Brain Anatomy
This organ is the control center of the nervous system.
What is the brain?
This sense allows you to detect light, color, shapes, and movement.
What is vision/sight?
Studying information multiple times instead of seeing it only once generally improves this ability.
What is memory/recall?
Your brain releases this chemical, often associated with reward and motivation, when anticipating or receiving rewarding experiences.
What is dopamine?
This progressive neurological disease is the most common cause of dementia and primarily affects memory and thinking.
What is Alzheimer's disease?
This part of the brain, located toward the back and bottom, plays a major role in balance and coordination.
What is the cerebellum?
These organs contain your taste buds.
What is the tongue?
Information you remember for seconds, like holding a phone number in your mind just long enough to type it, is stored in this type of memory.
What is short-term/working memory?
When you're scared, your heart may beat faster as your body prepares for "fight or flight." This is controlled by the ______ nervous system.
What is the sympathetic nervous system?
Recurrent, unprovoked seizures are the defining feature of this neurological disorder.
What is epilepsy?
These specialized cells transmit information throughout the brain and nervous system using electrical and chemical signals.
What are neurons?
Holding your nose while eating can make food seem less flavorful because this sense contributes heavily to flavor.
What is smell/olfaction?
Remembering the first and last items on a list better than the middle ones demonstrates these two memory effects.
What are the primacy and recency effects?
This almond-shaped brain structure is strongly involved in processing fear and other emotionally significant information.
What is the amygdala?
After brain damage, someone can see a face clearly but cannot recognize whose face it is, even if it's their own family member.
What is prosopagnosia/face blindness?
This brain structure is especially important for forming new memories.
What is the hippocampus?
This part of the eye contains photoreceptors called rods and cones.
What is the retina?
After hearing bed, pillow, dream, tired, and night, someone later incorrectly remembers hearing the word sleep. This demonstrates this phenomenon.
What is false memory?
You stop noticing the feeling of your shirt against your skin even though the sensory information is still there. This is called sensory ______.
What is adaptation?
Someone who has lost an arm continues to feel sensations, including pain or itching, as though the missing arm were still there.
What is phantom limb sensation?
This bundle of nerve fibers connects the brain's left and right hemispheres and allows them to communicate.
What is the corpus callosum?
Even with your eyes closed, you generally know where your arms and legs are. This "sixth sense" of your body's position is called this.
What is proprioception?
Patient H.M. became one of neuroscience's most famous patients after surgery left him largely unable to form new long-term memories. Doctors had removed much of this brain structure on both sides.
What is the hippocampus?
You are so focused on counting basketball passes that you completely fail to notice someone in a gorilla costume walking across the screen. This famous phenomenon is called ______ blindness.
What is inattentional blindness?
After damage to one side of the brain, a patient may eat food from only one side of their plate, draw only half of a clock, and be unaware that anything is missing.
What is hemispatial neglect?