100% continuous assessment means no exam in January!

BUT it also means that you have to be here EVERY Wednesday

20% of your grade will be awarded for participation in Workshops! There are 5 assessments. You have to be here to do them. If you miss an assessment through health or good cause reason, there will be opportunities for resits during the course.

We would like to thank the inspiration from Professor Colin Blakemore, who presented the series The Mind Machine and Professor Susan Greenfield, who presented the series Brain Story. Both produced by the BBC. The videos that we have used in the lectures are reproduced in this Web format as italicised commentaries on the video content.

1. Turn ON your handset - slide the Power Switch up (I = ON)

2. Enter the number 9 and press to join the class

3. The ANS: field will appear you are ready to respond to questions. 4. To send a response, select your answer and press WARNING: Your handset will go to SLEEP when not in use. Press ANY KEY to WAKE UP your handset.

What happens if you do NOT attend ALL the Wednesday sessions?

1) You spontaneously combust.

2) The chip in the back of your neck is activated. 3) You get a rude e-mail from us. 4) Your class certificate is withdrawn.

What happens if you do NOT attend ALL the Wednesday sessions?

1) You spontaneously combust. 2) The chip in the back of your neck is activated. 3) You get a rude e-mail from us. 4) Your class certificate is withdrawn.

Who we are:

Professor Mary Cotter m.cotter@abdn.ac.uk

Professor Peter McGeorge mcgeorge@abdn.ac.uk

Dr Steven Tucker s.j.tucker@abdn.ac.uk

Which of the following statements do you most agree with? 1.The mind is separate from the brain. 2.The mind is entirely due to the activity of brain cells. 3.We do not know what the mind is. 4.It is not possible to understand the mind. 5.The mind is spiritual, the brain is physical.

Historical and Philosophical views of the Mind

Plato established his academy in Athens in 385 BC. At that time there were two diametrically opposed views of the human mind: that it was part of the physical world and that it was not. Plato believed that the human mind/soul was immortal and only temporarily related to the body.

In contrast, Democritus considered that everything in the universe was made of atoms and thus the mind was material.

The 17th century French philosopher Ren Descartes had huge influence. He considered that most functions of the brain, detecting events in the world and reacting to them, were a function of the nervous machinery of the brain. But some special aspects of human behaviour such as moral judgement came from the mind/soul, which he thought exerted its influence through the pineal gland (the third eye).

Dawkins; the mind is the actions of the brain, which evolved because it made humans more efficient at propagating their genes. To understand the brain is to understand the organ that allows us to understand!!

What is the point of brains? Interestingly only animals have brains.

What could be the interpretation of that?

1. Plants are stupid. 2. Animals need brains because they move around.

3. Plants have a completely different brain system, which we have not yet discovered.

Sea squirts have different life cycle stages:

As larva they are free swimming and have a brain, the cerebral ganglion. They disperse by swimming and then settle down as adults, attached to a permanent substrate.
Once they do that, then the cerebral ganglion is digested, they literally eat their brains. Good Biology!

What does that suggest might be a major function of the brain?

Movement: increases risks,

increases need for rapid information from the environment about what is happening,
find food and mate, avoid predators. Need to process lots of information very quickly.

Humans need a very long time in order for their brains to mature and yet their lifespan at the time of the Stone Age would only have been about 20 years.

So need for a cohesive, complex, innovative and communicating society may have been an important drive in the evolution of the human brain.

The Machine of the Mind

? =

Your brain weighs about 1.5kg and contains roughly 100 BILLION neurons..

A neuron (nerve cell) is specialized to be very good at transmitting information...

Its s all about information. Neurons communicate by sending electrochemical signals along their axons down to a specialised junction called a synapse.

At the synapse, chemicals called neurotransmitters are released, which affect the electrochemical activity of another neuron. (There are lots of different neurotransmitters).

Neurotransmitters attach to receptor sites on the next nerve and trigger an impulse/activity which sends the information on.

