Famous People
Camillo Golgi
Damage to this brain lobe can impair decision-making, impulse control, and personality, as famously seen in the case of Phineas Gage.
Frontal lobe
This part of the brain, located at the back of the head, is primarily responsible for processing visual information.
Occipital lobe
What dessert is Boston best known for?
Boston cream pie
A Spanish scientist, the first to propose that neurons are separate, individual cells.
Santiago Ramon y Cajal
The place where the neuron's membrane is exposed (gaps in myelin sheath) and the only place where ions can leave.
Nodes of Ranvier
This type of memory allows you to hold and manipulate information temporarily, such as when solving a math problem in your head. (HINT: this memory was intact for HM!!!)
Working memory
What regatta, the largest two-day rowing event in the world, is held annually on the river that separates Boston from Cambridge?
Head of the Charles
These two celebrities have neurons in the hippocampus named after them.
Halle Berry and Jennifer Anniston
These star-shaped glial cells help maintain the blood-brain barrier and support neuronal function.
Astrocytes
This region is specialized for facial recognition
Fusiform face area
Who is the current mayor of Boston?
Michelle Wu
This person discovered an region in the brain important to language. One of the case studies that lead to this discovery was a patient that could understand speech and speak fluently, but made little sense when speaking
Paul Broca
This protective structure, formed by tightly packed endothelial cells, regulates which substances can pass from the bloodstream into the brain, maintaining the brain’s delicate chemical environment.
Blood brain barrier
This phenomenon occurs when individuals with damage to their primary visual cortex can respond to visual stimuli without conscious awareness of them.
Blindsight
In 1919, what disaster flooded parts of Boston's North End with a deadly wave of sticky goo?
The Great Molasses Flood
The first to describe large nerve cells in the cerebellum, which are now named after him. These cells send inhibitory signals to fine-tune motor activity.
Jan Purkinje
This neurodegenerative disorder, characterized by progressive degeneration of upper and lower motor neurons, leads to muscle weakness and paralysis, and is linked to mutations in the SOD1 gene in some familial cases.
ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)
This brain network, active when a person is at rest or engaged in self-referential thoughts, is typically deactivated during focused cognitive tasks.
Default Mode Network
What Boston park was the location of a scene from Goodwill Hunting?
Boston Common