PSYC 2200: Exam 4

sensitive period

a certain period of time during which an organism is more susceptible to environmental influences or stimulation than at other times

expressive flexibility

ability to both enhance and suppress emotions -emphasizing the importance of matching the emotional expression to situational demands -In many situations, there is no need to suppress an emotional reaction, but your outcome may be better in certain situations if your emotional expressions are less transparent: ex. poker

implicit memory

can't explain how to do but know how to do it anyway like riding your bike

wanting

closely related to motivation and drive -Brain areas: orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental area, and hypothalamus -Dopamine is key neurochemical

angiotensin

renin acts on in our blood and affects our drinking

anterior insula

secondary processing area -Step up in processing -Add more layers -Assimilated and feel things like emotion -How we feel

pineal gland

secreting melatonin: controls ability to go to bed to go to sleep

tracer

injected a chemical known as a tracer to track the neural pathways from the thalamus to other brain areas. Such chemicals, when injected into the distal processes (those located the farthest from the cell body) of a neuron, travel to the cell body, enabling scientists to confirm the origin of cell bodies in various neural networks

immunocytochemistry

involves exposing extracted brain tissue to specific antibodies to visualize a certain substance of interest, such as brain proteins that are expressed when brain areas are active

autism

problems w recognizing emotional content of situations with ppl on the autism spectrum -Individuals on spectrum don't gain as many neurons in amygdala as they grow up

long term memory

-Goes to short term memory first then goes to new storage for memory -Scattered throughout brain -NMDA receptors uniquely suited to be able to make this work better: when two things happen simultaneously you need to have the postsynaptic cell be depolarized and have to have the presence of glutamate and when these happen together, there can be a long lasting changes in the neuron that are calcium driven -Thought there might be some kind of chemical activity or compound able to hold these memories -Used planaria and taught them how to run a maze and didn't teach others how to do it: Ground up worms and fed them to other planaria->idea was that the planaria that ate remains that were trained will do better than the ones that didn't (didn't work) -Long term memories work: they get ported out into cortex and other areas involved

Korsakoff syndrom

-Happens to severe alcoholics->have really bad nutrient deficits -Thiamine deficit (B1), so exhibit anterograde amnesia as well so not able to form new memories Typically will have one or the other

Simon Levay and homosexuality

-Look at SDN in humans: in looking at homosexual males to see if SDN in homosexual males resembled that of a male or if it resembled it of that of a female -Looked at gay men, straight men, gay women and straight women -Charted the size postmortem who had previously died, and the best sample he could reliably get was AIDs victims but important confound->did find there was a difference in SDN (area bigger in straight men than gay men in the hypothalamus) -Confounds: AIDS causes widespread damage in brain -Redone with PET scans and it still holds -Did a vaporizer here where they let humans sniff basically an androgen to sniff testosterone to see what area of brain lit up-> brain is lighting up in the heterosexual female and homosexual male but not in the homosexual male? -When estrogen is administered-> hypothalamus of the homosexual females and the heterosexual males are lighting up whereas heterosexual female not -Brain hormonal systems do this later as activation -Found the third interstitial region of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH3) Activation part: -Castration: remove all of the circulating androgens and ability to produce them->would think it would decrease sexual behavior Graphs: -Time on x axis and amount of hormones on y axis -Need to have a clearance system to break down hormones and need this bc if we didn't have it hormones would constantly be on go (need to change response) -Whenever we castrate the animal, those circulating hormones will go away and break down/not produced -If circulating hormones were the only things regulating sexual behavior, then we should see a really good one-to-one ratio between when we remove the hormones and when sexual behavior goes away->hormone level experiment doesn't always work/doesn't always match up directly to the level of hormones present in the blood and the sexual behavior->castration expt can give more insight into this -When castration occurs: amount of circulating hormone you have there makes a difference; so if you have sexually mature animal and castrate them->end up having a drastic reduction in the response in amount of circulating hormones and behavior (become less interested in sexual activity) -Situation of a sexually experienced male who is older and has more experience will retain more sexual interest for longer simply because this is a behavior they have done already -If have a male that has been through puberty but never been sexually active have same kind of slope where their circulating androgens are going to go down based on the castration but they also would lose the behavior quicker bc they never experienced it to begin with -Levels of circulating hormone effect behavior but it also seems like the previous sexual experience can impact these behaviors -Castration before puberty: never allowed circulating androgens in the first place so bc you cut them they never have the androgens and they stay flat line (never exhibit any kind of sexual activity) -Castration before puberty vs after puberty makes difference -Amount of circulating hormone, amount of sexual experience that has been previously and then timing of castration (before or after puberty) -What about castrated and let all the androgens go out of their system and then inject testosterone: if you do that, you will temporarily get an increase in sexual interest or activity but it will drop off again Something about experience that also impacts the behavioral response of this circulating hormone and the big picture tells us that circulating hormones do impact behavior

Romance

-Only 3-5% of mammalian species exhibit monogamy, characterized by the formation of strong pair bonds

mesocortical system

-VTA to cortex (frontal mainly) -Maybe important for planning cognition

ventromedial prefrontal cortex

-What allows us to mediate gut feelings -High level of cortex getting all of this info coming in and it considering how we should feel about it (decides what state of body you should have) -Phineas Gage: Ventomedial prefrontal cortex damaged in accident -Programming and driving response to the gut

retrograde amnesia

Event that happens in a timeline and anything that is before event that happened (inability to remember before event) -50 first dates -able to form new memories

four warning signs of stroke (FAST)

Face drooping Arm weakness Speech difficulty Time to call 911 (Time is really important)

submission

In other species and circumstances with less clearly defined dominance hierarchies, animals can defuse an oncoming aggressive encounter by exhibiting certain behavioral postures, sending a message of submission to the aggressor -Darwin noted contrast between the aggressive and submissive postures exhibited by dogs -Submissive dogs are less likely to be involved in fights. Thus, adopting a submissive strategy on occasion may be a smart social approach that keeps an animal alive

emotional temperament and longevity in rats

Internal environment plays a critical role in health outcomes: -Cavigelli, Yee, and McClintock developed an animal model to determine the role of an animal's internal environment (in the form of emotional temperament) on susceptibility to tumor development. -In this study, female rats were assessed for their tendency to explore new environments at 20 days of age and assigned to either a low-exploration, an intermediate-exploration, or a high-exploration group. For the temperament task, an exploration arena was designed to introduce rats to an unfamiliar environment. The experimental arena was covered and the walls were opaque to reduce anxiety in the rats (who prefer dark spaces to bright habitats). Novel objects such as plastic tubes and inverted bowls were positioned throughout the unfamiliar environment. The experimenters' goal was to diminish as much of the stress response associated with the environment as possible to assess individual responses to nonthreatening novelty—that is, the novel rat-size objects. For five minutes, experimenters recorded the rats' responses HYPOTHESIS: the rats that tended to avoid novelty would be more susceptible to health risks such as tumor formation and shortened life span than the rats that tended to approach novel objects -Movement throughout the arena was assessed by counting the number of times the rats walked from one area to another area of the arena (areas were marked by nine equally sized grids). The most active rats were categorized as "neophilic" (more likely to approach novel objects) and the least active were categorized as "neophobic" (less likely to approach novel objects). The animals falling between the two extreme temperament categories were classified as "intermediate responders." This assessment was repeated when the rats were 11 months of age -When the rats were 47 days old, they were housed in trios of sisters representing each of the three groups. Beginning at 10 months of age, the rats were routinely examined for mammary tumors (common in captive laboratory rats) to investigate the effect of these specific emotional temperaments on health outcomes. At 15 months of age, animals were placed in a restraint tube for 30 minutes. Repeated blood samples were drawn to determine corticosteroid levels at baseline and 30, 60, 90, and 150 minutes following the rat's release from the tube: -Examination of the tissue took place following each rat's death, and the rats' mammary tumors were excised and assessed. Additionally, the rats' brains were examined for the presence of pituitary tumors. RESULTS: -the neophobic rats with mammary tumors died faster than their neophilic sisters (the same was true of rats with pituitary tumors). Also, neophobic rats developed mammary tumors significantly earlier than the neophilic sisters so that at all ages assessed, the neophobic rats were more likely to die of a mammary tumor. By 390 days of age, 80% of the neophobic rats had developed a detectable mammary tumor compared with only 38% of the neophilic rats. Neophobic rats lived an average of 573 days compared with 850 days for the neophilic rats. The maximum life span for the neophilic rats was 1,126 days, almost a year longer than the maximum life span of 781 days observed for neophobic rats. Further, the neophobic rats secreted lower levels of corticosterone in response to the restraint stress than the neophilic rats did, an effect hypothesized to be caused by the accelerated aging of the ovaries and HPA axis in the neophobic rats.->suggest that a shy, neophobic temperament in rats leads to enhanced vulnerability to tumor growth and, consequently, a shorter life span -suggest that in acute, short-term stress experiences, a greater corticosterone response was found in the rats with the healthier life outcomes

two sides of amygdala

Info come into the basolateral side and then it goes over to central medial side and then out to lots of different brain areas

anterograde amnesia

Other kind happens when can't remember after the event -can't make new memories -Can remember everything up until event well, but after can't form new memories -Korsakoff Syndrome

short-term memory things you do

Phonological loop and visuo-spatial sketchpad: repetition of things you hear (repetitive)

ventral tegmental area (VTA)

Projecting to lots of different places -These dopaminergic neurons are close to the substantia nigra and VTA sends axons to alot of places that receive dopaminergic input -Sending things that look like to nucleus accumbens and then going to cortex and forebrain -Another system is substantia nigra->caudate/putamen->other areas as well -Responsible for reward/learning behaviors: -Discussion in terms of motivation and addiction -Mesencephalon: dopaminergic neurons are originating

induced ovulation

not many; physical act of sex causes these animals to ovulate (efficient)

nucleus accumbens in limbic system

role in anticipation and reward, contributes to emotional expression, as does the insula

female hormone system

some things really high at certain times and then they would drop off and then other things would get really high and drop off; lots of players -Female system has cycle: related to female ovulation and reproductive system -Goes around as a cycle: cut it in half -This cycle: one target tissue releasing hormone in bloodstream which is talking to another target tissue -Regulated by the hypothalamus working through the pituitary gland

memory consolidation

the process by which an unstable memory representation is converted into a stable and accessible memory -Medial temporal lobe, especially hippocampus: involved in the consolidation of memories, attention turned to this brain area in laboratory investigations: Conducted on animals->cannot simply tell us what they remember

hippocampus in memory

the processing-based model emphasizes the speed of relational memory formation during hippocampal processing, as no other brain structure is capable of associating the elements of our experiences on-line -eventually disengages from its early essential role as learning transitions into more structured semantic categories and procedures, at which time our responses become more rigid and less flexible

classical conditioning can be good or bad

-Condition can lead to something positive happening which will lead to food that animal would like -Condition can happens and as a result something bad would happen -Ledoux: trying to track down the pathways that were involved in fear or emotion so in doing this he can use some kind of conditioned stimulus and he might play a tone and the tone would say hey foot shocks are coming -Repetitive conditioning where animal would learn to associate something aversive with the tone -Association will form -Aversive reaction to tone -Fear response

dentate gyrus

-Conserved through vertebrate evolution -With the enhanced cortical development in primates, the hippocampus has dropped to the ventral areas of the brain. In the rodent, however, it has remained in the dorsal brain regions.

cryophobe as alternative for lesion study

-Consistent with the lesion -When you have ability to warm it back to normal it functioned normally

problem with neurogenesis not being part of memory-timing

-Compared with the rapid modifications observed in spine restructuring, it takes considerably longer for a new neuron to mature and become settled in a neural network. -Review of developmental trajectory of a mouse hippocampal neuron: Following birth, the young cell differentiates into a neuron, rather than a glial cell. It continues to mature and then eventually migrates relatively short distances to the inner granule cell layer of the dentate gyrus so that it can begin growing modest processes in preparation for the formation of eventual synapses. Hence, during its first week of life, the neuron concentrates on its own development as it reaches its destination and continues its maturation. The neuron continues to mature during the second week following birth, as its processes have clear destinations within the hippocampus. Specifically, the dendrites migrate toward the molecular layer of the hippocampus and the axons toward the hilus and CA3 cell layer. These young neurons are distinguished from fully mature neurons by higher membrane resistance (a measure of the impediment to the flow of electric current across the membrane), leading to different action potential firing patterns. -At this early stage, the neurons start receiving GABA input from nearby interneurons->depolarizes the neurons, making them more likely to survive to maturity -By third week of life, neurons start forming connections with local neural networks: dendrites that make these connections begin to form around day 16 of a neuron's life. during this time, dendrites sprout filopodia that seek out existing synaptic terminals on other neurons to incorporate an existing circuit into the neuron's infrastructure -complete process of neurogenesis takes too long for it to be the mechanism of all learning, which often must occur quickly to enhance an animal's survival or optimal resource acquisition. Still, aspects of neurogenesis have been associated with learning

emotions and decision making

-Even when we suppress emotions, the experiences are still processed by the appropriate brain areas. It is critical that our brains fully process the threat value of various life events; otherwise, we will not learn from our experiences and make informed future decisions -individuals with frontal lobe damage experience diminished emotional responses to situations that are traditionally viewed as threatening or emotional. Subsequent investigations revealed that these individuals take more risks than others in a gambling task; further, many such individuals are currently in prison for committing crimes -Somatic marker hypothesis

dopamine, GABA, and noradrenaline, have also been implicated in modulating aggressive responses

-Ex. drugs that antagonize dopamine have been associated with decreased aggression. -Mice genetically engineered to lack the dopamine transporter, leading to increased extracellular dopamine, exhibit increased aggression -in humans, GABA receptor agonists generally decrease aggression -In rodents-> evidence that increased GABAergic activity in the septum, an area involved with the suppression of aggression, increases aggression -Because aggressive encounters are stressful, high levels of noradrenaline also accompany aggression. Although the role of noradrenaline in aggression is also complex, drugs that decrease its levels (such as β blockers) have been used to treat children exhibiting excessive levels of aggression

