Anatomy
This is the fundamental building block and cell of the entire nervous system.
What is a Neuron?
This mirror-like layer at the back of animal eyes causes eyeshine and improves night vision.
What is the Tapetum Lucidum?
These structures in your inner ear, which contain tiny crystals, are essential for sensing gravity and balance.
What are the Otolith Organs?
This sleep hormone, released by the pineal gland, makes you feel drowsy when it gets dark.
What is Melatonin?
This "brain fertilizer," boosted by some antidepressants, helps neurons grow and form new connections.
What is BDNF
This tiny gap is where chemical messages are passed from one neuron to another.
What is a Synapse?
This neural process, which sharpens visual edges, occurs when excited retinal neurons inhibit their neighbors.
What is Lateral Inhibition?
Smell and taste are known as these types of senses because they detect chemical molecules in the environment.
What are the Chemical Senses?
This sleep disorder is defined by sudden sleep attacks and cataplexy, a loss of muscle tone triggered by strong emotions.
What is Narcolepsy?
This type of memory acts as a temporary mental scratchpad, like when you hold a phone number in your head.
What is Working Memory?
This major neurotransmitter is crucial for movement, and its loss in the substantia nigra causes Parkinson's disease.
What is Dopamine?
The brain's "what" pathway identifies objects, while this "where/how" pathway guides your actions toward them.
What is the Dorsal Stream?
This type of muscle, found in your intestines, is responsible for involuntary movements like digestion.
What is Smooth Muscle?
The frontal and temporal lobes are particularly active when you recognize this angry expression on someone's face.
What is Anger?
This is the neuron that fires in response to a very specific concept, like the image of Jennifer Aniston.
What is a Grandmother Cell?
This instinctive "fight-or-flight" response is controlled by the sympathetic branch of this system.
What is the Autonomic Nervous System?
These are the specific sound-receptor cells located in the inner ear.
What are Hair Cells?
This movement disorder is characterized by tremors and rigidity due to the loss of dopamine-producing neurons.
What is Parkinson's Disease?
This almond-shaped brain structure is critical for processing fear and other social emotions.
What is the Amygdala?
This term describes our personal, subjective experience of the world and our own existence.
What is Consciousness?
For most people, the ability to produce and understand language is primarily located in this cerebral hemisphere.
What is the Left Hemisphere?
Damage to the hair cells in the inner ear results in this type of permanent hearing loss.
What is Nerve Deafness?
This term describes the precise mapping where neighboring points in the retina project to neighboring points in the visual cortex.
What is Retinotopic Mapping?
Urbach-Wiethe disease, which can damage the amygdala, famously impairs the ability to recognize this specific emotion.
What is Fear?
This property of the visual cortex allows for features like color, motion, and shape to be processed simultaneously in different areas.
What is Parallel Processing?