So at synapses, nerves talk to each other by releasing neurotransmitters.

Chemical Messengers (Neurotransmitters) carry the message from one nerve to another. How long do you think the Neurotransmitter stays attached to the second nerve? 1. Hours 2. Minutes 3. Seconds 4. Milliseconds S-3 5. Microseconds S-6

In fact very, very short time, so that the second nerve is ready to respond to new information. Action of the neurotransmitter is rapidly terminated either by its destruction or its reuptake into the nerve that released it.

Important to appreciate that virtually all of the Pharmacopoeia , (available medicine cabinet for treatments), is made up of drugs that manipulate an aspect of synapses.

The Brain: the ultimate prima donna!! The rest of the body slaves all the time to maintain the brain in a happy state. Brain demands constant supply, via blood supply, of oxygen and glucose (sugar). Failure to provide either results in severe interference with function.

The Brain: the ultimate prima donna!! When neurons are active they increase their demand for blood supply which increases delivery of O2 and glucose. These changes can be monitored and give us lots of information about which areas of the brain are involved in what activity.

Interference with the supply of oxygen as occurs in Stroke demonstrates the absolute need of the brain for O2 . Just 4 minutes interruption of brain blood flow leads to irreparable damage.

Stroke victims give us lots of information because the changes in their behaviour/perception of the world inform us about what the areas they have lost might have been doing.

Divisions of the cortex

In Human beings (like many other primates, including chimpanzees, New and old world monkeys, etc.) the most powerful sense is vision. We have a phenomenal visual system which dominates all our other senses. Quite a bit of cortex is devoted to it too:

From Dougherty (2003) Journal of Vision.

whereas a dog for example would have a smell map of this room, in one glance

He looks so cute!

He needs a bit of a wash

Which of the following most closely defines Perception? 1. ability to hear, see or become aware of something through the senses 2. a way of regarding, understanding or interpreting something 3. intuitive understanding and insight 4. neurophysiological proceses, including memory, by which an organism becomes aware of and interprets external stimuli 5. All of the above. 6. None of the above.

If you look really hard at this chocolate bar, can you see anything? 1. Yes 2. No

One of the most important things we need to make sense of is faces. Is this person friend or foe?

The human brain craves information about faces and many of us see faces in any vague combination of shapes, even in the most unlikely places.

But what if you could not recognise faces, even your own?

Lincoln Holmes had a car accident 30 years ago and is completely face-blind. He suffers fear and panic because he has no ability to recognize faces. But, he is NOT blind.

Lincoln 1

In tests of his visual perception, Lincoln has no problem recognizing objects, but is totally flummoxed by faces, sadly, including his own.

Lincoln 2

So Lincoln cannot recognise faces (Prosopagnosia).

what about Kevin?

Kevin Chappell also had an accident which damaged his brain. He has NO problem with recognition of faces, but is unable to recognise objects. (More than 30 brain areas have now been shown to be involved in visual processing)!

Kevin

So one patient can recognize objects but not faces and another faces but not objects. These patients with very specific brain damage provide insights into how we actually make sense of our world.

Another important source of information is by stimulating different areas of the brain and observing what behaviours/sensations occur in conscious humans. Sounds really bizarre BUT there is no pain in the brain and so once the skull has been removed under local anaesthetic, can puddle around and stimulate different parts of the brain.

Sarah Kitchen is undergoing brain surgery to remove a tumour. In order to avoid any damage to the areas of the brain that are involved in key functions such as speech, the surgeon has to have the patient awake. So she is asked to speak by counting numbers and when the surgeon stimulates certain areas , he can jam the function of that area and then knows to avoid it because of its involvement in speech. (One key fact to appreciate is that many pathways in the brain are inhibitory and so when they are stimulated they damp down activity).