B.F. Skinner

-Explored impact of reinforcers: events increasing the likelihood of a recurring response, on behavioral patterns -Experimented with pigeons-> researchers built an automatic feeding machine that dispensed grain for the pigeons and they began conditioning pigeon responses. Pigeons were trained to roll a wooden ball with their beaks down a tiny alley to knock down very small pins. The conditioning was achieved using the feeding machine to reward small steps toward swiping the ball with their beaks. Amazingly, in just a few minutes, the pigeons were swiping the ball with their beaks as if they were bowling champions (acquired a behavior) -Found operant conditioning: Animals "operate" on their environment by manipulating certain aspects of it. When the response leads to a positive outcome, the actions are reinforced and repeated -Emphasizes the animal's active interaction with its environment -Reinforcement schedules: patterns by which reinforcements given over time -Used to emphasize importance of reinforcement contingencies -Reinforcement can be negative if aversive stimuli -used a Skinner box -formalized ideas of Thorndike into a framework

two examples of LTP

-First sign: train of impulses three times in a row this results in LTP -If two sets of LTP: strong on top and weak on bottom, end up strengthening both of those bc they're happening at same time or concurrently: associativity comes into this

Pavlovian conditioning

-Idea that the conditioning is changing the behavior or changing the response -Referred to as classical conditioning: one of first kinds of ideas to frame learning and memory as model 1. If you take a dog anywhere and anytime and you show it a big hunk of meat that it's going to salivate if showed food. -food was unconditioned stimulus -Elicited unconditioned response: salivation to food 2. Pavlov realized in the lab that he could pair this arbitrary, unrelated stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus and it would still elicit the same response->still elicit salivation: If you repeatedly pair an unconditioned stimulus with a conditioned stimulus overtime, then the new stimulus would give you some kind of result that looked like the unconditioned stimulus ->becomes conditioned response -Conditioned stimulus: lids of trash can -conditioned response: salivation -Coming from the conditioned stimulus instead -Somehow the two stimulus get paired together in the brain and as a result you have a response: -In a dogs mind when you give the conditioned stimulus then the unconditioned stimulus and both of them will elicit this conditioned response -Animals are learning: something about this predicts that; novel stimulus can elicit familiar response

insula part of cerebral cortex that allows us to process state of our body

-Input come into insula then we need to have output going from the cortical regions to be able to experience emotions consciously -Output side allow us to modulate how we feel in gut

Egas Moniz and Walter Freeman

-Moniz was head of asylum-> when we didn't know how to treat w emotional/behavioral problems we contained them -Ppl who were in us and doing lesions where removing parts of prefrontal cortex and calmed down and did these prefrontal lobotomies (taking out lobe): best thing that patients who were horribly and terribly behaved before were much easier to take care of -Walter Freeman: ww2 majority of males had been having problems PTSD aggressive tendencies->set up system called veteran affairs hospitals and diagnosed w mental problems -Believed that could all be cured from prefrontal lobotomy -Lecture in surgical amphitheater and do 6-8 in course of 50 minute lecture -Not okay to do -> not reversible procedure -Ethical and immoral problem -Kids as young as 8 and 9 bc parents couldn't control their behavior (not consent) -No medical need

submission and defeat

-Not adaptive for animals to be excessively aggressive -Certain behaviors have evolved to prevent continuous tissue-damaging aggressive encounters

rapid encoding of single or categorized items

-Once memories have been established, this memory system is involved in the recognition of how subsequent life events fit into those established memory networks. -Ex. a loud noise in the street outside your window will be integrated into a threat memory system if you are a military veteran who returned from a tour of duty defined by hostile combat. The noise will still get the attention of someone who recently moved to the city from the quiet countryside, but it will not be easily categorized into an existing memory system -The brain areas assessing the familiarity and relevance of stimuli encountered throughout our lives involve the area surrounding the hippocampus known as the parahippocampal gyrus, as well as the neocortex

two theories of how brain encodes memories

-One theory holds that the representation of a single memory (e.g., the image of Luke Skywalker) is distributed->it is stored as bits and pieces that are distributed across millions or perhaps even billions of neurons -alternative theory holds that thousands or ever fewer neurons constitute a "sparse" representation of an image->Each neuron will activate to different views of Luke Skywalker; a subset of these neurons will also fire to the image of the Star Wars character Yoda. However, a separate set of neurons will activate to the image of Jennifer Aniston -Although neuroscientists debate these two theories, there is little dispute that our rich and diverse memories consist of unique networks formed for different concepts

CRH (corticotropin releasing hormone)

-Released from hypothalamus -CRH travels through the hypothalamic-pituitary portal system and triggers the eventual release of adrenocorticotropic hormone from the anterior pituitary gland and cortisol (a type of glucocorticoid found in humans) from the adrenal cortex and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is released from the adrenal cortex in parallel with glucocorticoid

are bolder coping strategy more adaptive in humans?

-Research suggests that first-year college students who believe that they have control over their emotional responses and can modify their emotions were more likely to exhibit healthy mental health profiles (with fewer depressive symptoms, higher social adjustment, and a heightened sense of well-being) than students who felt their emotional responses were fixed and out of their control: Having the perception that your emotional response is under your control is healthier than believing that you cannot control your response. Because intense emotional responses are not always appropriate, being able to modify emotional responses is often beneficial

LTP and glutamate

-Researchers trying to determine whether LTP is a critical neural component of learning and memory have blocked various aspects of LTP, with subsequent evidence of impaired learning in most cases -Ex. disrupting glutamate transmission or AMPA receptor availability impairs LTP and memory. -Enhancing receptor binding appears to have the opposite effect->doogie mice: These transgenic mice received extra copies of the NR2B gene, a gene that enhances NMDA receptor function. With enhanced NMDA signaling, the transgenic mice performed better than their normal (non-genetically modified) counterparts in object recognition tasks. The transgenic mice explored new objects for longer than they explored familiar objects. In contrast, normal mice spent an equal amount of time with new and familiar objects, suggesting weak memories of the object they had previously explored: -Although most of the research on the neurobiology of learning has focused on LTP, experience can also weaken connections between synapses, a process referred to as long-term depression

criticism of Karl Lashley

-Rests on idea that learning and memory is happening in the cerebral cortex -If it doesn't exist in cerebral cortex->theory doesn't make sense -Said this is a really complicated way to ask this question -So much stimulation->not simple behaviors (smells, visual cues, somatosensory) -Too complicated to find a particular change -Ppl tried to find more simple way

locked-in syndrome

-Result from stroke or vascular accident where you have a problem with blood flow or blood flow is blocked -Stroke: blood supply to area of brain is blocked -The diving bell and the butterfly -French executive that had stroke underneath the amygdala->basically completely paralyzed but brain completely fine -Noticed he was able to communicate with them and worked out system where he could communicate with them -Ended up writing a book bc he was locked in but same person as he was before -Not getting info back from gut or viscera, so that suggests that they would feel nothing at all in terms of feedback -Ppl rarely get frustrated, they aren't upset->feel pretty serene -Chain reaction

memory consolidation studies

-Studied this by implanting electrodes in the brains of humans, both volunteers and patients being monitored for epileptic seizures -expands on a theory originally presented in 1969 by the neuroscientist Jerry Lettvin suggesting that we may each have specific neurons that contain our memories for specific people and concepts. -Introduced concept of grandmother cells: -more recently, specific cells in the hippocampus have been found to respond to a specific person such as the Star Wars character Luke Skywalker or the actress Jennifer Aniston: instead of single cells containing the memory for a specific person or concept, it is more likely that sets of neurons make up the memory networks for specific concepts

autonomic nervous system and emotion

-Sympathetic body arouses body-> like heart rate, increase in sweat<-easy to measure -Can measure galvanic skin response: two electrodes on a person's palm and when you start to sweat there will be fluid on your palm and it will decrease amount of resistance between the two electrodes and then you can measure that (proxy for emotions is gsr) -Expt: Backwards masking: flash pictures at the participant and the pictures are going to be emotionally neutral stimuli (cat, house) and then you'll flash something with emotionally laden content in it very quickly (tarantula) and immediately flash a picture of an emotionally neutral stimuli -Ask participant what they saw, they will say emotionally neutral stimuli-> will not be consciously aware that they saw the tarantula -Picture of the second emotionally neutral stimuli backwardly masks the very short stimulus of the emotionally laden content, but will still have an increased GSR (sweat more)->activates autonomic nervous system, response you do not find there without the scary picture

pure autonomic failure disease

-Sympathetic nervous system does not work: usually has arousal effect so no arousal -Input is interoreception: info picking up from internal organs inside our bodies -Output is exterior reception: outside bodies from external world -Do not have overt emotions, they experience blunted emotions -Intereoreceptors: bringing in info abt gut: this is what is affected -Have blunted emotions -This tells you hey if you can't feel that something's going on in your gut differently, then can't feel emotions as strongly -Emotions still there, not completely gone

Williams Syndrome

-compromised amygdala function -Individuals with this genetic condition (seen in 1 in every 12,000 live births) also have specific facial features (e.g., low nasal bridge, puffiness around the eyes, a long upper lip and prominent lower lip, blue eyes with a starry pattern), cardiovascular challenges, delayed cognitive development, and other physiological effects. -these individuals exhibit diminished amygdala activity in response to social situations compared with healthy control subjects -respond with less amygdala activation to images of fearful facial expressions than to images of natural disasters, while healthy controls, however, respond more intensely to fearful facial expressions->Social threat not considered as important -highly social and seem to have no social stress or anxiety->not knowing whom to approach and whom to avoid in certain contexts is dangerous (must be closely monitored)

driving

-demonstrates how readily behavior can be engineered to manipulate the environment in adaptive ways. -enables us to accomplish goals that we perceive as necessary in our daily lives

lesion studies with amygdala

-if remove entire amygdala, it changes their responses to emotional states -If remove basolateral portion (so not getting sensory info) , then animals are more aggressive -Basically have a control group (no damage to amygdala) -Different group where the basolateral area of amygdala has been changed: put animals into situation w another species to see if they exhibit aggressive behavior -Damaged basolateral amygdala->rats have increased amounts of aggression towards intruder mouse -Opposite expt: damage to central medial side: -Raise a rat to be "winner" or "loser" at fighting -For normal rat: put it in a situation where it fights really weak and spindly other rats so it will win so itll think it has high self-esteem and good fighter or if you have rat could always lose (wimpy, submissive rat) -If damage central medial amygdala, the wimpy rat will never stop fighting and he will never give up and will not become wimpy rat when exposed to partners stronger->emotional input coming in but not being processed so not going out properly

HM scans

-innovative histological project involving the digitization of more than 2,400 slices of the brain -Final histological analysis of his brain revealed: -portion of the posterior hippocampus remained intact -confirmed that the surgery resulted in extensive damage to the entorhinal cortex, sometimes referred to as the gateway to the hippocampus->although Scoville unintentionally left some of the hippocampus in H.M.'s brain, this area was likely isolated or at least marginalized because of the entorhinal cortex

lip activity

-integrates relevant information for the emergence of the final decision -A general theory of how the LIP is involved with decision making is that it contains a priority, or salience, map: LIP is thought to encode a combination of sensory, motor, and cognitive signals that might guide the monkey's final decision -Ex. the LIP may integrate the likelihood that a visual stimulus will appear in a particular location with the magnitude of a juice reward that is associated with a motor response->the LIP has been described by Glimcher as a brain area that continuously encodes probabilities to determine the most optimal outcome of various response choices

methodological challenges with aggression

-limited by ethical considerations -difficulty of simulating actual aggressive responses in a laboratory setting because it would be unethical to have another person harm someone in the context of a research study -time delay between the violent event and the current baseline testosterone levels is also a methodological problem given that testosterone is context dependent and that it is difficult to collect fluid samples from individuals while they are conducting an aggressive act->typically occur outside the laboratory in the midst of a person's day-to-day functioning

norepinephrine and memory with stress response

-neurotransmitter released during stressful experiences, has been implicated as a contributing factor to the consolidation of emotionally arousing memories -discovered that giving rats injections of epinephrine antagonists impairs memory in the Morris water maze task, whereas infusion of β-adrenergic receptor agonists enhances memory consolidation->rats that are moderately emotionally aroused will perform better on a learning task than their relaxed counterparts

Neuropeptide Y (NPY)

-one of the most abundant peptides in the mammalian brain, is also involved in emotional resilience -NPY-containing neurons are densely packed in several brain areas overlapping with the areas associated with the limbic system -when NPY is infused into the basolateral amygdala in rodents, a reduction in anxiety is observed -not known how NPY exerts its anxiolytic (anxiety-reducing) effects, but evidence indicates that it may interfere with the consolidation of stressful memories -Additionally, NPY counteracts the anxiogenic (anxiety-producing) effects of CRH -lower plasma and cerebrospinal fluid levels of NPY have been observed in patients suffering from major depression

localizationists

-postulate that there is a particular place in the brain where learning occurs and that learning and memory can be localized to one place -Identify one region -Pavlov: dog salivate at meat so sight or the smell of the food will activate neural pathway and activate salivary gland -And then with bell, then the pathway of the bell and pathway of the meat and salivation have to interact->two separate pathways coming together to make association come together; two possible explanations: -Two connections be there already and experience could strengthen the already existing connections -Whole new connection between the two pathways

