Brain Imaging & Modern Methods
This early brain imaging technique used X-rays to create cross-sectional images.
What is CT (or CAT) scanning?
A neuron's baseline charge of about –70 mV is known as.
What is the resting potential?
This neurotransmitter is the brain’s main excitatory signaler.
What is Glutamate?
Cognitive neuroscience tries to connect these two domains: one biological and one psychological.
What are brain structure/function and the mind?
This non-invasive technique offers higher-resolution structural brain images with good white / grey matter tissue contrast.
What is structural (anatomical) MRI?
The Na⁺/K⁺ pump moves ions in this 3:2 ratio to maintain the resting potential.
What is 3 Na⁺ out for every 2 K⁺ in?
This neurotransmitter is the brain’s main inhibitory signaler.
What is GABA?
Ramón y Cajal used new staining methods around 1905 to reveal these basic brain building blocks.
What are neurons?
PET scans helped reveal dopamine loss in this neurodegenerative disorder involving a loss of voluntary movement.
What is Parkinson’s disease?
During an action potential, these ions rush into the neuron.
What is sodium (Na⁺)?
Acetylcholine plays a key role in this cognitive function.
What is attention (or vigilance)?
This Roman physician was among the first to argue that the brain creates the mind.
Who is Galen?
This imaging modality measures oxygenated blood flow to infer brain activity.
fMRI
These gaps in the myelin sheath speed conduction.
What are the nodes of Ranvier?
Serotonin cell bodies are located here in the brainstem.
What are the raphe nuclei?
Despite phrenology’s flaws, it introduced this important principle.
What is localization of function?
Dronkers et al. (2007) found that symptoms in Broca’s patients could also result from this type of damage.
What is white matter disconnection?
These graded postsynaptic potentials depolarize a cell, increasing the chance of firing.
What are excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs)?
This catecholamine system is critical for reward and motor control.
What is dopamine?
Karl Lashley proposed this law, stating memory impairment is proportional to brain tissue removed.
What is the Law of Mass Action?
Many modern insights using invasive recording or stimulating electrodes in human patients come from surgical procedures for what neurological disorder?
What is epilepsy?
These SUMMATION processes allow synaptic inputs to be integrated to determine the relative likelihood that a postsynaptic cell will / will not generate an action potential.
What are temporal and spatial summation?
Noradrenaline, produced in the locus coeruleus, is thought to increase this property of brain activity.
What is neural gain?
These two broad principles summarize how cognitive functions are organized in the brain.
What are functional modularity and distributed networks?
This invasive method in allows precise causal inferences about brain-behavior relationships.
What is experimental lesioning (or invasive animal studies)?
Oligodendrocytes produce this fatty substance that insulates axons.
What is myelin?
Most modern evidence suggests the brain uses this type of coding, involving ensembles of neurons that can be recombined flexibly—but in rate limited ways.
What is sparse distributed coding?
Situations where two separate mental processes are found to be controlled by different underlying brain systems.
What is a double dissociation?