Brain Surgery

The surgeon emphasises that there is nothing wrong with Sarahs vocal cords, it is her mental processes of speech that are being blocked. The surgeon is then able to remove the tumour without damaging speech areas. Bizarrely patient talks about puddings while her brain is being manipulated by the surgeon. She was asked if she wanted to watch the operation on her brain, but declined!!

As a result of this kind of technique, it was possible to map out areas of the brain which control the muscles of the body, motor homunculus. Penfield in Montreal stimulated small areas of the motor cortex and carefully recorded the effects on the bodys muscles

For example if he stimulated here in the right motor cortex, he observed co-ordinated contraction of the thumb muscles on the contralateral side, ie left. (One of the things about the motor system is that one side of the brain controls the other side of the body!)

In a similar way to the motor homunculus, discrete electrical stimulation of the adjacent area of the cortex , produced sensations eg touch or pin prick in specific parts of the body= Somatosensory homunculus.
Thus the body carries a map of the body in terms of both its muscles and also its sensations.

Which of the following statements do you think is most correct?

1. Thanks to the brain, we have an absolutely accurate picture of the world.

2. The brain constantly lies to us about the world in which we live. 3. Sometimes the brain makes it up. 4. We are all in a constant state of delusion and hallucination.

Angela Button has had her right arm amputated but still feels as though she retains her lost hand. This is a clinical condition, known as Phantom Limb. Sometimes patients with this condition eg with their leg removed try and stand up, but fall over or with their arms removed try and scratch their nose with their lost hand. They also get radiation , ie the parts of the body that are lost are taken over on the somatosensory cortex by adjacent areas. So touching her face elicits sensation of her lost hand.

Phantom

Is she hallucinating? Perceiving a limb that is not there? How can that be? Her brain is projecting back out to the area of the somatosensory cortex that represents her missing hand, to give her a perception of that hand.

So is the brain messing with our heads? Can we trust what we see and feel?? Is seeing really believing? It is important to realize that you dont have to have brain damage to be deluded by the brain, all of us suffer constant delusions and hallucinations. Lets look at a picture?

Can you see anything moving?

1. Yes 2. No

Nothing is actually moving in this image..Stare at any of the red arrows for a second and that part of the figure stops moving.. (rotating snake illusion)

Attention!
Although we know that the brain craves information, a lot of the time there is simply too much information for the brain to deal with, so it filters out the unimportant stuff. In order for us to take any notice of it, we have to ignore a great deal of incoming information.

Famous Harvard experiment revealed that our brains actually process very little information from our eyes. When students enrolled in an experiment, one student gave them the form, then another, hidden under the counter, gave it back. It revealed change-blindness, most students, ie >75%, failed to see that it was a different person who returned the form.

Attention

This has all sorts of implications for accuracy of witness statements for example.

Very important processing for attention goes on in the parietal cortex, damage in some parts leads to one of the most bizarre neurological syndromes.

Damage to the right hand side (parietal cortex) leads to neglect. Patients ignore half of their world. Mainly due to strokes affecting the right side of the brain. They may only dress one side of the body. Peggy Palmer ignores the left hand side of the world and can only draw the right hand side of a picture that she is asked to copy, Remember one side of brain controls other side of the body. It is not blindness, but damage to the attention system. When pointed out that they have ignored things then they acknowledge that. Brain fills in the gaps due to imagination.
Neglect

So weve seen that fascinating deficits can be observed and studied in patients with very specific brain damage.
But maybe broken brains dont work quite like normal onesare there other ways we can learn about the brain and its relationship to different qualities of mind?

Are there ways we can learn about the way the brain/mind works in people without brain injury?
Are there ways we can demonstrate how the brain uses information to perceive the world?

Dont have to have brain damage to be messed about by our brains?

Weird perceptual illusion designed to fool the brain.

Ames room

The Ames Room It isnt really a nice rectangular roomit is very distorted but perspective says it isnt---so if those distances are what they appear to be, that lady on the right must be a giant! Your experience determines what you perceive And you cant ignore it even if you know it is an illusion!

