These short neuronal processes receive information.
What are dendrites?
100
The name given to the wrinkled outer layer of the brain.
What is the cerebral cortex?
100
The basic biological unit that transmits characteristics from one generation to the next.
What is a gene?
100
This mechanism, which occurs after birth, removes synapses that are not activated by experience.
What is pruning?
100
The arrival of an electrical impulse at the axon terminal triggers the release of this type of chemical signal.
What is a neurotransmitter?
200
This glial cell gets its name from its star-like shape.
What is the astrocyte?
200
This part of the autonomic nervous system slows your heart rate and breathing when you are safe and at rest.
What is the parasympathetic nervous system?
200
This type of living situation can make rats from a strain bred to be timid and fearful bolder.
What is an enriched environment?
200
One reason why teens are likely to behave impulsively and take unnecessary risks is because this part of the brain, responsible for planning and judgment, is still immature.
What is the prefrontal cortex?
200
This specialized protein removes the chemical signal from the synapse to end communication between neurons.
What is a transporter?
300
The name given to the electrical impulse that travels down the axon.
What is an action potential?
300
The collective name for the medulla, pons, and midbrain
What is the brain stem?
300
Researcher Terri Moffitt and her colleagues in New Zealand found that individuals with the low activity form of the MAOA gene become violent teens only if they also had this type of childhood experience.
What is growing up in a severely abusive home?
300
This developmental disorder may be diagnosed in a baby who does not smile or babble by 9 months of age.
What is autism?
300
This "stress hormone" is released from the adrenal gland in response to a signal from the pituitary.
What is cortisol?
400
This type of glial cell wraps around axons in the peripheral nervous system and covers them with myelin.
What is the Schwann cell?
400
This part of the brain regulates hunger and sexual behavior, as well as linking the nervous system to the endocrine system via the pituitary gland.
What is the hypothalamus?
400
People with two copies of the short from of the serotonin transporter gene had more activity in this part of the brain, which may explain why they tend to shy and anxious
What is the amygdala?
400
The term used by neuroscientists to describe the ease with which the brain changes during childhood and adolescence in response to experience.
What is plasticity?
400
Transporters for this chemical signal are blocked by drugs like Prozac and Zoloft, prolonging communication between neurons.
What is serotonin?
500
These glial cells are actually part of the immune system.
What are microglia?
500
This area controls the muscles of the face, lips, and tongue that allow us to speak. People with damage here have difficulty talking, but can understand what others are saying to them.
What is Broca's area?
500
The term behavior geneticists use to describe changes in gene expression triggered by environmental factors like nutrition and stress.
What is epigenetics?
500
The neurobiological term for the process in which new synapses are formed during brain development.
What is synaptogenesis?
500
These chemical signals are natural pain relievers.