Bard-Cannon Theory

-proposed that the hypothalamus was a key brain region generating the expression of emotional experiences and that higher cortical areas inhibited these evolutionarily ancient emotional responses -Cannon-Bard theory of emotion: emphasized the role of the brain in emotional processing, as opposed to the James-Lange theory's emphasis on responses from other parts of the body -There's a stimulus that invokes both a response and an emotion: happen at same time; stimulus->simultaneously have behavioral response and at the same time, emotion -Motor response will cause you to run away from the bear->activates the hypothalamus and hypothalamus will release hormones and then body is aroused -autonomic nervous system works as a whole so sympathetic nervous system can be a little bit on but this theory, think there's not enough info from visceral changes from your body to come up with all different emotions that we have: Autonomic nervous system not refined enough to distinguish between different emotions; Visceral response is same for alot of different emotions -Top-down processing: brain in control of some aspects of behavior -the removal of the cortex in cats resulted in uncontrolled displays of emotion known as sham rage. -also supported earlier observations in the case of Phineas Gage-> compromised emotional filters made it difficult for him to interact socially after his accident -Incorporated affective neuroscience

behavioral approaches

1. John Locke suggested that all knowledge developed through our experiences—finding no evidence that we were born with any type of knowledge -believed that our minds at birth were a tabula rasa, or blank slate -Experience shapes our knowledge 2. Ivan Pavlov: classical conditioning 3. Edward Thorndike: law of effect 4. B.F. Skinner: operant conditioning

conditioned defeat

Defeat can have significant consequences for the animal because it often marks a pronounced loss of control over social conflicts and valuable resources -When one hamster encounters another, both exhibit intense displays of aggression a unique phenomenon that occurs in the hamsters that lose an initial aggressive encounter, that is, the defeated hamsters -Defeat is a potent stressor evidenced by increased stress neurochemicals (adrenocorticotropic hormone and glucocorticoids) and decreased testosterone levels in the blood -Although the two fighting hamsters are similarly active in the initial aggressive encounter, the winner exhibits baseline levels of stress hormones during the encounter, whereas the loser exhibits heightened levels of stress hormones. -Following defeat, if the hamster is placed in the cage with a smaller, nonaggressive male hamster, the previously defeated hamster continues to exhibit submissive displays, a behavior known as conditioned defeat. -When placed with another male, defeated males experience similar physiological effects to those observed during the initial aggressive encounter leading to defeat->Thus, because the physiological response, which may also include increased blood pressure and compromised immune function, occurs in the absence of an actual behavioral response, conditioned defeat represents a psychological stressor -However, regardless of its source, stress ultimately results in a physiological response -Conditioned defeat endures for approximately a month in male hamsters -Uncommon in females: If it occurs at all, it is rarely seen after the first test following the defeat -Many of the same brain areas involved in emotional responses, as discussed above, are involved in conditioned defeat, including the amygdala, PFC, and BNST (in addition to being associated with aggression, this brain area has been implicated in anxiety) -defeat behavioral paradigm is an interesting animal model in males for the evaluation of prolonged or chronic stress and various anxiety disorders. To the extent that it is applicable to humans, it may provide insight about the impact of persistent bullying on children—a neurochemical recipe for anxiety disorders -Involves context: In these hamsters, having a history of defeat determines aggressive responses in the future. -in general, it is important to respond to real-time contextual cues to respond appropriately to threatening—and rewarding—stimuli that are critical for survival, it is difficult to understand how such prolonged periods of submission can be beneficial -May have some adaptive value but in lab the response appears maladaptive-> increasing the animal's susceptibility to future internal and external threats -The mismatch between response and environmental cues may be similar to the discrepancy observed between emotional responses and nonthreatening stimuli (e.g., sounds of loud, sputtering car engines or children's video games) in individuals experiencing PTSD, observed in many soldiers returning from the horrific trauma of war. The conditioned defeat research illustrates how an animal model may inform us about neurobiological mechanisms involved in human conditions such as being a victim of bullying or suffering from PTSD

conditioned fear->Joseph LeDoux

Investigated fear response using Pavlovian classical conditioning to generate fear in rats -In his studies, a sound was paired with a brief electrical shock so that, after training, the sound elicited a fear response as the rat anticipated the delivery of the shock. The experimentally induced fear was similar to an animal's response to a natural threat such as a predator. Thus, the laboratory rats exhibited defensive behavior in the form of freezing or escape responses accompanied by altered cardiovascular and stress hormone responses -When LeDoux set out to map the brain circuitry of this response, he followed the brain's natural auditory processing. Specifically, the sound entered the ear and activated neural pathways continuing to the thalamus and on to the auditory cortex so that the sound could be interpreted as a threat. At that point, the appropriate subcortical emotional brain circuits could be activated, leading to a response such as RUN! -Became curious of the neural connections of the auditory thalamus->used a tracer -observed a network directed toward the amygdala->explained previous research indicating that, although the conditioned fear paradigm required the animal to hear the stimulus, lesions of the auditory cortex did not interfere with the conditioning response -some shortcut processes projected directly from the thalamus to the amygdala, and the amygdala initiated the fear response. After all, having to wait for the threatening information to travel all the way to the cortex before being interpreted might cause an animal to lose precious time in mobilizing its exit strategy -the thalamus can use this neural shortcut for other sensory systems: when a snake is seen, the visual message travels from the eyes to the visual nucleus of the thalamus, where, in the case of emotional stimuli, it typically takes two roads: the high road to the visual cortex and then back to the subcortical limbic structures and the low road straight to the amygdala -Lateral amygdala:

dominance hierarchies

acknowledged by animals enable them to avoid conflicts over limited resources -Only certain monkeys in the group approached first. Once they had consumed the food they wanted, others approached, depending on their status in the established dominance hierarchy for that particular troop of monkeys. The process did not seem fair to the patient low-ranking monkeys as they watched the higher-ranking monkeys eat, but it reduced the fighting and injuries that would result if there were constant bickering over resources

cerebellum in learning and memory

cerebellum has fibers that come in -Perkinjie cells getting info from two different sources they're getting them from the parallel fibers, they're going up to the top to the dendrites of the purkinje cells and then you have the mossy cells coming up to the purkinje cells and they're synapsing on cell body -One set of stimuli coming from one place and the other side is coming up from the other side and if they converge on this purkinje cell, you can get a strengthening of synapse or weakening of input coming into purkinje cells based on two inputs -Purkinje cell doing a balancing act of every input coming in->bring enough to bring you to threshold then you'll fire and if the balance is not enough, won't fire -Circuitry perfectly able to balance these two things and it's perfectly set up for learning and can use it to change the response of that particular purkinje cell and then the output of that cell goes to lateral interpositus nucleus -Goes from the interpositus nucleus to the red nucleus

anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insular cortex

coactivation of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and anterior insular cortex in subjects experiencing a wide range of emotional experiences including happiness, love, anger, disgust, indignation, empathy, and unfairness

reappraisal

damage ventromedial pfc can't feel bad abt what your doing, so don't change anything -Context: when things go on in life, we always ascribe value to them and emotion is one of the thing that can allow us to ascribe value to them -Something good or bad in the environment has to allow us to have these responses to the exact same stimulus based on context -Have to be able to appraise on a rolling basis according to new info that's coming in and how we feel abt things around us in lives -Lots of areas: nucleus accumbens (good and rewarding; part of reward pathway) and amygdala (bad)->together these two do a balancing act between the positive and the negative and attributing reward to different situations; blue areas on bottom and orange areas can add value on an ongoing basis to something that happens in our environment -Cortex can produce these visceral responses (ventromedial pfc) but can respond and modulate based on situation that ur in

salience

describes any stimulus that an animal deems important, either from training or via natural tendencies

unconditioned stimulus

didn't have to do anything to it and it would already work

gut response

emotion is the difference between just general cognition and emotions is that emotions have a gut state to them that regular cognition doesn't have (visceral feeling->whole body reaction) Problem: do this also for hunger or thirst; whole body state -Hunger or bright light

pet factor and oxytocin

estimated that humans and the ancestors of dogs began to interact socially with one another about 11,000-16,000 years ago. The relationship developed because of dogs' tameness and motivation to interact with humans Research indicates that this relationship is so strong that dogs outperform wolves and apes in their understanding of human pointing or gaze cues -In fact, when dogs and wolves are raised in environments with similar exposure to humans, dogs exhibit much more attentiveness toward human gestures. These findings suggest that this predisposition toward attentiveness to humans was not a prevalent trait of wolves and has been acquired through living alongside humans for thousands of years -researchers wondered whether dog owners' oxytocin levels would increase when their dogs gazed at them during their interactions -researchers assessed the urinary oxytocin levels of dog owners prior to and following a 30-minute interaction in which one group of owners was allowed to look at their dogs and another group of owners was not -the duration of gaze in the dog owners who were allowed to look at their dogs was positively correlated with the dog owners' urinary oxytocin levels->suggest that human- pet interactions alter oxytocin levels in a similar fashion as human-human interactions do

how short term memory works in animals

experiment with rats: one trial passive avoidance -Take an animal and you put it in a cage and the floor of the cage is a little bit electrified -If you put animal in this situation and then put a flower pot on top of floor and put animal on top of flower pot, then the animal is going to hop up off the flower pot and it will be shocked -Learn quickly they should not get off flower pot -Passive: do absolutely nothing -Similar situation where you do something active such as pressing button to not get shocked

autonomic nervous system

lot of info coming in from internal systems and alot of external output and feedback from our internal systems

idea of equipotentiality

for complex behaviors like this, that all the brain is equal and able to code for the information -All areas of the brain can code for behavior for complex behaviors

traumatic brain injury

head injury -Three categories: -Mild: under 30 min -Medium: from 30 min to 24 hours -Severe: over 24 hours -Diagnosed based on how long the person lost consciousness for: Don't need to lose consciousness to have brain injury -Head injury typically do CT scan to make sure everything okay (may not do this depends on severity) bc CT scan quicker than MRI, tell you bleeding around brain or if there's swelling -Brain can get double injured: -Have an impact from actual hit -Also have a richoet effect and brain is going to hit the back of the skull and it might go back and forth -Damage to a lot of axons as well bc axons not used to shearing effect FOR MILD: -Cognitive impairment: like higher rate of depression or hyperactivity or trouble w executive functioning FOR SEVERE: -Rightly severe in brain -May not get back to homeostasis MILD repeated and SEVERE -can have plaques in brain (CTE) -Boxing or football -Form of dementia from repeated brain injury -Link between CTE and how many times mild brain injuries and alzeheimers and depression -Older adults are 2.3 times more likely to develop alzheimer's than those who have had no head injury in past: 4.5 greater risk for severe head injury

the neocortex in learning and memory

implicated in all three of the aforementioned memory processing modes -Because each of the three processing modes involves spatial, temporal, sensory, and semantic knowledge types of representations, all tapping into neocortex functions, the highly associative neocortex is considered to play a central role in most aspects of learning. -lesions of the temporal neocortex inhibit the meaningfulness of the acquired associations, leading to learning and memory impairments -Those born with very little cerebral cortex: Although these children can categorize individuals as familiar or unfamiliar, their performance is impaired in all three memory modes

limbic system problem

lumped together to categorize every emotional content that we can link into any kind of neuroanatomical feature in the brain -Lots of things going on here -All the areas work together and link up into a circuit and with these emotional circuits, may run into certain areas that can tinge the way our emotions are felt in terms of our behavioral output as well

insula

middle of temporal and frontal lobe is outside area of cortex but not yet insula -Fissure -Gets a lot of info coming in from our body and from viscera -Involved in sensory info coming in -Two parts: anterior and posterior part that have really different things that they receive input from: most input comes from back and then the processing area area in the back then gets sent to anterior area for higher processing

procedural/implicit memory

motor memory that enables us to fine-tune the brain's circuitry underlying skilled performances (ex. Staying in the lines of the road)

long term depression

opposite of LTP -Make synapses weaker: As a result->can see if pathways not used very much or at all, then end up eliminating that response and synapses not needed

Study with attention

rats were placed in a novel environment, behavioral activation associated with the norepinephrine system was associated with synaptic plasticity -suggest that neuroplasticity circuits are primed by the locus coeruleus/norepinephrine system when entering a new environment that must be processed for relevant information

radial arm maze

required animals to remember recent experiences to solve a problem -usually consists of eight runway alleys that radiate outward from a central area, much like spokes on a wheel. In a basic version of the maze, a food reward is placed at the end of each arm, and the rat's task is to collect the rewards efficiently. Going into each arm once until all the treats are retrieved is the best strategy. Revisiting the same arm only to discover that the reward has already been retrieved is less efficient. Thus, the number of errors made in the task is a typical measure that is recorded. -The radial arm maze does not simply assess memory for spatial locations; it also tests the rat's memory for recent events. Damage to the hippocampus interferes severely with the ability to successfully accomplish this task -Referred to as working memory

why use aplysia

simple system three reasons why: 1. Really small nervous system~10,000 cells -No brain or spinal cord but have ganglia scattered throughout their body 2. Some of neurons in this are really big, so stick recording into them 3. Identifiable neurons in them: can go to a particular ganglia and you can find a cell and record from it and can know what cell it is and it was universal -Not possible in other animals bc we have so many neurons, so can't identifiably record from the neuron -Can build maps

cortical-hippocampal system

underlies declarative memory -Specifically, as we form memories for everyday events and relevant factual knowledge, it has become evident that a considerable amount of communication takes place among the hippocampus, the parahippocampal region, and the more recently evolved neocortex -conserved throughout mammalian evolution -Each area contributes unique functions to the formation and use of declarative memories: -Hippocampus: involved in the processing and linkage of sequences of events and places -Surrounding cortical area in parahippocampal region: thought to act as a convergence pathway to the neocortical areas that add appropriate context from surrounding sensory, cognitive, and motor cortical areas -Performance on the delayed nonmatching-to-sample task, for example, is not impaired with damage to the parahippocampal area (with a reasonably brief delay) but is impaired with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex->it appears that it is difficult to hold the information online without the support of these cortical systems.

why is energy for these stress response restricted?

when an emotional storm is looming, energy is directed toward survival—once you are safe, more long-term investments related to romance, digestion, and immune competency once again become priorities -Prolonged or chronic activation of the stress response will ultimately lead to allostatic overload and serious side effects, including insulin resistance and increased risk for diabetes, hypertension, immunosuppression, osteoporosis, atherosclerosis, and cardiovascular disease

mesostriatal

-From substantia nigra to caudate/putamen (striatum) -Help regulate emotional state if going to cingulate gyrus -Dopaminergic input coming from substantia nigra

Mu

3 subtypes -Mediate euphoria and you feel good when your mu receptors get bound to -Don't feel any pain -Tells you when mu receptors are activated that that was a good thing and to do it again->rewarding experience

montane vole

fails to show such intense social bonds -viewed as a valid animal model for the exploration of neurobiological foundations of affiliative social responses

Dr. Kelly Lamber

work she does on hormone systems, sex hormones and environment and how this can impact so many things about our life including behavior -A little bit of behaivoral neuroscience lab: most research focused on rat model -Look at learning, stress response, maternal behavior, biological mechanisms of resilience related to depression, cognitive behavioral therapy -Use of rats limited: only one species and in a lab->not natural -So try to bring nature in lab -Also use mice, observational work with primate species, raccoons -Mom and dads of owl monkeys both take care -Taught rat to drive a car -Do histologoical methods to look at neuorscience->look at different neurons or glial cells or interactions, look at neurochemicals, hormone receptors

