![[IMAGE]](http://media.pluto.psy.uconn.edu/brain.jpg)
Guildenstern:, O, there has been much throwing about of brains. (Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2)
TMBG: i think maybe, but i don't know, but i'm starting to feel like i got a brain problem situation on my hands
| EL | 1100 | 2500 |
Guildenstern:,
O, there has been much throwing about of brains.
(Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2)
TMBG:
i think maybe, but i don't know, but i'm starting to feel like i got a
brain problem situation on my hands
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The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century: Many of these names will become familiar through this class.
Some representative insightful comments from founding psychologists and other sources
William Perry's view of the intellectual and cognitive development of college-age students is not so much a "developmental psychology of college students" as it is an observation-based description of how their approach to knowledge (or their "epistemology") typically changes over four years, and as such, it may be of interest to you.
Learning styles in Wikipedia: In particular read the "criticisms" section; the rest is useful if you're unfamiliar with the concept but it just describes the whole unscientific idea.
New Findings Inform the Laptop versus Longhand Note-Taking Debate, by Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel: A blog post commenting on the findings about notetaking and laptop use in class, and a failure to replicate the notetaking findings. References for those papers, and a newer one that qualifies the notetaking results, are here:
Noam Chomsky quote from Language And Mind (1968) on the need for "making strange" the phenomena of psychology
Speech perception depends on context:
play this video without looking at it just to hear the audio, then play it again while watching it. (Same thing on
Kaltura.)
LINKS AND READINGS:
These are mostly optional; the required ones are highlighted in white boxes.
Slides on Definitions of Psychology in PDF format: Four definitions of psychology -- (1) the science of mind and behavior, 2) the science of experimental epistemology, 3) the science of knowing and experiencing, 4) the science of things that move around on their own; three important dates in the history of psychology; a timeline and four terms that are central to epistemology; the mind-body problem; what kinds of things are of interest to psychology.
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A thing that moves around on its own: the robot called Big Dog from the Boston Dynamics robotics lab is designed to maneuver through a cluttered terrain with rocks, hills, snow, ice, and other impediments to locomotion. The computations that go into controlling and coordinating its legs, and perceiving its environment in order to do so appropriately, are of interest to psychology as well as to related fields such as artificial intelligence: the principles it uses are inspired by animate locomotion, and in turn help to develop theories about how animate locomotion works. Not to mention, Big Dog seems to take on a kind of psychological existence simply by moving around in a lifelike way; many video viewers were angered by the demonstration of how its little brother Spot regained its footing after a destabilizing kick, commenting that it was mean to kick the robot like that (click here to see Spot run). Once you've seen Spot run, you may also want to see Spot dance, along with Handle and Atlas (two of them).
A dog demonstrates that perceptions and actions are scaled to size.
The Venus Flytrap is pretty smart. See similar coverage of the Venus Flytrap in the New York Times, where it's called "a plant that can count" and "much smarter than [the roundworm] C. elegans", a widely studied simple animal having a nervous system of 302 neurons; the Venus Flytrap, being a plant, has zero neurons! [Try accessing through Google if blocked by paywall.]
Thigmotropism in Wikipedia: how plants' climbing and clinging behavior works based on their "sense" of touch.
Links cited in slides on definitions of psychology: These are collected together here in a more accessible format than the pdf of the slides.
Counting the neurons in the brain: Excerpts from a book review that describes the surprising "brain soup" procedure.
Quicktime movie of the action potential and neurotransmitters
crossing the synapse as described in
the text (with
awesome music by They Might Be Giants). It may be helpful to move through
the movie frame by frame to study the sequence of events and match it up
to the lecture and text. Note that at the end of the sequence just
before it repeats, an enzyme labeled AChE (for acetylcholinesterase)
appears, to break down any neurotransmitter (apparently acetylcholine in
this case) that remains in the synapse after the signal has been sent.
Here's the
Kaltura version of the video, in case it's easier to view.
Fun facts about neurotoxins (PowerPoint slides): you don't need to memorize these cases, but you should be able to understand how each poison interferes with the neural mechanisms you know about now.
Swearing as a Response to Pain: a 2009 report showing that swearing is effective for pain relief; the methodology is kind of fun. They hypothesize that swearing may activate strong emotional responses that can inhibit pain sensitivity (which would be an indirect way of inhibiting a withdrawal reflex): "[F]ear may cause amygdala activation of descending pain inhibitory systems that regulate the flow of incoming nociceptive [pain] signals. Therefore, perhaps swearing induces a negative emotion that, if not fear, may nevertheless be characterized as an immediate alarm reaction to present threat. The heart rate acceleration after swearing observed in this study is consistent with activation of the fight or flight response. However, the question as to which negative emotion swearing elicits, if not fear, is unclear. One possibility is aggression."
