Brain Anatomy & Regions
This extensively folded, 2mm-thick outer layer of the forebrain is responsible for complex conscious thought, voluntary movement, and sensory processing.
What is the cerebral cortex?
This discredited 19th-century pseudoscience suggested that a person's mental faculties and personality traits could be determined by feeling the bumps on their skull.
What is phrenology?
This term describes the capacity of the brain’s neural networks to dynamically modify and adapt in structure and function as a result of experience or trauma.
What is neuroplasticity?
This mild traumatic brain injury is caused by an external force that makes the brain bounce inside the skull, leading to symptoms like blurry vision and headaches.
What is a concussion?
This neurological disorder is characterised by sudden, intense bursts of brain activity that result in uncontrolled rapid movements called seizures.
What is epilepsy?
This structure in the hindbrain coordinates voluntary muscle movement, balance, and the storage of memory for motor skills like riding a bike.
What is the cerebellum?
This structural neuroimaging technique uses magnetic and radio fields to activate atoms in the brain and create detailed 2D and 3D pictures.
What is an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging)?
Following a brain injury, this process occurs when existing neurons form new axon terminals and dendrites to allow new connections to be made.
What is sprouting?
Often identified using the "FAST" acronym, this acquired brain injury is caused by an interruption of the blood supply or bleeding in the brain.
What is a stroke?
This progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disease is linked to repeated impacts to the head and can currently only be definitively diagnosed post-mortem.
What is Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)?
This complex arrangement of neuron clumps in the midbrain plays a significant role in maintaining arousal, consciousness, and motor control.
What is the reticular formation?
This early philosophical debate centered on whether human thoughts, feelings, and behaviours originated from the head or the chest.
What is the brain-heart debate?
This specific type of plasticity involves brain development that is triggered by environmental cues the brain anticipates encountering, such as an infant opening their eyes for the first time.
What is experience-expectant plasticity?
An individual with this acquired language disorder can speak fluently, but they have severe difficulty comprehending speech and producing meaningful sentences.
What is Wernicke's aphasia?
Conditions like Alzheimer's disease fall under this category of incurable conditions that involve the progressive death of neurons over time.
What is a neurodegenerative disease?
Located in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere, damage to this specific area results in a person struggling to produce clear and fluent speech.
What is Broca's area?
Pioneered by Pierre Flourens, this early surgical experiment involved the removal, destruction, or cutting of a region of brain tissue to study changes in an animal's behaviour.
What is ablation?
The phrase "neurons that fire together, wire together" describes this process, where repeated activation leads to the relatively permanent strengthening of synaptic connections.
What is long-term potentiation?
Often resulting from a stroke in the right hemisphere, this neurological condition causes an individual to lose the ability to attend to sensory stimuli on the left side of their body.
What is spatial neglect (or hemispatial neglect)?
In patients with CTE, this specific protein required for cell stability malfunctions, clumping together and disrupting communication with adjacent neurons.
What is the tau protein?
This forebrain structure connects the nervous system to the hormonal system and is responsible for maintaining homeostasis, such as body temperature and hunger.
What is the hypothalamus?
This functional neuroimaging technique shows live brain activity by measuring oxygen consumption, assuming that active areas of the brain consume more oxygen.
What is fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)?
If neural connections undergo repeated low levels of activation, they weaken over time and may eventually be eliminated through this specific process.
What is synaptic pruning?
This neuroplastic process occurs when healthy nearby neurons create alternative neural pathways to bypass existing connections that were lost through an injury.
What is rerouting?
Parkinson’s disease, which causes movement tremors, is linked to damage in the substantia nigra, an area of the midbrain responsible for producing this neurotransmitter.
What is dopamine?