James Olds and Peter Milner implanting electrodes in rates

-Rats received electrical stimulation in specific brain areas if they stayed in a particular location->rats seemed to really like this brain stimulation -Unexpected rxn bc researchers were targeting reticular formation (involved in sleep/wake cycles and arousal functions) -The stimulation of specific brain areas was rewarding enough to keep the rats working for the continued stimulation of these brain areas -When rats were allowed to voluntarily press a lever to receive mild jolts of electrical stimulation targeted at limbic structures such as the septal nuclei and nucleus accumbens and pressed lever lots (seemed more intense than just curiosity) -Robert Heath: implanted electrodes in the septal nuclei in human patients->pressed the button to stimulate their brains extremely frequently (similar to rats in Olds and Milner -Teaching rats to press a button in a cage. When a rat pushed the button, it was hooked up to an electrode and the electrode would deliver a really mild current which would stimulate whatever brain area electrode was implanted in -Put electrode in wrong area and put it into the septum (close to nucleus accumbens): when had nucleus accumbens stimulated, they would observe very positive things for the rats->pleasurable to them and kept doing it and that's all they did -Reward center in nucleus accumbens->motoring through life and in the environment and getting all the sensory info and then have situation w reward so motivated to get the reward so nucleus accumbens is a way to understand how animals can bring in sensory info and determine what to do next with it: motivation

amine hormones

-derived from the amino acid tyrosine -Ex. norepinephrine, epinephrine, melatonin, and the thyroid hormones -Cannot easily travel across the cell membrane -derived from amino acid tyrosine (norepinephrine, melatonin); do not easily travel across cell membrane

steroid hormones

-Derived from cholesterol and fat soluble, so they can easily travel across the cell membrane -reproductive and stress hormones, derived from cholesterol and fat soluble (cortisol, progesterone); easily travel across cell membrane -Related to reproductive and stress responses -Steroid hormones pass through cell membrane and bind to a receptor protein -Hormone-receptor complex enters the nucleus and stimulates protein production: impact on protein production -Estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, cortisol -Ex. aldosterone, cortisol, and progesterone

protein hormones

-peptides with more than 50 amino acids -Ex. prolactin, insulin, glucagons, and luteinizing hormone (which travels from the anterior pituitary to the gonads to influence hormone release) -Cannot travel easily across the cell membrane->depend on activation of a specific receptor in the cell membrane that triggers the activation of additional mechanisms to carry out the protein's function

Brain's reward system

-product of a complex circuit of brain areas and neurochemicals -Altered environmental conditions and availability of resources can recalibrate these responses, which can be highly detrimental -

reward

Sensory info coming in and how you use that to determine what to do -When animals encounter a stimulus that leads to a positive outcome then they should approach it -approach positive situations -When the animal encounters a stimulus that would lead to a negative outcome, they should avoid it -avoid negative situations -Also important for learning and memory

what is regulating the timing of the cycle?

animals fall into two categories: -induced ovulation -spontaneous ovulators

hormones

chemicals released by endocrine glands into the bloodstream, where they regulate the activity of certain cells or organs -chemical messenger secreted by a gland (not a neuron) and travels through the bloodstream to a target where it exerts its affects -Variations in characteristics of neurochemicals acting as hormones (Used to think hormones and neurotransmitters as two different things but distinction between them has become blurred as we learn more about them): -Ex. oxytocin and vasopressin are technically neurohormones because they are released by a neuron instead of an endocrine gland. Once these neurohormones are released into the bloodstream, however, they travel to target organs just as other types of hormones do -Vertebrates have several variations of hormones that use specific modes of entry into cells. -divided into chemical classes -biological basis of behavior -How hormones interact with our physiology to control our behavior that we would do different than we normally would

sex hormone system

derived from cholesterol -Hormones specifically sex can have affects on our body and behavior -Big difference between hormones being regulated in males vs. female bodies

indirect pathway pituitary gland able to control things (anterior)

hypothalamus can look at circulating levels of hormones in the body itself and decide to adjust what it senses by releasing its own hormones. These hormones can go into blood and pituitary can analyze the blood content and adjust its response and send out a signal itself -neurohormones (precursor hormones) that are released and travel through the bloood flow or the pituitary stalk to the anterior pituitary and then they trigger the release of hormones of anteiror pituitary -blood intermediary

biparental species

males also participate in raising the young ex. prairie vole

pathways ventral tegmental area sending info to

mesostriatal mesocortical system mesolimbic system

direct mechanism pituitary gland able to control things (posterior)

the hypothalamus has cell bodies that go into the pituitary gland (axons) and these neurons can deposit neurotransmitters and things directly into the blood; neuron directly releasing something through the pituitary gland into the blood -actual neurons that have their processes extend through this pituitary stalk and these hormones release these hormones of posterior pituitary (oxytocin and vasopressin released) -Blur between neurotransmitter vs. hormone -Released by neurons -Neurohormones: chemical release by a neuron that travels through the blood and at that point acts like a hormone until finds it receptor

three families of compounds that interact with the morphine receptors

-Beta endorphins -Keflams -Dinorphins

DES (diethylstilbestrol) syndrome

-Compound to give to pregnant women: miracle drug to women for cramps -Synthetic estrogen hormone, so women took this bc doctors told them to and offspring had really high levels of circulating hormones than what they would have usually -Didn't effect males -For females, hit puberty had problems with cycling -Drug knock females off pathway to have proper reproductive cycling and fertile

spontaneous ovulators: factors that contribute to when we ovulate

-Seasonal ovulators: bird species; come out in late March and sing songs to track mate bc once babies born, they want to be environment most supportive to them (want it to be warm, bugs to eat), sets baby up for success -Social cues: birds flock their to lay eggs at same time->lay eggs at same time to decrease the risk of predators from getting a large number of the offspring: ensure survival of species Each animal does this at its own time -Odor cues: mice in one cage and other mice isolated; can blow air to females grouped together and they will sync up cycles and then can blow air to isolated mouse and she will sync up with the other cage even though she's not with them

amygdala

-looks like an almond -Complex set of nuclei->there are subnuclei within the amygdala: -Area that's involved in bringing sensory information into motivation pathway: -Info comes in through all of our sensory modalities then goes to thalamus where it gets sorted then goes to other cortical areas except olfactory system->gets sensory information from lots of different places going into basal lateral area -part of basal ganglia: particularly central and medial nuclei -22 separate nuclei associated with amygdala: divided into two areas -Basal lateral area: bottom and outside -gets sensory information from lots of different places -Centromena: centrally located and in the middle -Very complex of how all 22 nuclei are connected -in horn of temporal lobe -one on either side

endocrine system

-made up of glands distributed throughout the body -organs that produce hormones are part of endocrine system -Neurotransmitters released from neuron to a neuron -Hormone released from endocrine gland into blood system and find receptors on target organ->chemical that can enter brain and have a neural impact but it's released by ductless gland->flows through bloodstream->find specific receptors where it will have some impact on changing something in brain (specific response) -Different endocrine glands across the body -Ultimate response or activation involves the brain in some way -Table of different endocrine glands and different functions: some diverse functions

Dad brain

-used california deer mouse and cousin of california deer mouse but it does not engage in the paternal behavior (Father not taking care of pup) -family reuinions: Separated dads from offspring and then reunited them -Paraventricular nucleus: oxytocin -California deer mouse: larger area of cell bodies for oxytocin secreting cells than other type of mouse -More vasopressin in california deer mouse as well -studied Daegu as well

organization of behavioral systems from hormones

Hormones early in life organize behavioral systems; later in life, they activate your behavioral systems -General rule this is true -Later in life: puberty->sexually mature acts in different way -Organization: how hormones organize the brain and as a result how they organize their behavioral systems -embryology: when baby is tiny embryo just conceived one of first things that happens is neural tube is formed and formation of hormone systems -Cells that will become genitals and gametes (eggs and sperm) will be set aside in the genital ridge->bump that holds these cells out of dividing fetus's body so that they don't divide and set aside so nothing goes wrong to eliminate chance of mutations->wait out rest of development until organism is ready to have them -Every organism starts with blueprints/instructions for both wolffian ducts (male reproductive system; XY) and mullerian ducts (female reproductive system; XX): ambidextrous for sex -If you have two of same chromosome=female; if two different chromosome=male -Not same in all species -Genes located on Y chromosome will do things that will masculinize the male fetus: genes that make proteins in SRY region (sex related genes on Y chromosome): that cause formation of testes from Wolffian ducts->does not happen in XX baby; Y chromosome causes Wolffian duct to form testes (maleness)->testes produce androgens -Androgens: maintain Wolffian ducts and will produce something that will make Mullerian ducts to go away -Males have large number of really tiny gametes -If don't have the Y chromosome and don't make protein that makes Mullerian ducts go away then these ducts will be retained -Developing totally different trajectories in timing in terms of what happens: -Gametes -Organizing male and female behavior by differences in genes->genes translate to different internal plumbing that then translate to differences in external plumbing -led to sociobiology: EO Wilson to say that as default, female mammals have a lot more invested in their offspring than males do->biological difference in how they treat their offspring -Organizing systems in ways with lifelong implications -Higher levels of estrogens in waters and synthetic versions of them like plastics and BPA: being aware of this important to minimize exposure/highest level of exposure for our generation -decrease use of plastics -Emphasize the importance of hormone exposure during specific critical periods of prenatal development -thousands of studies that provided unequivocal evidence that the presence of sex hormones early in development influences sexual differentiation of both behavior and reproductive anatomy -Even goes into adolescence -Hormone exposure during puberty also plays a role in sexual development-> some babies born with female external genitalia are actually genetic males with 5-a-reductase deficiency: This genetic condition inhibits the production of an enzyme (5-α reductase) that is necessary for the development of male external genitalia during gestation. At puberty, however, this enzyme is no longer necessary for male sexual development->a genetic male that has been raised as a female begins developing male external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics -Other modifications, such as altered receptor sensitivities to the hormones, may induce variations from traditional developmental trajectories

brings up philosophical and scientific questions

Philosophical: notion that all ppl are created equal and we don't like that their is a difference between male and female brains bc it implies we are not all equal -Big difference hormonally between male and females which leads to difference behaviorally

nucleus accumbens

activation of certain areas of the shell results in very specific desirable (appetitive) behaviors

Wise and Schwartz

administered pimozide and found evidence that it diminished the rats' motivation to respond for a food reward

three related systems defining pleasure responses

distinct and overlapping -liking -wanting -learning

liking

sensory-stimulating emotional experience, closely associated with pleasure -Brain areas: orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, nucleus accumbens shell, ventral pallidum, periaqueductal gray and amygdala -opioids as neurochemicals

Can Perceived Safety Diminish the Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder?

-Extremely adaptive to alter our responses in accordance with the new contextual rules -researchers sought to understand how fundamental learning may contribute to PTSD. -the investigators used a procedure known as conditional discrimination to study the impact of learning on PTSD symptoms. Under this protocol, an annoying blast of air to the larynx is used as the unconditioned stimulus. Everyone exhibits a startle response when that stimulus is presented! In this study, the startle response was defined by a very fast eye-blink response, not unlike the rabbits' response in the LTP research that we discussed earlier in the chapter. To establish baseline startle responses, the investigators also recorded eyeblink responses to a second type of unconditioned stimulus, a loud noise probe, which had not been associated with the conditioned stimuli. The conditioned stimuli that were used to set the context for the air blast conditioned stimulus consisted of four lights of varying colors: stimulus A (green light); stimulus B (purple light); stimulus C (orange light), and stimulus X (blue light). During the training phase of the study, participants received six trials in which stimuli A and X were presented, followed by the unconditioned stimulus (air blast). These trials were followed by six trials where stimuli B and X were presented together, but were not followed by the air blast. If your attentional systems are fully engaged, you should have inferred that trials including stimulus B are never followed by the air blast and that stimulus B should therefore become accepted as a safety signal in this discrimination task.During the testing phase, trials consisted of both A + X, B + X, and the presentation of a new stimulus light with no conditioning history (C + X). The trials were presented in an order such that the subjects could not predict the air blast using any information other than their experiences with the stimulus trials. In the actual testing phase, the air blast was no longer used, just the noise. Thus, the startle response to the noise alone with no conditioning stimuli present was compared with the startle response in the presence of the various light stimuli. Experimenters monitored subjects' eye muscles and button press responses. During conditioning, subjects had been asked to press a button reflecting their expectation of the unconditioned stimulus being presented on each trial: press + if they expected air blast to follow light and - if they did not expect it and 0 if uncertain -PARTICIPANTS: 28 healthy adult males and 27 adult males with a PTSD diagnosis. Three subject groups: -High-symptom PTSD group -Low symptom PTSD group -Healthy control group with no PTSD diagnosis RESULTS: -Whereas all subjects thought the air blast was aversive, indicating a perceived threat, the PTSD subjects rated the startle probe as more aversive than the control subjects rated it. All subjects startled more in response to the noise in the presence of the stimuli predicting threat (that is, A + X) -both the control subjects and the low-symptom PTSD subjects exhibited a suppressed startle response when the safety signal was present. However, subjects in the high-symptom PTSD group found it more difficult to discriminate between the safety (B) and threatening (A) stimuli CONCLUSION: -an ability to clearly distinguish safe environments from threatening environments is important for building resilience against PTSD symptoms->After establishing conditioned responses to stimuli in one environment, as is the case for war veterans, being able to inhibit those responses to similar stimuli in a safe environment requires sophisticated learning strategies that are compromised when a person is experiencing high levels of stress -this ability may not be sufficient to ward off PTSD completely->The low-symptom PTSD group demonstrated an ability to inhibit the fear-potentiated startle response, yet still had developed symptoms of PTSD (although their symptoms were not as severe)

aplysia californica

large sea slug -simple neuroanatomy characterized by few (approximately 20,000), but large, neurons and its ability to exhibit classical and operant conditioning made this slug an attractive model for understanding the cellular basis of learning -could learn -studied by Eric Kandel -sea slug -Giant marine snail without shell -Very simple animal -Maybe find where learning and memory is anatomically localized bc this is a simple creature -Then have to figure out what they learn -Brain has to be able to change

vasopressin

distributed throughout the limbic system in brain areas including the amygdala, hypothalamus, and septum -receptors in monogamous species: Praire voles have a denser distribution of vasopressin V1a receptors than montane voles do in several brain areas, such as the olfactory bulb and BNST -dense V1a receptor labeling was also observed in the ventral pallidum, an area in the basal ganglia implicated in reward systems-> lifelong pair-bonding is closely associated with the density of vasopressin receptors in the reward areas of the brain -receptors in nonmonogamous: Montane voles have the densest distribution of V1a receptors in the medial PFC and lateral septum

two separate systems that use dopamine

dorsal system ventral system -happen at same time: -Dopaminergic pathways are helping us select what to do based on the stimuli that are coming in -Both systems work as a gatekeeper to monitor the brain for positive outcomes and report back

universal aspects of emotion

ex. facial expressions -Paul Ekman: identified universal facial expressions that could be understood across cultures: facial expressions of fear, happiness, anger, contempt, surprise, disgust, and sadness are easily identified, regardless of one's home continent -Also examined the facial expressions of psychiatric patients, who were known to have lied during a clinical interview by concealing their plans to attempt suicide -Facial microexpressions: barely perceptible brief facial expression fragments, to be associated with deception and lying -Ex. Rodriguez denied using performance-enhancing drugs, but he later admitted to using them. In Ekman's analysis of the 2007 videotape, he noted certain facial microexpressions that had been associated with lying in his past research. Rodriguez was unable to inhibit what Ekman calls the microexpressions of gestural slips, unilateral expressions of contempt, and transient expressions of fear -Strong ties between emotional responses and facial expressions in nonhuman animals -Primates display emotions with distinct facial expressions during play, aggression, and threat. Even mice may express their emotions via facial expressions, according to some research -Studies of injuring mice suggest that mice can communicate information about pain to other animals visually with these facial expressions-> can assess effectiveness of pain medication in mice -suggests that, far from being a uniquely human characteristic, facial expressions are more hardwired across mammalian species than previously thought -Kind've categorized the faces that we make as humans and everyone can identify these things as these basic seven or so emotions: anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise -Whole lot of other emotions as well