Praying mantis sex from National Geographic on youtube, starting at about the 3:49 mark after a bit about naked mole rats. Pretty lurid narration for National Geographic, actually. It's an example of disinihition: The male praying mantis performs copulatory movements reflexively and even more vigorously after the higher nerve centers responsible for inhibiting that reflex are removed, if the female bites the male's head off. Another video makes this point, saying "A separate mini-brain in his tail kicks in, and actually speeds up his performance." It's more of a nerve cluster than a "mini-brain"—even the "brain" in the head is really a nerve ganglion, not technically a brain—and it "kicks in" because it's no longer being inhibited by signals from the head. This is actually a fairly uncommon phenomenon in the wild though it apparently happens quite often in captivity—if you want to know more this (copied from a sadly now-vanished website) seems like a decent account, or just go to Wikipedia's article on the mantis. I've seen estimates that around 25% of copulating males in the wild end up being eaten.
Disinhibition in humans due to alcohol: The original posting of this video had over a million views within a week of the events of the night of Sunday Oct 4, 2015 at the UConn Student Union, and became a nationally famous "news" story with clips being shown on network late night shows, and occasional coverage of the unfortunate ex-student's sad struggles in the years since. Demand soared for UConn's Bacon Jalapeno Mac'n'Cheese. It all resulted from alcohol's depressant effect on the pre-frontal cortex's inhibitory functions, which led to this guy acting on some normally suppressed obnoxious impulses. Don't let that happen to you, if you ever decide to try alcohol once you're 21.
Autonomic Nervous System: a diagram showing the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic branches and their functions. Here is a slightly modified version substituting a few brief summary statements for the accompanying text; both are useful.
| NERVOUS SYSTEM OUTLINE: an outline of what to know about the nervous system for this course. Here's a pdf version, in case the formatting is messed up in the Word version. And here's a web page version. |
BRAIN CARTOON: need I say this?... you do NOT need to know this picture for the exam!
A Wired article
and a
New Scientist article
about a woman who was found, at the age of 24, to have been born without a cerebellum.
Research on Jonathan and people like him supports the idea that the cerebellum really has just one job: It takes clumsy actions or functions and makes them more refined. "It doesn't make things. It makes things better," Dr. Jeremy Schmahmann says.
That's pretty straightforward when it comes to movement. The brain's motor cortex tells your legs to start walking. The cerebellum keeps your stride smooth and steady and balanced.
"What we now understand is what that cerebellum is doing to movement, it's also doing to intellect and personality and emotional processing," Schmahmann says.
Unless you don't have a cerebellum. Then, Schmahmann says, a person's thinking and emotions can become as clumsy as their movements.
Some links related to Parkinson's Disease, if you're interested:
| Experiment on patients with either a damaged amygdala or hippocampus as described in lecture, but not in the textbook. (Here is the published paper -- purely optional, quite advanced, but readable if you're motivated.) |
| A summary of the basic terms in classical conditioning as used to describe the hippocampus / amygdala experiment above, consistent with the reading on pp. 195-201 about Learning (pp. 259-265 in 8th edition). |
Take an MRI tour of a really great brain:
from
left to right,
from
front to back,
from
top to bottom.
Depending on your browser and plug-ins, these versions might be more browser-compatible and convenient:
from
left to right,
from
front to back,
from
top to bottom.
Here are the same videos on Kaltura:
from
left to right,
from
front to back,
from
top to bottom.
(And here's a special bonus scan of a really okay abdomen from
front to back.)
| Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology, along with some of his legitimate scientific achievements. |
The story of Phineas Gage's gruesome accident and (supposed) personality change is related here, with admirable restraint, for those who want to read the details. But all the links make interesting browsing. Phineas's damaged skull and his tamping iron are displayed at the Warren Anatomical Museum of the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; next time you're in the Boston area, stop in. The story of the daguerreotype image identified in July 2009 is recounted here. The second image, identified in 2010, is described here.
A crude sketch of some regions of the left hemisphere cortex that you should be familiar with. Though unlabeled in this drawing, you can identify the seven highlighted areas: primary motor cortex, primary somatosensory cortex, primary visual cortex, primary auditory cortex, pre-frontal cortex, and (in the left hemisphere only, as shown) Broca's area and Wernicke's area. More usefully the sketch serves as a model of how to draw a simple sketch of the brain for reference.
