Download Memories and your Brain

Memories and your Brain
Psychology 3717
Introduction
• Look, your memories MUST be in your brain
• Somewhere…..
• Questions arise though like umm where are
they stored?
• How are they stored?
• Is it just new connections or something else?
Don’t be afraid, it is just a bit of rote
memorization
• Unless you know Greek and Latin…
• Brain is organized in, at best, a semi random
pattern
• Some of the names are confusing
– Substantia negra
– Zona inserta
• Some make a teeny bit of sense
– Hippocampus
– amygdila
A few key terms
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Anterior
Caudal
Dorsal
Frontal
Inferior
Lateral
Medial
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Posterior
Rostral
Sagittal
Superior
Ventral
dorsal
Time for a diagram!
Some important Subcortical structures
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Hippocampus
Amygdila
Thalamus
Hypothalamus
Nucleus accumbens
Medula
The cells
• There are two basic types of cells in the brain,
neurons and glial cells
• Neurons do the transmitting
• Glia do the support functions
• There are many types of neurons and glial
cells, but we don’t have to be too concerned
about those
Fall in to the gap
• Between neurons there are teensy gaps
• The synapse
• Neurotransmitters go across the gap to cause
the next neuron to fire
• Why not direct connections?
• Allows for modulatory properties of drugs and
other chemicals
Learning and memory may happen here
• Seems sensible that learning and memory
could happen here
• New synapses?
– Enriched rats
• Long Term Potentiation
– Maybe
– Looked really promising
On a more oh macro level, how can you
measure brian activity
• There are many imaging techniques
• Before even EEG we had techniques like those
Penfield used
• Neurosurgeons were usually a tad busy and
had pesky operations to take care of…
EEG
• Oldest form of brain
imaging
CAT Scan
• Computerized axial
tomography
PET scan
• Positron emission
tomography
MRI
• Magnetic Resonance
Imaging
So, how do you combine this stuff
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Easy (if expensive)
Put a subject in an MRI or PET scanner
scan
Have her read a passage
Do a distracter task
scan
Remember
scan
Some selected results
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Aplysia and habituation
Feature detectors
Face detectors
Place cells
HM
KC
conclusions
• Look we KNOW memories are up there
somewhere
• However, we are a LONG way from figuring
out where
• We are also a long way from figuring out how
• Even once we do, someone has to design the
behavioural end of cognitive neuroscience