Berridge and Reynolds

explored impact of the environment on the nucleus accumbens -To identify specifics: administered drug that blocks glutamate: depending on the area of the accumbens shell affected, researchers observe different outcomes -More rostral regions of medial shell: glutamate enhances appetitive responses like eating -Caudal shell: glutamate generates negative avoidance and defensive responses (aggression or escape) -Intermediate locations: mixture of appetitive and negative responses Wondered if they could adjust the tuning of the nucleus accumbens by exposing rats to one of three environments: -More natural environment: dark, familiar, quiet -Standard laboratory environment: artificial light -Stressful environment: extra bright light and loud sounds like punk-rock music Findings: rats preferred familiar homelike environment to standard and overstimulating environments -Standard laboratory environment animals: no reassignment or reorganization of rewarding areas (accumbens shell) -Homelike, familiar environment: appetitive zone expanded to fill approximately 90% of entire accumbens shell (aversive zone shrank to ⅓ of its original territory)->seemed to restructure nucleus accumbens shell so that the zone responding to pleasure increased in size->experienced changes in a brain area involved with the processing of pleasurable responses that seemed to maximize their potential of experiencing more pleasure -Stressful environment: defensive, aversive zone expanded to fill more than 80% of the medial shell->twice the size of the aversive zone in standard lab environment (appetitive sites still existed but much smaller than that in other groups and pushed to very frontal region of the accumbens shell) Conclusion: -Provide insight to how stressful contexts may lead to stress-related disorders like PTSD or depression -PTSD: heightened responsiveness to stimuli after living in a war zone or experiencing other emotional trauma; sounds became associated with intense aversion and defensiveness -Depressed patients: difficulty experiencing pleasure or being motivated to engage in previously enjoyed activities->Could coincide with the rezoning of the accumbens shell -Researchers ability to increase size of the appetitive zone of rats' nucleus accumbens by changing their living conditions suggest that environmental conditions and maybe cognitive-behavioral therapies can also produce more positive accumbens responses (happiness, pleasure, anticipation) in humans by physically altering the nucleus accumbens shell -Animal's physical and social environment should always be evaluated when examining neurobiological effects->Findings reinforce importance of considering environmental context of humans when exploring mechanisms of mental illness and other maladaptive functions

neurobiology of aggression and fear

fear, aggression and self-preservation have spared experiments in behavioral neuroscience->As a result, models of fear, defensive responses, and aggression have dominated the research on emotion and have resulted in a wealth of interesting findings

habituation for aplysia->Eric Kandel

first way decided to present the aplysia they thought that they could elicit a learning response and see if they could change the function in the neuron and response in it used habituation -Have to do control to make sure not fatigue (muscles are simply too tired to exhibit a response and make sure patient can still hear it) -Lowkey learning -Can have this response happen in the cells: don't need whole organism->can dissect the siphon sensory neuron and the motor neuron that allows it to retract its skill; simple circuit it only has one synapse (monosynaptic); if you just took this out and recorded from it you would get same info -Action potential happens with calcium allowing the neurotransmitter to be released: -If you have repeated stimulation in this sensory neuron again and again overtime you have a decrease in amount of neurotransmitter that is released from presynaptic sensory neuron (Neurons release in quanta: situation where decrease in number of quanta of neurotransmitter that is released from the presynaptic sensory neuron->less amount of neurotransmitter going into cleft) -Result here is due to calcium channels in this sensory neuron at the end where about to release vesicles in the cleft, they don't open up as much as they normally do with the repeated stimulation -One of the first demonstrations that synapses can change their function and become less potent to same stimulation overtime and result in decrease in quanta -if same light touch given to siphon repeatedly, then the gill reflex goes away (ignore the stimulus)->energy saving mechanism bc not harming you -Result of habituation is that calcium channels are not open as much in the presynaptic cleft and amount of neurotransmitter release in cleft is decreased -Thought this would be generalized to learning and memory but need to go step farther

Ivan Pavlov

formation of mental associations between different aspects of our environment -Basically started field of learning and memory -Russian physiologist studying the digestive tract -Trained in digestion science and realized that there was something about what he was studying that was more important than the question he originally wanted to study -Studying salivation in dogs. He had taken little cannulas (tubes) and implanted them into the salivary glands of dogs and wanted to measure saliva production. He realized that when the helpers in the other rooms would rattle the cans that food was kept in, the dogs would salivate -When his dogs perceived any evidence that food was about to be delivered—hearing the footsteps of workers, seeing the bowl of food, or even hearing that infamous bell—they would start salivating. The association formed between these predictors of food arrival (e.g., the food bowl) and the food itself was the product of a type of learning referred to as classical conditioning, or Pavlovian conditioning -Although food (the unconditioned stimulus) was previously observed to result in salivation (the unconditioned response), the dog formed associations between the bowl (conditioned stimulus) and the food (unconditioned stimulus) so that, after a while, the dog would salivate in response to just seeing the bowl (the conditioned response) -multiple examples in our life: -Wincing to prepare for thunder when you see lightning -Foot moves to brake automatically when see blue lights, regardless of speed -Associations are engraved in our memories and response repertoires -Did not explain how an individual acquired a behavior -Pavlovian conditioning

Bill Stittsworth (more of a fun story)

had problems with sexual performance -Transplanting another animal's testes into a human to enhance sexual performance -Brinkley responded that he had tried various serums with patients who had similar complaints, but that none to date had been successful in improving sexual performance. The story goes that they paused and looked out the window, at which time Stittsworth commented, "Too bad I don't have billy goat nuts" -Brinkley then transplanted two goat testicles into Stittworth's scrotum (a different insertion point than used in the roosters). Similar to the rooster transplant experiments, however, no blood or nerve connections were made. After two weeks, the patient returned with a smile on his face, conveying that the transplant was a success -Dr. Brinkley thought he could transplant even non-human goat testicles into humans who were enthusiastic or desperate to enhance their sexual vogor->made a lot of money transplanting gonads -Huge placebo effect when individuals did say it changed their sexual motivation -Started selling this (probably placebo though) but subsequent information about methodological, ethical, and safety aspects (many people died from this procedure) of this testicle transplant surgery later led to the demise of Brinkley's enterprise

gametes

have a small number of really large gametes -Large eggs but not many of them -By time she is born, may have 300,000 eggs and goes down from there; when you are 30 you have about 12% of your eggs left; 40 3% of eggs left -Used to believe that reason why women's risk of having a baby with increased genetic susceptibility to certain disorders is bc they used to have old eggs, but actually shows that it has a lot to do with male (older sperm are problematic as well) -When gametes are set aside and do not reproduce, then less likelihood of genetic defect but with males you are constantly producing sperm so everyday you make 1200 sperm a heartbeat and extremely prolific so has a lot of cell divisions->increased likelihood that there will be some problems as they get older as well -Problems in older women having babies may be because their partner is older passing on genetic mutations -May be result of sperm for genetic problems

terminal investment hypothesis

how offspring important genetic investment for all animals for survival of species -Blue footed booby bird: older and mature birds and injected lipopolysaccharide (lps) which makes the animals sick and what impact had on offspring survival -Younger animals more successful in their parenting than the old was: -When injected with lps: younger dads backed off of their parental responsibilities whereas the older dads kicked everything up became super dads -Terminal investment hypothesis: this is the last brood that this male is going to be able to parent, so need to put everything in it

SRY gene

important for encoding a protein that initiates the male sexual differentiation process -both males and females have indistinguishable genitalia until about six weeks of development->At this time, the presence of androgens in males suppresses the Müllerian ducts and stimulates the transformation of the Wolffian ducts into the male internal genitalia, including the vas deferens, seminal vesicles, and epididymis: -Wolffian ducts: develop into external genitalia (penis and scrotum); presence of androgens -Females: absence of androgens; , the Wolffian ducts are suppressed and the Müllerian ducts develop into the female internal genitalia, including the uterus, fallopian tubes, and vagina, as well as the external genitalia, including the clitoris and the labia majora and minora

stress and memory enhancement

in certain situations stress can facilitate the storage of a memory to the brain's hard drive: More typical with procedural memories->explicit memories become fixed in the threatened person's neural networks. Thus, it should not be surprising that the brain makes a special effort to remember potential threats -amygdala: implicated in stress-enhanced memories -specialized cluster of nuclei in the medial temporal lobe interacts with stress hormones and other stress-related neurochemicals to facilitate the consolidation of a memory for the threatening experience -When a person has encountered severe trauma, the memory for a threatening stimulus is so strong that it leads to the development of mood and/or anxiety disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) -involved in the conditioned fear response and is hyperactive in patients with a PTSD diagnosis -rats exposed to acute stress (immobilization for two hours) exhibited decreased spine density in the hippocampus, as well as increased anxiety behaviors in a task known as the elevated plus maze. In this study, both the neural and the behavioral effects seemed to build over time. No differences were observed 1 day after the stress exposure, but the effects were clearly seen 10 days after the stress exposure, suggesting that it was difficult for the rats to shift from a stress mode to a safety mode after the stress was removed

amygdala and emotions

in temporal lobe -bilateral lesions restricted to the amygdala resulted in the behaviors observed in Klüver-Bucy syndrome in monkeys -pre-screens for negative emotons -Both lesion studies and neuroimaging studies have supported the role of the amygdala in recognizing emotional facial expressions. -Humans with amygdala damage have been observed to exhibit an impaired ability to recognize emotional facial expressions -fMRI studies in healthy subjects indicate heightened amygdala activity in response to pictures of fearful faces -can pre-screen the environment to tell us to be more careful -information from sensory systems comes in and goes to the amygdala and goes in the basal lateral amygdala and goes out from the central medial and from this it goes out from the medulla, basal forebrain, and hypothalamus and all of these things are gonna be capable of running the sympathetic nervous system and causing this response in the absence of going up to the cortex and doing any higher processing -Able to monitor emotional content of stimuli before hits consciousness while having thalamacortical tract still trying to sort it out -Human subjects with no amygdala on either side: unable to experience emotional content -Don't experience, show or understand emotion at all -Hard time recalling emotional content in real life -Don't recognize emotion -Found that typically developing children will have increase in neurons in their amygdala as they grow up: Individuals on autism spectrum don't gain as many neurons in amygdala as they grow up -sociopaths

Second study on courage

in this case a tarantula moving toward the participant's foot—revealed additional clues about the neuroanatomical basis of fear->p's had not expressed a prior fear of spiders -As the participants lay in the scanner, they saw a video feed that they believed was live, with an image of a box placed very close to their foot. The video appeared to show the tarantula approaching the participant's foot -activation occurred in the ACC, as well as in the midbrain's periaqueductal gray when the tarantula was supposedly nearby and approaching. -the ACC has been implicated in courage. -The periaqueductal gray is involved in the processing of pain as well as in defensive behavior -As the video feed showed the spider retreating from the participant's foot, the PFC was activated, perhaps indicating safety to the rest of the brain. Regardless of distance, if the spider was approaching the foot, the amygdala and BNST were activated; these brain areas are thought to be involved in assessing the threat value of a situation

postretrieval lability

instability of memories is beneficial, allowing you to upgrade your memory stores each time they are retrieved. -However, this reconsolidation process makes it virtually impossible to hang on to episodic memories in the exact form they were initially consolidated. Research provides strong evidence that most long-term memories, rather than being stored in a somewhat permanent fashion, are maintained via a dynamic process. If memories are not retrieved for a long period of time, they may decay or, alternatively, change from the original version

Paul Zak and oxytocin

investigated the role of oxytocin in human trust by collecting blood samples in individuals playing what he calls the trust game: two subjects, Subject 1 and Subject 2, participate in this experimental game. Subject 1 is presented with $10 via her computer screen and instructed that any money she sends to Subject 2 (whom she has met, but who is now in a separate room) will be tripled for Subject 2 before Subject 2 is asked to send money back to Subject 1. If the two subjects cooperate, more money is available for both -trust is exhibited if Subject 1 sends money to Subject 2, and trustworthiness is exhibited if Subject 2 reciprocates by returning part of the money to Subject 1. RESULTS: -85% of the individuals in the Subject 1 role sent money to Subject 2, and 98% of individuals in the role of Subject 2 reciprocated by returning money: -When individuals in the Subject 2 role received money, they exhibited a rise in oxytocin levels relative to the baseline condition, an increase that was proportional to the amount of money received -other control subjects who were merely given money from an unknown source did not exhibit a rise in oxytocin -The subject 2 individuals with the highest oxytocin levels sent the most money back to Subject 1 -suggested that a nasal dose of oxytocin enhanced the cooperative generosity of both Subjects 1 and 2: -Nasal spray undergoing clinical trials (not approved)-> goal of increasing trust level of others is controversial and presents logistical problem (could be too trusting): Zak has written that most individuals he had sampled were producing adequate and appropriate levels of oxytocin naturally. He has even found correlations between social anxiety and higher levels of oxytocin, which may be an attempt by the brain to counteract the anxiety

neuroeconomics

investigates the neural computations that accompany value-based decisions or, in other words, the ways in which the brain makes choices among various options->ultimate goal of behavior is to make the optimal choice that maximizes an animal's individual survival as well as the survival of its genetic code -Paul Glimcher

microtubules

long scaffolding proteins like highways that go down the axons really long distances and they are helpful in providing the structure to the neuronal axons and bodies and there are transportation routes where things can walk down to the end of where synapse is and deliver proteins and other things needed down there

amyloid plaques

made of beta-amyloid protein and these are little conglomerations of proteins that clump together in way not supposed to and gump up works and they are sticky and found between neurons in extracellular space

