General
This is a tool used for shaving thin layers of a frozen brain.
What is a microtome?
We can ask "how do neurons communicate?" and use histology and staining.
Animal lesion studies involve experimental removal of tissue, aka this.
What is ablation?
This is a map of the brain used in stereotaxic surgery.
What is a stereotaxic atlas?
What are similar lesions?
These participants act as a necessary control group with normal functioning.
What are neurologically intact individuals?
We can ask "how are different areas interconnected?" and study autopsies of healthy and diseased brains.
What is anatomical?
This destroys everything it is aiming at and is generally a bad form of lesioning.
What is high frequency radio pulse?
This is the key first step in stereotaxic surgery.
What is anesthesia?
A limitation of human lesion methods is the assumption that an area is solely and directly responsible for a given cognition, rather than this possibility.
What is a connection between two critical regions?
Placing the brain in a fixative like formaldehyde halts this process, the digestion of cells by their own enzymes.
What is autolysis?
We can study behaviours and their brain associations through induced brain lesioning.
What is functional (animal)?
A limitation is that this may be low between animals and humans.
What is correspondence?
What is the radial arm maze?
These are described as "damaged to area x is impaired for cognition a but not b; while damage to area y is impaired for cognition b but not a."
What are double dissociations?
This type of stain shows an individual neuron in great detail.
What is a golgi stain?
What is systemic?
These two are reversible lesioning techniques.
What are anesthesia and cooling?
What is the lesion?
To understand which brain regions support a given cognitive function, researchers examine a group of participants with these.
What are similar cognitive impairments?
Questions like "what can the brain do?" are well suited to these studies, while questions like "what does the brain normally do?" are well suited to these.
What are single case studies and group studies?
We can understand how certain areas mediate certain behaviours and study natural brain lesions.
What is functional (human)?
Change in behaviour after a lesion may not be due to affecting the one area involved in a cognition, but it may disrupt this.
What is a connection between two regions?
This is the junction of the coronal and sagittal sutures.
What is the bregma?
This would be displayed as someone only reporting one hand moving when both move at the same time, though they can identify which hand is moving when they move independently.
What is extinction?