and count um that oops that there are 10 to the 12th neurons in the brain and of these I didn&#39;t even tell you on this picture but here we can draw a tail on this thing um hanging off the back of the brain sort of underneath the back is is the cerebellum it means little brain um important in learning and motor control sorts of things um we&#39;re not going to say much about it here sadly but what my professor said was there are oops 10 to the 12th neurons in the brain of these 10 to the 13th are in the cerebellum uh the the quick on the uptake crowd uh picked up that there&#39;s a problem here right what he was trying to tell me was not that he didn&#39;t understand um math but that look we don&#39;t even really know to an order of magnitude how many cells there are in the brain um but that Lots on this order how many cells sell cord from in um in a study of some function in the brain you know heroic single unit single cell recording studies might have um uh you know on the order of 10 to the second 100 cells recorded from moreover if you&#39;re going to stick an electrode in the brain the cells that it encounters are going to be biased by things like size you&#39;re more likely to get big sales than little cells and big cells do things that are different than little cells um do in the brain so it&#39;s not you can imagine that it would be difficult to figure out um what your laptop did by recording from I you know single components on the motherboard um that wouldn&#39;t be particularly easy um it gets significantly worse when you try to uh um do that in in the brain as a as a whole um the best the things we know best about in the brain are things where we can bring all of these techniques bare and get um what what would be called converging evidence converging data on it um evidence from multiple different sources and then corroborate that by looking at at um Behavioral behavioral measures oh let me say um well all right this this is the moment in the lecture where my wife where where I I really feel my wife looking over my shoulder in two minutes I will polish off the rest of the brain um so that&#39;s just the surface of the brain right you know the the brain is a 3D structure one way to to very grossly think about the the overall structure of the brain is that um if there&#39;s cortex that lying underneath cortex is what but if are a bunch of structures that often get called limbic structures this is really an outdated term it comes from the word for ring and it was the notion that there was a circuit of structures lying under the brain under the cortex but there&#39;s a a collection of structures whose who will show up later in the term um with names like the amygdala from the Latin for um almond uh hippocampus Latin for almond or Greek for almond I&#39;m not sure at the moment um hippocampus from the word for seahorse not because you have almonds or sea horses in your brain but because the shapes of these things are faintly reminiscent of such things out in the real world um and other structures that turn out to be vitally important in emotional um in your emotional life and in um in memory hippocampus will show up later as as as critical in memory underneath there and heading on down into spinal cord oh I don&#39;t know let&#39;s call it the core today or something um are a set of structures um that uh well we tend to spend a lot of time in Psychology talking about the cool stuff happening up in the cortex and stuff like that but the stuff you really don&#39;t want to lose the stuff we don&#39;t know about from lesion studies is down here because something in your brain has to say to your heart beat beat that piece of brain goes you&#39;ve got really big trouble there&#39;s another piece down there that says time to breathe time to breathe again I mean it&#39;s not glamorous work but you know somebody so there&#39;s a whole set of stuff here running vegetative processes and also important not not just for you know pacemaker kinds of things but also for General uh issues of arousal um and and um sleep and wakefulness those sort of things uh so that is an embarrassingly brief tour of of of of the you can spend your life on neuroanatomy trust me my wife does um we&#39;ll come back and talk about single cells on Tuesday

Transcript for:Introductory Psychology Lecture Notes

Transcript for:
Introductory Psychology Lecture Notes