Skinner box

manipulate reinforcement schedules -New knowledge came new responsibility: -giving a child the candy he is screaming for in the grocery store is not the best use of reinforcement. Although it may stop the immediate screaming, this strategy reinforces the connection between screaming and getting candy, exactly the behavior a parent would want to terminate

pituitary gland

master endocrine gland -Anterior pituitary gland produces at least 6 hormones and then a few from the posterior pituitary -influenced by the hypothalamus -Different types of hormones through bodies that have different functions and any disruption can impact behavior and development

study on perceptual choice

monkeys were trained to recognize the direction of coherent motion in a video display of random dots while the activity of their individual neurons was recorded -The dots could all be moving in a random direction, or they could be moving in a consistent direction->Thus, depending on the dot activity, the decision or choice about the direction of motion could be very difficult or very easy: range of difficulty allowed the researchers to identify key neural areas that were associated with the animals' decision-making efforts. -FINDINGS: activity in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) was positively correlated with the monkeys demonstration of a final decision -done on humans: brains were scanned while making decisions->subjects were asked to decide whether ambiguous visual stimuli depicted a house or a face. Again, the difficulty level was manipulated to determine brain area activation associated with the decision-making process. -Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was shown to be important: involved in the computations associated with decision making

mass action

more brain that was taken out of the animals, the worst they did on the maze but still able to learn -More brain left, better you did -Can still do the maze, but slower

Jennifer Thompson-Canino

noise in her bedroom->intruder; she was raped->, she was determined to study the rapist's face so that, if she lived through the horrific experience, she could identify him to the police -After escaping, she worked with the police to develop an accurate composite sketch. As she studied the sketch, she felt confident that she had accurately captured the face of her rapist -When she selected the same person, Ronald Cotton, in the physical lineup and was told that her choice matched the photo lineup choice, she was 100% confident that she had remembered the face of her rapist. Although Ronald denied any involvement in the case, with Jennifer's testimony, the jury convicted him in just 40 minutes, giving him a sentence of life plus 50 years->Ronald model prisoner and believed it was mistaken identity -Although he was granted another trial, Jennifer's continuing confidence that Cotton had raped her persuaded the jury to ignore the possibility that his conviction was a result of her faulty memory. This time, he received two life sentences -As Ronald continued to consider ways to potentially clear his name, he learned about how DNA evidence can be used in criminal cases, and he asked his lawyer to search for any remaining physical evidence associated with the case. A semen sample was located, and it showed no match to Ronald.

vasopressin and oxytocin

not drastic differences between these systems in monogamous species (such as the prairie vole) and nonmonogamous species (such as the montane vole), but differences in density of receptors -Differences present shortly after birth -if the animals are genetically altered—for example, if a gene is inserted so that the montane vole expresses more vasopressin receptors in the ventral pallidum than it did previously—the vole demonstrates increased partner preference

cognitive scientists respond to Jennifer Thompson-Cannino

not surprised she forgot -Their studies show how easy it is to nudge the human memory into becoming convinced an inaccurate photo in a lineup is the actual person of interest. If the witness's selection of a specific person in a suspect lineup is reinforced by an experimenter or officer, the original memory can be restructured in the brain. This leads to the formation of an inaccurate memory as the newly updated retrieved memory from that point forward -when Jennifer's memory network for her perpetrator's face was reactivated, it was likely temporarily vulnerable to her ongoing experiences. As she studied the various faces in the photo lineup, not seeing the exact face of her perpetrator, her memory circuits may have started incorporating the face closest in appearance to Poole's, reconsolidating, or restructuring, her memory of her rapist's face -postretrieval liability

somatic marker hypothesis

physiological emotional responses serve an important role in guiding the brain's decision to carry out a particular behavior, especially when making risky decisions. -the lack of anxiety when thinking about harming someone may contribute to a person committing unspeakable crimes -emphasizes the importance of physiological feedback in the expression of certain emotions -diminished physiological responsiveness is associated with a weakening of an emotional response that may be necessary to inhibit certain behaviors

ventral system

picking up info from all kinds of systems and using these in different ways but same sort of gate for info

Dr. Frank Beach

pioneer looking at how hormones affected behavior -Behavioral neuroendocrinology: how behaviors, the brain and hormones all interact to influence a behavior or psychological process -ppl studying way hormones effect behavior -Species-specific behaviors -Focused on reproductive behavior

glutamate

principal excitatory neurotransmitter -Different types: NMDA receptors and AMPA receptors -Glutamate system: primary ionotropic excitatory neurotransmitter -Receptors are AMPA and NMDA for glutamate -magnesium ions naturally block NMDA receptors, interfering with the transmission of ions into and out of the cell->voltage dependent, meaning that the magnesium unblocks the receptor when the postsynaptic cell becomes depolarized (typically becomes depolarized in response to a burst of activity from the presynaptic cell, the ultimate binding of glutamate to the NMDA receptor is contingent on simultaneous activation of the presynaptic cell and postsynaptic cell) -the presynaptic neuron must capture the postsynaptic neuron's attention prior to actual synaptic communication that will likely establish the physical traces representing two associated events->The coactivation of the presynaptic and postsynaptic cells in LTP is reminiscent of Hebb's earlier cellular theories

contingency

probability that a specific outcome will follow a specific response ex. a reward was presented one minute after a targeted response -response ratios in which an animal had to respond a certain number of times before the reward was presented -notion of contingency is critical for the acquisition and memory of adaptive responses -between behavior and outcome of behavior: If know if we reward all the right things and punish wrong things then have a great society (eutopian)->didn't work

activity stress paradigm

provides clues about the impact of increased activity and decreased food consumption on the brain and body. -anorexia nervosa patients support this->search for something to make them feel less anxious and more secure -Dopamine has been implicated in the excessive activity and dieting in anorexia as well

lateral amygdala

receives the visual information and transfers the information to the central amygdala, which ultimately stimulates relevant brain areas that initiate the freezing response, blood pressure modifications, stress hormone release, and the startle reflex often observed in fearful situations

tickling

refers to a vigorous whole-body play simulation that includes repeatedly "pinning" the animal as observed in natural rat play. Once a rat is placed in a cage or aquarium, the experimenter places one hand next to the animal and uses rapid finger and hand movements to tickle it. To avoid threatening the animal, the experimenter applies light touches to the rat's back. A nearby ultrasonic detector allows the experimenter to hear the rats' ultrasonic vocalizations and determine their quantity, duration and quality

medial preoptic nucleus

role in regulating sexual behavior-> aka sexually dimorphic nucleus -Much larger in males than females Potential mechanism for this effect: the prostaglandins influence the glial cells known as microglia. (newborn male rat pups have a different shape of microglial cells in the medial preoptic nucleus than females do; the shape is more compact and dense in males and more diffuse in females). Thus, prostaglandins may influence microglia, thereby providing a mechanism that underlies sexual differentiation in the brain

how amygdala helps to study the circuitry of these behaviors

said that you can't define what an emotion is, so he tried to operationalize it (know what related to emotion)->ex. Can't define fear but fear looks like when an animal detects and runs away from a fearful object -Can put animal in a cage where the floor can deliver a shock: Doesn't take much current to elicit a behavioral response where the animal doesn't want to be in that situation anymore. Play a sound to deliver the shock and the animal will quickly learn that that sound means that bad is coming -autonomic nervous system -Everytime hear a tone, behavioral response even when absence of a shock -Behavior looks like fear and conditioned it to stimulus -How the stimulus elicits a response and to hopefully track the neural circuits behind which behavior might emerge for us: if condition them to this tone, then you'll have a key or access point to get into the fear system in a way where you don't even actually have to have this fearful stimulus there: test step by step where the change is happening to see where in circuit is most important -Take an animal now conditioned to experience fear response when tone comes in: eliminate ears from the animal->not exhibit fear response (eliminate cochlear nucleus: don't hear stimulus->won't exhibit fear response) -Damage inferior colliculus: extinguish behavior -Damage to medial geniculate nucleus: doesn't make it so that your still fearful -Damage Cortex: still get the response anyway (not controlling fear response) -Damage to amygdala: will not get fear response anymore (amygdala important for behavioral response) -Change occurring is happening by amygdala: info going out to different brainstem, hypothalamus, etc. (so autonomic or hormonal responses we see here or behavioral responses are not happening)->if we know pathways in amygdala let's damage them one by one: could get rid of different pathways, you would extinguish different pathways (if you got rid of one pathway coming out of amygdala, animal wouldn't freeze (extinguish a different portion of behavioral response that looks like fear)->separate conduits coming out of amygdala that go to all these different responses that the animal actually makes -Amygdala codes for danger and fear emotional sorts of things and then eliciting the responses an animal making -Model system how one might approach the wiring for a really complicated circuit like emotion (specifically fear)

chemical classes of hormones

steroid hormones amine hormones peptide hormones and protein hormones -Different mechanisms by which different categories of hormones can work or work under different conditions

Edward Thorndike

studied how animals solve problems as a means of determining their intelligence -First one to ever have done behavioral conditioning/operant conditioning but most credit given to Skinner -once a chick managed to get out of a maze to receive a reward, the chick got faster with each trial: after receiving a reward for a response, the animal's behavior became more efficient -Increased complexity of the problem with puzzle box: hungry cat placed in a wooden crate. The cat had to determine the response that would open a door to food placed just out of reach. After trying multiple responses, the cat eventually stumbled on the response that opened the door (e.g., pressing a pedal). When given subsequent opportunities to solve the puzzle box, the cat would quickly respond by pressing the pedal. the animal's response had become more efficient -Law of effect: relationship between behavior and consequences

brain areas for emotional regulation and cognitive appraisal

study: women were instructed either to react naturally to an unhappy movie or to actively suppress any emotional response to the movie. Greater activation of the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortical areas accompanied the reappraisal task of transforming the sadness to a more neutral emotion in the subjects suppressing their emotional response -brain imaging studies point to roles of the prefrontal, orbitofrontal, and cingulate cortical areas in cognitive reappraisal. As the reappraisal process successfully diminishes the emotional experience, less activation is observed in the medial orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala, suggesting that these two areas may play important roles in assessing the relevance of the emotional stimulus -Emotional responses can be modified, although some individuals seem able to do this more easily than others: emotional flexibility is adaptive

Paul Glimcher

suggested that the field of neuroeconomics expands classic views of brain and behavior. -neuroeconomics research suggests that the input/output formula is more complicated in the complex real world. Glimcher argues that somewhere between the sensory and motor responses are brain areas devoted to computing the most optimal outcomes leading to enhanced survival.

Shatz

summed up Hebb's research -Said that cells that fire together, wire together and cells out of sync don't link -When things happen in the nervous system it is really important -idea of long term pontentiation/LTP

neurochemistry of aggression

testosterone; serotonin; dopamine, gaba and noadrenaline

when an unexpected outcome is detected...

the OFC has been found to be critical for altering the established behavior to a more adaptive default plan -OFC plays a role in facilitating this switch from established behavioral strategies to new adaptive contingency strategies once unexpected outcomes are detected. -OFC is known for its role in flexible behavior, because it is able to rapidly encode changing relationships between specific cues and associated outcomes. -Ex. rats in one study were trained to associate the first odor with sugar solution and the second odor with bitter quinine solution. When the order was reversed (i.e., now the first odor predicts quinine solution), the associations needed to be rapidly recoded so that the rats would transition from avoiding odor 2 to approaching it so that they would not miss the sweet solution. Rats with OFC lesions, however, were much slower in reversing their behavior and more likely to miss their sweet rewards

explicit memory

things like facts

studies for circuits of emotional behavior

things that pick up emotional content can run more quickly than our higher level cognitive processes allow us to do -Simple search task: paper w 50 pictures on it and then ask them how long to pick out a specific picture from all of that and time how long it takes for them to find it -Takes them longer to find things that don't have emotional content associated with them -Ask for something like snake more quickly without even realizing it -Find emotionally arousing stimuli more quickly than they will find emotionally neutral pictures

cingulate and PFC areas

thought to be involved in top-down processing by modulating the expression of emotions based on the integration of information processed across the brain

why use homeostatic mechanisms

to measure why somebody goes from behavior to another behavior: eating, drinking, and thermoregulation->based on an internal cue: bodies pick up something that differs from normal and modify our behavior to fix that to get it back to homeostasis to get to optimal set point

reconsolidation cellular mechanism tests

use animal models to systematically track relevant neurobiological changes: One strategy is to use a simple form of training such as classical conditioning so that the animal clearly demonstrates an acquired memory. Using this form of learning, the unconditioned stimulus is presented to prompt the retrieval of the memory. When the memory is retrieved, a drug that blocks the synthesis of proteins that likely play a role in the memory-based synaptic plasticity is administered to the animals. This leads to various changes in the animals, such as blocked ion channels or restructured synaptic endings. Such studies suggest that the administration of protein synthesis inhibitors after a previously consolidated memory has been retrieved disrupts the original version of the memory -human studies have demonstrated how easily misinformation is incorporated into earlier memories and have provided strong evidence for reconsolidation in human memory

hypothalamus

ventral side of brain; intricately connected to the pituitary gland -Intricate role in regulation of sex hormones, and so does the pituitary gland -Can control output of pituitary gland in a number of ways (ways into categories): direct and indirect mechanisms -master regulatory for all the endocrine system -Controlling brains output system for hormones -pituitary is one way it uses to control system

male hormone system

wasn't much going on: same level of circulating hormone levels -Shaved so often: measured whiskers (closer it got to his time off the island, more his whiskers grew); postulated that anticipation of seeing ppl (hormonal response with endocrine system) -Ppl watching favorite sports team on tv and measure testosterone: winning team will have higher levels of testosterone than someone watching their team lose -Not lots of things happening

Experimental wedding

would oxytocin increase in them and guests in wedding ceremony: oxytocin, vasopressin, cortisol, testosterone RESULTS: -Oxytocin levels of couple and close relatives had more of an increase than the other guests -Linda (bride) had the highest, then her mother, then father of groom, then groom -Cortisol high in bride before wedding and increased more post ceremony blood sample -Nic (groom) vasopressin levels decreased -Decrease in cortisol immediately following the ceremony -Plasma testosterone level doubled during the ceremony -not controlled experiment->case study and field research -Endocrinological, or hormonal, measures are traditionally highly variable with prominent individual differences, so more subjects would be required for more reliable results.