Ames room

Neuroimaging
Imaging techniques have been developed which allow study of the brain performing different activities. PET (Positron Emission Tomography) fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) MEG (magnetoencephalography) They have lead to an explosion in our understanding of which areas of the brain are normally involved in different activities and behaviours in healthy undamaged brains.

PET scan of normal brain performing complex planning activity that involves the frontal cortex/lobe. How do we think things through? Complex planning needs brain to create solutions to a problem. Imaging shows frontal lobe lights up with activity. A second scan, taken when something is not being actively planned can be used to subtract activity to pinpoint areas involved in planning.

PET Scanner

We know from neuroimaging and from studies of patients with brain damage that the frontal lobes play a role in tasks like planning actions

Michael, a Vietnam veteran who suffered shrapnel wounds to his frontal lobes has lost the ability to plan. He has gone from a bright promising, assertive soldier to an unemployable person who makes multiple mistakes in his behaviour and his social relationships. He now works as a hospital janitor

Frontal

The damage to Michaels frontal cortex means he is no longer able to cope unless he is given very structured step-wise instructions. He is no longer able to rely on internal thinking to develop and execute plans. He has also lost reflective ability.

Frontal scan

Theme 2 Consciousness and free will

What do we mean by Consciousness?? Clinically it refers to the state of awareness of self and the environment. And a key component of that is conscious memory

If this is impaired it has devastating effects on our behaviour and being.

Clive Wearing, a professional musician, suffered a loss of components of his temporal lobes and has completely lost the ability to remember anything since his accident = anterograde amnesia. He lives in a moment to moment existence. Snapshots of time with no connections to either the past or the future. Endlessly writes the same thing, but cannot recognise it, because even as he sees it, it is fading from his memory. Teaches us that we are our memories.

Theme 3: Language
The Communicative Imperative: How do we use language to convey complex ideas, emotions and abstract concepts? What do we do if we can't 'speak'? Is our mind affected by the language we speak? Is our language a product of nature, or nurture? Can brain damage selectively impair it?

Dr Wilson Tally, an award-winning nuclear scientist and advisor to the US government suffered a stroke that has left him unable to use language properly. His words are jumbled and somewhat incoherent and he cannot express himself.

Wilson Tally

Theme 4: Creativity
Another aspect of the human brain/mind is creativity. Just think about what amazing things people have done.

Which of the following do you think is the most amazing example of human creativity: 1. Art such as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 2. Music such as the symphonies of Beethoven or the operas of Mozart. 3. Literature such as the plays of William Shakespeare. 4. The voyage to the moon. 5. The development of anti-cancer drugs. 6. The internet

Is genius the product of a damaged mind, where some functions are lost and brain takes over that cortical space to enlarge other functions? Steven Wiltshire has autism, he is known as the human Camera. At the age of 11, he was able to draw a perfect image of London after one helicopter ride. Even the number of windows in all major buildings was completely accurate. Steven is challenged with another helicopter ride over Rome, the eternal city, which he has never seen before. Yet again, he produces a perfect replication.

Savant

Theme 5: The Healing Brain

Can the mind/brain heal the body?
Is a positive attitude to disease effective in fighting off cancer?

Do people really die of voodoo curses?

Why is this not causing pain? Or is it? Is the brain masking the pain?

So next week, we will explore more about the way in which scientists think that different parts of the brain might work, looking at more cases.
Also importantly, although we have been looking at these amazing unique patients, Science requires not anecdotes and one off unique cases but the need to adhere to the scientific method. So we will explore a little bit of how we might we able to build a case for understanding how the mind works. Meantime, here is something to ponder

The human mind has amazing capacity to innovate, as evidenced by mans exploration of space.

Space

Next week: More of the puzzle: Lecture 9-9:50 in REGENT LT (across from playing fields) Workshop 10:05-12:00 in Zoology G9 and 11 (the PODSup St Machar Drive to roundabout turn right, or head across the botanical gardens to Zoology)