hi everyone nice to meet you my name is Laura and I'm an IB psychology and biology tutor for Lanterna so what we're going to do today is this is going to be the first of a series of videos where I talk you through some of the more difficult concepts within IB psychology so to begin with we'll look at the biological approach so those of you who've already been studying psychology for a while you'll know that paper 1 is split into 3 main approaches to psychology so what we mean by that is we're basically looking at the biological approach as in considering how are our behaviors affected by biological features so by our brain by neurons and neurotransmitters and hormones and so on and then we also have the cognitive approach which is thinking how is our memory affecting our behaviors and actions and how is our memory actually how does that even come about were the different processes lots of different theories and models and then we have the socio-cultural approach which is considering psychology in terms of group interactions and how cultural dimensions can affect our behaviors and attitudes and so on so as I said today we'll start with the biological approach and the main concern of the biological approach is considering how we can study the main biological correlative behavior or physical correlative behavior and now that might sound a bit fancy and a bit unfamiliar but all of that really means is we want to study the brain so we want to study the actual thing that produces all these behaviors and attitudes etc that we then study in psychology so we're trying to see how can we actually trace that down and limit it to one physical thing which is the brain and we know the brain is really complex and there's also different processes many different neural connections etc that all happen within it which we'll explore but because of that complexity there's so much to study which is why this can sometimes be a slightly tricky topic but not to worry we're going to completely go through so what we'll do today is we'll look at brain localization so you might know that the biological approach as well as all the other approaches are split into smaller subtopics and for each of those you're meant to be able to write an essay and you need to have the background knowledge on those specific subtopics but the key is that you also need to be able to bring in evidence and so what I mean by that is studies and I'm sure you've all heard of research studies what we're interested in is seeing how you can show that you understand a concept to say like brain localization which you'll understand by the end of this video but also in seeing how you can relate that and apply that actual research which has tried to demonstrate this in the real world so what we're gonna do is we're going to by the end of today then have a background to it as well as two research studies which you could draw on to support what Brayton localization is so what is brain localization then so brain localization is the idea that certain areas of the brain correspond with certain functions so it's to say that we could isolate one tiny little maybe square centimeter within our brain and that specific area will have a function and somehow that is present in our behavior in actions so on and we've seen this kind of for a while in history that people have had this idea that the brain is localized and that's particularly been evident in kind of outdated ways of thinking like you might have heard of the two hemispheres left brain right brain approach which is really just the idea that people used to think that the left hemisphere is solely logic problem solving etc and the right hemisphere is solely creativity and emotion and so on and even though that's not completely true and it's kind of since been highly highly debated and then disagreed on the sentiment of having these localized functions still very much exists and the way that we mainly can see that is in the four main lobes of the brain and so the lobes you might have heard of them before so the frontal lobe the parietal lobe the occipital lobe and the ten or elope they are what make up the overall mass of our brain and they have kind of overall functions but within them they have specific functions in very specific areas and so the one will mainly look at today is the frontal lobe and then you might also have heard of the Language Center and that's just to kind of give you an example of how you can have an overall Center which is responsible for something like language but within that we then have three areas so you might have heard of Broca's area for example but each of these specific areas is still to do with language but a way more specific subsection so again everything is localized to a specific region in the brain and that specific region produces a specific function or outcome so let's take a look at that a little further by then looking at a case study you guys might have heard of this case before it's quite a famous case quite a weird one and this is about a man called Phineas Gage so what happened is that Phineas Gage was a nineteenth-century railroad worker who suffered a terrible accident where a iron and iron rod passed through his left cheek and exited up through the top right side of his skull and you'd think that someone wouldn't survive that but somehow miraculously he did but unfortunately this iron rod took with it a chunk of Phineas gages brain so what then happened is that he was studied by a man called Harlow and what Harlow did is he purely just observed Phineas's behavior for a while to see if there was any influence in losing this part of the brain to how he would then act and interestingly what they actually found was that Phineas Gage who had originally been a completely normal individual suddenly demonstrated quite dramatic personality changes so suddenly he was rude he was quite extravagant and drastic into his decision-making so suddenly he'd say I'm going travelling tomorrow and make quite drastic plans or talk about moving relocating etc and then a few minutes later he would change his mind entirely and have a new drastic grand plan that he'd come up with so what this then led us to and let harlow to conclude at the time is that the frontal lobe which is where the fraud had exited Phineas gages brain that must be involved in personality because by removing that chunk then clearly that produced some alteration in Phineas gages behavior in the form of personality so the kind of decisions he was making however one thing to make sure to note here is that in psychology we make a distinction between talking about correlation and causation so I would always advise you to talk about correlation if you are unsure because really we can only say that two things are linked or related so as one increases and other increases or that one thing suggests something might happen but causation we kind of reserved when we talked about experiments and things where you actually have variables that you're manipulating to see a cause and effect because without that we can't necessarily be