Papez Circuit->lecture

-1930s: came up with a brain circuit that he thought dealed with emotion -He realized four stations in brain that were responsible for this circuits and four brain areas connected by connector brain areas: 1. cerebral cortex: within this, there was a specific area here called the limbic lobe/cingulate gyrus -Above corpus callosum -One on both sides -Sends info to hippocampus 2. Hippocampus: sends info to hypothalamus 3. Hypothalamus: specifically to mammillary bodies -Send to thalamus 4. Thalamus: sent back to cortex ^limbic system: processing of emotion

courage

-2 studies: how the brain overrides the fear response to muster the energy to act and another one -Courage can also be manipulated in cat-fearing rats so that they fearlessly approach their natural predators. Interestingly, this is not done with strategic neural surgeries or drugs. Rather, this "brainwashing" is accomplished by a protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii. This parasite has a highly specialized evolutionary restriction related to its reproduction: The only place it can sexually reproduce is in the intestines of cats. Consequently, the parasite travels to the rat's brain to decrease the rat's innate fear of cat urine so that the rat's cat vigilance is relaxed, making it more likely to approach a cat. By doing so, the parasite increases its chances of arriving at its desired destination: the cat's stomach. Further, recent research suggests that not only does T. gondii reduce the rat's fear, likely by altering activity of the amygdala, but also it causes the rat to experience a social attraction to the cat. In this case, a single-cell parasite, without the benefit of a biopsychology course, has evolved the ability to manipulate the behavior of its mammalian host

cingulate cortex

-5th lobe -Limbic lobe -On top of corpus callosum between hemisphere -Output that is mostly visceral motor so controlling your gut -One of output is visceral motor: this is where we can change the things that are happening in our gut and there is an input and output side coming down into gut so we can know what's happening and we can change what's happening -Some way to respond to it, decide what to do and then execute that decision and change way we feel or have other behavioral responses based on how we feel

laughing rats and positive emotion research

-Although most investigations of emotional responses in rodents have focused on aversive emotions such as aggression, stress, fear, and anxiety, research suggests that there is a way to systematically generate a positive emotion without the complication of the response being accompanied by food, sex, or social interactions -tickling rats on their bellies generates positive emotions. With a methodology that generates a positive emotion, various research questions can be answered about the neurobiological impact of positive emotions and may extend to human emotions -tickling -Compared with social-housed animals, rats that are raised in isolation vocalize more during play sessions, perhaps because they have far less opportunity for play than social-housed animals. Further, rats have been shown to press a lever for tickle time with the experimenter's hand -research suggests that opioid receptors are involved in the neurochemistry of these vocalization responses. When rats were given naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, vocalizations were reduced in rats housed alone—an interesting finding considering that opioids are involved in both reward and pain functions. -As rats were repeatedly exposed to the tickling regime, they approached the experimenter's hand more quickly, indicating a building motivation to interact with the experimenter's hand -The development of a technique such as the tickling protocol to assess positive emotions in rodents offers an opportunity to determine the impact of such responses on building resilience against an animal's susceptibility to negative emotions such as the expression of symptoms typically considered in rodent models of depression

modifying memories

-Always possible to modify existing memories, even without our conscious awareness. -Memory updates are necessary as we encounter new information throughout our lives -the brain must balance both long-lasting and transient memories to allow us to interact optimally with our changing environment->ability to erase or forget memories is essential

Decision making

-An important factor in decision making, especially for social mammals, is how the presence of other individuals, either collaborators or competitors, influences our decision to make a specific response. -Nash equilibrium: a solution to forming strategies that incorporate the potential actions of others

short term memory

-Bring into lecture hall and show a slide that has numbers on it and then ask what was on the screen after took it off and do this repeatedly -Limited amount or a limited store for short term memory -Longer the interval before test memory, worse you will do -More than 7+/-2 things to remember, then not gonna do as well -If someone tries to remind you/jog your memory then these cues may not work on short-term memory -Info not there to access

pigeons and skinner

-Bring you into class and they'd give you a pigeon and the psych classes would show you how to use Scinnarian conditioning to train your pigeon to mold its behavior -Took the pigeons and they could teach the pigeons how to peck a particular key in a box and the keys could have pictures on them and the pigeon can be taught to discriminate between the two pictures and they would peck the key that would be with the right picture and a door would open and they would get a seed -Shown that you could train it with the right picture -Can we stretch this schedule a little bit? -Instead of every time get food, can you stretch it to every two times a pigeon pecks and then extend later: Do this to peck all the time to get rewards -Only reward for pecking after you have not pecked for 5 seconds -Different expt: boxes with pigeons to ask questions like can animals see color so you can train pigeon to put two buttons in there and only reward it when it pecks the color the color you want it to peck?: To discriminate color or even brightness of light or visual acuity (two stripes vs. one stripe); Birds detect carbon monoxide: pause pecking if introduce stimulus->Use these and set up controls -Can ask questions can pigeons recognize particular people->do they have a concept of what one person's identity is? -Take a pigeon and train them in a box every day and train them to get rewarded when they peck on the picture of a particular woman on it with different clothes, by herself, different hair -Can train pigeon to hit the button where the woman is -Wanted to know if they gave the pigeon a completely novel picture of the woman would they be able to peck yes they saw the woman: Pigeons able to do it->had a concept for the woman and when they found a novel woman picture presented to them they chose her over the other picture and got the seed -Also did this to see if pigeons knew what water was -Trained pigeons to be able to peck for pictures wherever there was water in them and the pigeons could accurately do this: Got it right everytime but one time kept getting it wrong but when blew up the picture and there was a puddle of water that the researchers didn't see

oxytocin

-Cells containing oxytocin are found in the medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus, in the amygdala, and in the BNST -receptors for monogamous: higher oxytocin receptor densities in the nucleus accumbens, PFC, and BNST -receptors for nonmonogamous: Nonmonogamous species have higher oxytocin receptor densities in the lateral septum, ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus, and amygdala -promotes prosocial behaviors such as trust, empathy, and altruism -Paul Zak and oxytocin

frontal lobe

-Central sulcus -Primary motor cortex -Functional units: motor cortex 1, f1, f2, dlpfc -F is frontal -Dl: dorsolateral -Vl: ventrolateral -O: orbital (near eye) -Pfc: pre frontal cortex ^Directional terms

drugs became available in 1960s

-Classes of drugs have: -Serotonin: -SSRIs: leave serotonin and system longer -12 different receptors so can be complex -Norepinephrine -NRI -GABA -GABA agonists: primary inhibitory neurotransmitters to calm ppl down -^not debilitating, impact behaviors -Not quite sure how drugs work and how it can modulate behavior the way it does -Lots of opportunity to tweak things to get different antagonists and agonists so don't have to slam body -Can tweak the system -Drugs and therapy used instead of surgery

Clive Wearing's Fleeting Memory

-Clive got really excited to see his wife whenever he saw her even when she just stepped out of the room -Had an illness (thought it was the flu): retained his fundamental level of intelligence and unimpaired use of his sensory and perceptual systems, each moment of his life was almost completely erased every time he blinked -Has journal entries: Each time he awoke from a night's sleep, or even blinked, seemed like his first awakening from an endless unconsciousness, and he thought the momentous occasion should be documented. BEHIND THE SCENES: -Had encephalitis: inflammation of the brain caused by the herpes simplex virus, was the culprit -Diffuse damage throughout the cortical areas of Clive's brain-temporal, occipital, parietal, and frontal lobes and complete destruction of the hippocampus (involved in learning and memory-particularly in forming memories) -Clive could no longer establish memories for events such as taking a bite of his favorite food, celebrating a birthday with his family, or spending a day with his wife. Interestingly, in some cases he knew things that he could not specifically remember -Amnesia (memory loss): did not affect his ability to, after declaring no memory for a musical score, sit down and play it beautifully on the piano -Provides evidence that there are various types of memory systems

where is the touch and sound being paired together and where does this change occur

-Come together in the deep portion of the middle of the cerebellum that is the lateral interpositus nucleus of the cerebellum: where learning taking place

why the females given estrogen act like a male? three principles

-Default state is female: don't have SRY gene then you will have Mullerian ducts that will turn into reproductive organs of female -In developing embryo, testosterone is metabolized into estrogen through aromatization: turn testosterone into estrogen -Alpha fetoprotein: bind up estrogen and take it out of system -Females, grow no Wolffian ducts and no testes and low testosterone and low levels of estrogen; little estrogen they do have bound by the alpha fetoprotein (taken estrogen out of system) -Males, have Wolffian ducts so make testosterone which is aromatized into estrogen, and not enough alpha fetoprotein in the embryo to be able to bind up all estrogen so circulating estrogen is what is making males turn into males->masculinizes them -Circulating estrogen turns males into males -Development different than estrogen and testosterone given as an adult -Is true that adult females have higher levels of estrogen and adult males have higher levels of testosterone -For development system, not true for how molecules working -Females will also end up having reproductive problems bc exposed to too much sex hormones in beginning

birth control pills: attempt to regulate systems

-Easier to regulate female system because there's so many more times to get in there; interfere with up and down then can disrupt the cycle and hopefully be able to control when contraception will happen -Most common have combination of progesterone and estrogen in them so mess with both systems at same time and shutting them down and they are giving these two things at same time (estrogen saying that follicle is already selected and progesterone saying we already ovulated so tricks system into not doing those things) -Can give female shot of estrogen and wait 24 hours and give shot of progesterone -in a mouse, this will make her ovulate -Hormones do affect behavior -Useful in lab to study how you can induce sexual reproductivity in females on timescale we would like

emotion

-Emotional responses are difficult to define, but easy to identify when we see them -Come up with examplees of what emotion can be and then look to see how they all get linked together -subjective feelings that are influenced by activation of various parts of our CNS and PNS -Activation of several neurobiological systems heightens our level of conscious awareness surrounding the internal and external circumstances of a particular event -Emotional experiences can be positive or negative, fleeting or long lasting, appropriate or inappropriate -Emotions are virtually impossible to simulate in even the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence -something that add value to our lives or adds something to our experience: going along on a normal life path and then something happens and have positive or negative emotion -Up life a little -Remember it better -have ability to tinge our cognitive state and that our emotions are less susceptible to our intentions -Emotions have way of overriding our intentions to keep us in that psychological state or psychological moment -Shape our perceptions: influence how we perceive the world around us -Just bc you define a psychological state as a certain emotion, nothing that says in the biological world that there has to be an emotional center -Artifical constructs of states->so no reason that there is one nucleus for each emotion

pregnancy

-End up having cross talk happening between mother and baby. End of pregnancy when offspring is born, the endocrine signaling pathway in the baby starts to send info to the mom, and the response the mom will start process of labor -Other organism behavior changes based on another organism -Goes on even after baby is born: nursing causes mother to release more milk and will stimulate the uterus to contract so things go back to its regular position in the body -Interplay between two organism -Marsupials: one or more babies in their pouch at different developmental ages that all have different kinds of milk that come from different nipples they attach to

historical background of behavioral endocrinology->Arnold Berthold

-First endocrinological research project->wondered how the testes contributed to the mature male characteristics observed in roosters -Divided groups of six male chickens into three pairs and castrated all of them: -First pair received no further treatment -Second pair: each chicken had one of its original testicles reimplanted into its body -Final pair: each chicken received a transplantation of one of the other male's testicles -Made sure the testes that were implanted had no vascular or neural connections RESULTS: -First pair: remained small, developed no fanciful comb and tail plumage, and were never observed to exhibit sexual advances or aggressive behavior -the two pairs receiving the implanted testicles matured into roosters with all the typical behaviors and plumage -concluded that the testicles were transplantable organs. Because they seemed to function with no nerve supply or physiological connections with the rest of the body, he proposed that they secreted a bloodborne product that was essential for the normal development of male chickens LECTURE -Castrated one group and that without those testicles, the chicken didn't look like typical male did -If castrated testicles and reimplanted those testicles or different testicles, then it gave a more typical phenotype -Testicles related to sex mature phenotype: some chemical substrate in testicles throughout body -Idea that certain chemicals could activate certain events throughout one's life and feelings and emotions and physical characteristics -Effects due to actual transplantation of gonads -Suggested we had these chemicals that could result in these changes -led to Bill Stittsworth

serotonin

-Generally, high levels of serotonin are associated with reduced aggressive behavior in rodents, whereas low levels are associated with increased aggressive behavior -Further investigations of specific serotonin receptors suggest that the 5-HT1B receptor is distributed among the brain regions involved in aggression, including the periaqueductal gray, hippocampus, and lateral septum. Activation of these receptors decreases aggression; additionally, male mice that are bred to lack this receptor are hyperaggressive -PET scans in human subjects also corroborate the idea that 5-HT1B receptor activation is negatively correlated with aggression, providing further evidence for its inhibitory role in aggression

homosexuality

-Go through and show you homosexual man. -When you share completely the same DNA, there's about a 50% chance that the identical twin will also be homosexual -Dizygotic twin: 22% chance of homosexual twin -Adopted: 11% -Has something to do with genes but genes are not the only important thing because these genes should be 100% of the behaviors if its only genetically regulated -Complicated interaction between genes and environment -Does appear that there is a biological component for particular traits and that genes have an effect on the expression of behaviors

Aristotle declaration of happiness two aspects

-Hedonia: pleasure->more immediate response/outcome -Eudaimonia: life well lived->adoption of a lifestyle or a process that facilitates positive emotional responses throughout one's lifetime

neuroplasticity of hormones

-Hormones and social behavior on parental behavior along with social relationships -Found that natural vs. city rats: -Noticed that when group housed in natural enriched environment: more likely to do things together -Increase in oxytocin with close proximity with one another->reduces oxytocin levels -In artificial environment: not as collaborative

insular cortex: involved in body awareness

-Hyperresponsive in PTSD as well as the ACC: an area involved in various learning tasks such as error detection and fear learning -Hippocampus involved in the interpretation of contexts as safe or dangerous based on available cues, is typically altered—however, the direction is not always predictable because both hypo- and hyperreactivity have been observed -PTSD has been associated with high cortisol and a cortisol deficit

Process of cycle

-Hypothalamus: recognize a signal and it will release GnRH (gonadotrophin releasing hormone) into the blood -GnRH circulate through blood to the pituitary gland: -Pituitary gland will release FSH (follicle stimulating hormone): released from pituitary with low frequency GnRH pulses from the hypothalamus -Follicle: found in ovaries; cluster of cells that contain the egg->protective casing for the egg; follicle does everything to support egg to be released -FSH stimulates the follicles to decide which follicle will be released during this hormone cycle: goes to ovary->FSH acting on ovary -Ovary (involved in maturation process of follicles) will then secrete an estrogen back up and act on the hypothalamus -estrogen acts on hypothalamus -Hypothalamus will then send signals to pituitary gland to release LH (luteinizing hormone): released from pituitary with high frequency GnRH pulses from hypothalamus -LH surge -LH will act on ovary -Ovary will be process of ovulation: egg is released from its follicle and travels down reproductive tract (fallopian tubes)

evidence of Papez's circuit

-If damage/remove any of these areas, people will have problems with emotions: hyperemotional or not enough emotion -Characteristic of emotion is that we have a gut reaction; our visceral reaction said that emotions add value to your life: Station in hypothalamus that can run the viscera and run your hypothalamus and can change effective response -Consciously aware of emotions: suggests cortical area able to have the ability to consciously realize what we're experiencing and we are actually in particular emotional state which is good bc it means we can possibly actually run our emotions -Its a loop: reaverbating circuit, which makes sense for emotion bc it goes around and around -Not just a flash of light

evidence for why lateral interpositus nucleus of cerebellum is where learning takes place