Oscar Peterson plays My Romance (with Sam Jones, bass, and Bobby Durham, drums) from Exclusively For My Friends: The Lost Tapes, c. 1965-67. It's from before his 1993 stroke and is a kind of stunning example of the level of motor control it's possible to have over one's fingers. If you like that, then from the same album check out Gravy Waltz cause it's fun, and It's Impossible to hear almost 2 1/2 minutes of spontaneously invented melody in sixteenth notes, a mindblowing feat of creativity and dexterity (starts at 3:48).
The sensory and motor homunculi as 3D models, at London's Natural History Museum.
The cerebral localization clip from "Scrubs" is posted here, for those who believe things they see on TV.
A brilliant ad involving the motor cortex in which a brain surgeon does some multi-tasking.
An excerpt from "The Royal Tenenbaums" in which Bill Murray's character is a satirical take on the neurologist Oliver Sacks; see also this clip from near the end.
Some myths about handedness are debunked in this excerpt of a few pages from Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus -- including the one that says left-handers die younger, and also the one I like to mention, which is that hooking of the hand while writing is an indication that language functions are carried out by the right hemisphere instead of the left. (More specifically, I've heard that right-handed writers who hook their hands are more likely to have language spread between both hemispheres, but that's equally unsupported.)
Examples of aphasic speech:
Excerpt from 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry L. Beyerstein (2009): this is a really good book that I'd strongly recommend to anyone interested in psychology, especially potential psychology majors. The publisher has made Chapter 1 available on their website and it happens to include some topics that are quite relevant to our coverage of neuropsychology, as well as discussions of E.S.P. and subliminal messages. See especially "Myth #2" on pp. 25-28 for the discussion of brain lateralization (right vs. left hemispheres) and split-brain patients.
Summary of the inhibition / excitation model of extinction and
spontaneous recovery: a brief description of the roles of
excitatory and inhibitory associations in accounting for classical
conditioning phenomena. This model is not discussed in the Gleitman
textbook at all.
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In school, we learned about "this scientist" who trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell... (my mouth tastes so bad all of a sudden... gaah...)
| Summary of classical conditioning and drug effects: the conditioning explanation of drug tolerance, withdrawal, and paradoxical overdose. |
Interesting analysis of the case of Pavlov's cat by Eddie Izzard.
Clip from "The Big Bang Theory" in which Sheldon reinforces Penny for desirable behaviors, which is sort of funny though too oversimplified to work in real life. Notice that he says at one point that he could use "negative reinforcement" to "train [a] behavior out of her," when of course that would require punishment instead (negative reinforcement can only INCREASE the occurrence of a behavior, by definition).
Squirrel Obstacle Course as an example of chaining: it's reasonable to assume the squirrel was first trained on the last step, and then each additional segment of the path was added in reverse order till they finally reached the beginning of the course. In that way, the nuts reinforced the jump from the platform, and through its proximity to the nuts the platform became a conditioned reinforcer for riding in the rocket. Then the rocket became a conditioned reinforcer for the step before that, all the way back to the beginning. End result: a chain of simple behaviors linked together into a complex sequence.
Musical Canine Freestyle (a.k.a. Heelwork to Music in the UK): a completely preposterous example of both shaping (getting the animal to produce responses it wouldn't normally produce) and chaining (linking together a series of responses into a sequence). From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird column (those of us with dogs know exactly what "at-home dog-dancing" refers to):
The New York Times reported in November on the recent but growing competitive sport of "musical canine freestyle" (choreographed dancing with dogs), in which costumed owners and their matching-collared pooches move to tunes such as "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Get Happy." (Holding the dogs' paws, as in at-home dog-dancing, is forbidden.) The World Canine Freestyle Organization has a mailing list of 8000 aficionados.
Race a rat through this maze, by pausing the video on the maze overview and tracing through it on your own, and then hitting play to see if you can actually stay ahead of him when they show his whole run in the second half. I'm not saying it's hard, just that he's faster than you think -- and the rat doesn't get the bird's eye view that you get either.
Operant Conditioning videos - alternate versions on Kaltura:
I Was Not A Lab Rat: B. F. Skinner's daugher, Deborah Skinner Buzan, is angry with idiots like Lauren Slater (author of the obnoxious Opening Skinner's Box - don't waste your time!) and others who persist in spreading rumors claiming that her father somehow mistreated her and set her on the road to insanity and suicide. Nice appreciation of the man and of the "Air Crib" he invented for her, which was NOT a "Skinner Box" in any way!
| The flow of information in memory: textbook diagram modified to reflect details from lecture by identifying two kinds of rehearsal, and retrieval from LTM. |