certain that one thing causes another so just be sure to be careful of that about that so what the study showed us is that there's probably a link between the frontal lobe specifically at the prefrontal region and personality okay one other thing before we move on to the next study as well is just to remember that when we're talking about these studies the IB wants you to be quite critical and what we mean by that is you need to be aware that studies like this in particular where there's kind of a freak accident it's just one individual that this occurs - or even just a small group we can't necessarily generalize that because it's such a rare event and it's not a big enough sample size that we can say oh well this whole group has shown this exact same effect therefore it must be true for everyone but what we can say is that this kind of points is in the right direction so this helped people in the past psychologists in the past then start to realize oh there must be such a thing as localization of function there must be a specific role of the frontal lobe in personality therefore it's a stepping stone but it's not the one piece of evidence okay so the next study that we'll talk about in the last study for today is Milner and Scoville so you might have heard about hm so HM was the subject of this study and it's quite unconventional again so a lot of these brain localization ones are what happened is that HM suffered from a bike accident at age seven and he basically got a head injury and then at age ten he started having lots of seizures and this continued and when he was 16 he was taking drugs for it which didn't help at all and then eventually when he turned 27 he decided to have an operation to remove part of his brain that was causing this issue and so what he had is HM had a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy and you don't need to remember that phrase at all it's very complicated all that means is they cut out a part of his temporal lobe which is where the hippocampus is and so they did this to remove the seizures but what they weren't aware was that there would actually be some side effects so it stopped his seizures which was great but then he actually developed a condition and this is what's then spurred quite a lot of other research into the role of the hippocampus in memory and just to note as well when you talk about this study make sure you mention korkin so I know in the title slide in title of the slide it says Miller and Scoville but korkin actually also contributed to the study and he's a key researcher and it's good to show the IB that you're aware of this because he's the one who administered the MRI scan in 1987 so when the technology became available he was able to actually given an MRI scan to understand what was physically going on inside MA chimes brain and remember that's what we said we want to be able to understand what's physically happening in the brain so just remember the name korkin and use that in your essays so what they found was that the condition that HM had developed is something that we call amnesia specifically anterograde amnesia so there's two types of amnesia and amnesia is when you're basically you lose the ability to form or recall memories and the two types are retrograde and tarah great so retrograde just remember retro that means old in the past so anterograde is kind of new or future so aunty you think after and what entire grade amnesia is is it's the inability to make new memories so you can't make new memories after the accident or in this case after the operation and what that meant is that HM was kind of stuck in this weird little bubble where he simply couldn't encode the things he was perceiving in his environment the new memories he was making he wasn't able to store them in any way and so that means that he basically had no future anymore he was just living in the now and beyond that he even developed partial retrograde amnesia so the inability to remember things from the past which meant that he had difficulty with memories from around the time of his seizure seizures so that basically meant he had this awful situation where he'd eliminated the seizures but instead he had an issue with his memory and so you might think what does this have to do with localization of function this is just talking about the hippocampus and memories but actually the conclusion we can draw from this study is that the hippocampus must play a role in memories and that's what the researchers were able to conclude as well because basically it showed that somehow and for some reason the hippocampus has some key key role in converting short-term memories to long-term memories so that encoding is basically what allows you to retain the memory for a long time and we'll talk about that in the cognitive approach so don't worry if that doesn't make sense now but basically that's a key to memory storage so it shows that localization of function is evident in HMS inability to create new memories ok so basically if we then let's say that we've answered the essay question with these two studies we would then make sure to tie it all together at the end by very explicitly linking these two studies back to the question back to brain localization because it's great that you can show the evidence we've shown the background and shown evidence but you really need to tie the two together to get those sevens so you really need to show that you understand that these studies showed freak accidents and they showed brain abnormalities and weird behaviors but the reason that we use these studies in our answers is to demonstrate that we understand that specific brain regions relate to specific functions and then also throughout remember to be critical remember to be a value t'v that doesn't have to be very complex it just needs to show your awareness that for example what we mentioned before you can't generalize these studies they're kind of one-off accidents or you could also say here that it's great that this was a long study because that meant that korkin had time to administer an MRI when that technology became available so it's not only about talking about the negatives you can talk about how good some pieces of research are and it's great when things are corroborated by further research or by for example an MRI scan so that's all we're gonna cover today so that's the first subtopic within the biological approach and I'll cover another subtopic next time I really hope that you've learned something about this and this is a little more clear now and you're starting to get an idea how we should be answering essay questions if not don't worry at all I've got more videos coming which hopefully will help you to explore that further and then also for now feel free to check out the link to online private tuition with Lanterna there's a bunch of tutors who are all absolutely amazing who will be able to help you personally so kind of tailor the tutoring approach specifically to you and I'm also available so just click the link and I look forward to seeing you guys next time thank you