-If you take out the lateral interpositus nucleus of the cerebellum, and then do paradigm the animals will never learn to associate a tone with the puff that comes next so will not blink due to tone -Cryoprobe can be used to make areas of the brain cold enough that they don't function properly so if you do this to the lateral interpositus nucleus, the animal doesn't learn the response -On output pathway to red nucleus and if you warm that up, red nucleus will work and then the next time that we expose them to this tone stimulation having trained them while this lateral interpositive nucleus was too cold to work and didn't see a response, the output pathway works and the next time we expose them to the tone stimulus they will blink->did learn this but couldn't express it bc output pathway to the eye didn't work -Showed that the changes tend to appear in these lateral interpositus nucleus of the cerebellum and that is where it is learned->learned there even if you mess up the output so that you can't blink in response to it, you're still learning it and when you have the ability to blink again you will do so

Theories of Emotion

-James-Lange Theory -Bard-Cannon -Schachter-Singer Theory of Emotion/two factor theory Scenario to explain it: vignette->walking through woods and you see a bear and you run away from the bear and as you do this, brain says im running away, i feel scared

stress and forgetting

-Leaving baby in hot car->asserted that these incidents had less to do with the quality of parenting prior to the incident and more to do with the stressful circumstances the parent encountered on that unfortunate day. -Memory is a machine and it is not flawless. Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but on a cellular level, our memory does not. If you're capable of forgetting your cell phone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child -If you recall the more rigid procedural memories discussed above, when a person is stressed, the brain areas such as the basal ganglia involved in procedural memories are less likely to be monitored as a parent juggles various crises and responsibilities -Ex. driving and forgetting what you saw when driving -a mother, after not getting much sleep the prior night as the result of babysitting for a friend and caring for her own son, who had a cold, set out to take her son to the babysitter as she drove herself to work. The baby, usually animated in the car seat, was also tired from his sleepless night and was uncharacteristically quiet. There were several factors that differed from the mother's usual routine: -The car seat was in a different position than usual and was not visible in the rearview mirror, and she had to drive her husband's car -Talking on her cell phone for most of the drive to work -So, she drove past the babysitter's home and parked her car in the parking lot at work. Because the babysitter had a new cell phone, she had only added the mother's cell phone number, not the office number. The babysitter's calls went unnoticed in the mother's purse all day. It was a perfect stress storm that had disastrous results. Because there is no intent to harm the children in these cases, in about 40% of the cases the authorities determine that no crime has been committed. However, in the other 60% of the cases, the parent is charged with a felony

evidence that LTP used for some forms of memory

-Localized in hippocampus->area important in learning and memory -The type of high-frequency stimulation used to induce LTP was similar to the θ brain wave rhythm recorded in the hippocampus during learning -when LTP was blocked in the hippocampus, learning and memory diminished -certain biochemical alterations such as the modification of the NMDA receptor are critical in both LTP and memory formation

rat model of poverty/low SES and offspring summary

-Moms changed neurochemistry: more stress hormone receptors for moms that were in poverty condition -Mom is stressed and habenula (fear-processing response) -Impact on oxytocin -Offspring: noticed that differences in tails (tails shorter) in poverty group: significant different -Disrupted care influencing the stress response that is influencing growth in pups -Poverty had less healthy: Lower bone volume, Cartilage and tendons compromised

california deer mouse

-Monogamous species: together for life -Obligate paternal care: if dad not there, pups don't do as well -Survival and well-being and health of pups depends on paternal behavior -Lots of variation -Biparental -Alloparenting: playing a role in parenting who aren't actually the parents Male and taking care of pup not his

relationship between hypothalamus and the pituitary gland

-Oxytocin and vasopressin, the peptide hormones that are eventually released by the posterior pituitary, are initially synthesized by neurons in the paraventricular and supraoptic nuclei of the hypothalamus. These hormones travel through the axons to the terminal endings in the posterior pituitary for storage. Action potentials from these neurons then signal the posterior pituitary to release the peptide hormones at the appropriate time -Anterior pituitary synthesizes a different set of hormones on its own unlike posterior pituitary: Because no axons project from the anterior pituitary to the hypothalamus, the release of these hormones from the anterior pituitary cannot happen via an action potential from the hypothalamus. In fact, the release of the anterior pituitary hormones is triggered by releasing hormones in the hypothalamus -Travel through the portal system: specialized blood system connecting the hypothalmus to the pituitary gland

Fos protein

-Produced by the immediate early gene known as c-fos -valuable marker of recent neural events because it is produced in accordance with the activation of intracellular mechanisms-> if cells are actively engaged during a learning task, increased evidence of this protein will be observed in these brain areas -Fos expression in the hippocampus, implicated in learning and memory, has been associated with recent firing of neurons.

Kandel gives us two ways to think in molecular way

-Quanta released or change shape of AP -Recording activation of cells and then measuring neurotransmitter levels -Synapses not hardwired and the brain can change->can pinpoint how neurons are doing this -made everyone realize that these changes in synapses were actually making these amazing candidate for learning and memory

brain differences between males and females

-Region in the brain where if you do a Nissl stain (cell bodies) you see two of this center (one on either side of the ventricles) and see that they are big in males and that this nucleus is smaller in females: sexually dimorphic nuclei of the hypothalamusm (SDN) -Lesion studies: in females, do not cycle anymore -If took a male mouse at birth and remove their gonads and then supply them with anti-testosterone agents, then you would predict they would grow up with the SDN that would resemble the opposite sex; and if you took a female mouse and injected them with androgens and then when they grew up, you would think they would look like male SDN -Prediction right -Early hormonal experience is what determines whether the nucleus is small or large -androgen=larger -Not alot of androgen experience=smaller -Suggests that there are brain organization differences on the basis of early exposure to hormones -Found differences in spinal cord due to different tissue that needs to be differences -Went into a different region in the hypothalamus: cells that had dendrites that stuck out a certain way in males and a different way in females -Potentially different regions between males and females

when ovum becomes fertilized or discarded

-Remnant of follicle that used to house the egg but no longer needed to support the egg become the corpus luteum: found in the ovary; ends up releasing progesterone->progesterone is released and acts on the uterus (getting uterus ready) -Uterus will make lining cozy and thick in preparation for the egg -Uterus secretes chorionic gonadotropin: goes back and acts on corpus luteum to keep corpus luteum alive: ^cycle goes around and around until it fails -Fails: corpus luteum will disappear and uterus goes back to normal form and cycle happens all over again -Two option: fail (start cycle over again if no baby will be conceived; egg not fertilized once a month) or fertilized egg appears so the cycle stops: egg will implant in the uterus and mature until their born and system will support developing organism

Berridge and Kringelbach

-Research on how mesolimbic dopamine reward circuit facilitates adaptive behavior -Brain's reward system very complex: mesolimbic dopaminergic neurons activated by aversive (negative) stimuli as well as rewarding stimuli -Doopamine not only sole neurochemical involved in brain's reward circuit: -Mesolimbic dopaminergic neurons more reliably activated by predictive, attentional, and motivational factors as opposed to more pleasurable aspects of stimuli -When behaviors indicating that an animal find a stimulus pleasurable are monitored manipulations of mesolimbic dopamine fail to modulate the degree of liking for stimulus -Suggested that dopamine may play a role in shifting our arousal and motivation toward pleasurable aspects of a stimulus. -Researchers reported that dopamine fluctuations were never observed to change the intensity of the pleasurable impact of food, even when the intensity of the drive to obtain it had been profoundly changed

Alzheinmers

-Specific kind of dementia -Characterized by tangles and plaques -Problems with recall of things -Often hippocampus is hit really hard from the development of these plaques so that's why we see these memory losses in ppl who have Alzheimer's disease

maternal behavior evolutionary perspective

-Structural differences in the brain, not just behavioral differences -Neurons in hippocampus-> more spines and bushier and spines can come in different shapes for lactating animals -Differences between lactating and virgin animals in hippocampus; could be to provide for her offspring -If we look at maternal brain, the changes are pervasive across many different areas of the brain: Most traditional area studied: is medial pre-optic area (seems to be important in initiating the traditional maternal behavior for maternal care) -Hypothalamus involved in motivated related behavior and sending signals to the pituitary gland to regulate, secrete reproductive hormones throughout all stages of reproduction -Hypothalamic pituitary axis important -Hippocampus and cortical areas is involved in maternal behavior, even though didn't think it affected that -Experinece is dynamic: considering how important for offspring to survive for survival of species, brain is heavily invested and doing what it needs to do to make sure these offspring grow up and continue cycle -mom as hunters: Moms vs. virgins were faster at killing a cricket to test for more natural like predator-prey relationship->Mostly focused on how adaptive the maternal behavior was -Female is vulnerable to when conditions are not as appropriate as they should be->more translational (less than ideal conditions): -Came up model looking at restricted resources or poverty, low socioeconomic status; keep lab rats in a cage and given bedding and given nesting material and standard situation, given two paper towels -Standard resources with bedding and nesting materials -Restricted (model for poverty): fourth amount of bedding, and 25% of nesting materials -Postnatal exposure -Found that the moms in the low resource condition seemed to be distracted-> weren't as fast in retrieving the animals; did not have as much on nest behavior -Quality of maternal care not as well -also given a challenge task: Uncertainty challenge task (iron curtain task): novel and scary most rats avoided it->put pups on one side and mom on other side without pups (could probably hear and smell pups); see what they would do to see pups -Standard: did good job of taking their pups and took them to the other side and put them into huddle; vigilant abt where she was -Low resources: tipped the thing over and covered them up and trapped them -Seemed confused -Mild conditions -Could be worse in real life

Structural Neuroplasticity

-The formation and rearrangement of dendrites on neurons in active regions in the brain is one likely mechanism for learning-dependent structural plasticity->all dendrites are not "carved in stone." Rather, dendrites can be quite transient, rearranging to form new synapses and sprouting spines in accordance with cellular demands. In fact, the memories of our lives have been likened to never-ending processes of establishing and stabilizing new synapses with newly learned associations and eliminating synapses that are no longer relevant -One mechanism of synaptic restructuring includes changing the shape of dendritic spines, specifically the bulbous head at the end of the spine: -Spine head shape is correlated with synaptic strength and stability: many of the aspects of LTP such as PKA and calcium activity have been associated with spine enlargement, prompting the proposal of activity-mediated spine enlargement in which the shape of the spine changes with neural activity -structural plasticity has been observed in activated spines, prompting the emergence of new spines on dendrites located near the original activated spine set -Novel experiences, thus, have been associated with the formation of longterm structural modifications leading to long-term memories->spine restructuring not only initiates rewiring of a neural circuit but also influences the intensity of the synaptic connections by increasing overall spine density -entirely new neurons are created and situated within the emerging memory/ learning cellular networks -represents a serious investment in the learning experience, more so than the tweaking of spines on existing dendrites. -neurogenesis, or the production of new neurons, continues in certain brain regions throughout adulthood. Because one area of production of these new neurons is the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus within the hippocampus, neurogenesis is thought to be associated with the learning process. -In addition to neurogenesis occurring in the hippocampus, the finding that experiences that enhance neurogenesis in the rodent (e.g., voluntary running, environmental enrichment, and spatial training) also enhance learning and memory has supported the idea that neurogenesis and learning are associated: Ex. one study provided evidence that behavioral training increased the proliferation and survival of newborn neurons->results of this study suggested that learning also increased the elimination of newborn neurons at a specific phase of development. Accordingly, inhibiting cell death also appeared to impair learning -Neurogenesis studies suggest that the developing neurons play different roles at different stages of development: . Prior to the growth of a full set of processes, the indiscriminate young neurons may modulate background neural activity and influence the firing patterns of neurons in the established neural networks. During later learning, however, the new neurons may be less necessary as the surviving developing neurons are maturing and integrating into the appropriate circuits. Finally, our brains have a limited spatial capacity. If learning requires new neurons and we have limited space in our skull for brain tissue, strategic neural downsizing must occur to maintain optimal lifelong learning. -Gerd Kempermann

emotions and health

-The stress response is one of the most influential mediators of psychoneuroimmunological functions. Thus, varying levels of emotional regulation and stress management will lead to different immune and health outcomes -Stress results in immunosuppression, research conducted by the Firdaus Dhabhar suggests that, when it comes to immune functions, stress is a double-edge sword: -When stress is acute or is present for short durations, much evidence suggests that stress leads to immunoenhancement -the prolonged vigilance and stress response take a toll on the immune system -Another index used to assess immune function in both human and animal models is the rate of wound recovery: increased probability of pathogens entering the body when an animal has an open wound, it appears adaptive for the wound to heal as soon as possible -Ample evidence indicates our emotions permeate immune functions: coping strategies such as cognitive reappraisal can be used to influence the immune system

electroconvulsive shock

-Therapy ppl use in certain conditions for mental illness -Like a reboot on a computer -Put two electrodes on either side of brain and will pass current between them and they reset all the electrical activity in brain HYPOTHESIS: short-term memory is stored in the brain as electrical activity -If take animals do one trial passive avoidance, they will at some point get off the flower pot the first time they do this and then they do electroconvulsive shock and you can do it at any time (at different times) -Don't want to do stimulus -Found that the next day testing them, if they gave them the electroconvulsive shock right after they got down off the pot and got shocked during training, wouldn't remember floor aversive->closer the electroconvulsive shock is to the trial that learned to avoid something, the higher the likelihood they are not gonna remember learning it -Supports short term memory is ongoing electrical activity in brain and if you disrupt it then you disrupt learning taking place: Emotions and learning part of this until it fails->once info is gone, can't bring it back

opioid system can hook into the dopaminergic pathway as well

-They can tell you the state of the moment and tell you if you should be doing this thing or not and when you talk about dopamine and learning they can be involved in this process as well -Natural rewards where you can encounter one and two will be reward but as you kind of learn that somebody presenting food on a plate to you is actually about to bring you that reward then the learning will shift to be able to associate dopaminergic activity with the presentation of the food before you even eat it -Opioid reward shows basically same thing. Before, the consumption of the drug made you feel good and euphoric and learning is going to shift so that you end up feeling this dopamine release when you see the drug paraphernalia -Dopamine critical for reward learning and predicts the value of a situation and determine if it is a really good situation to be able to do bc it will likely lead you to more good situations and avoid the bad situations. Once dopamine does that, the opiates are going to report that change in internal state back to you and it'll tell you the outcome of these systems

psychoeconomics

-Translate operant conditioning up to how hard humans working -If humans working where they get paid one-to-one for everything you make in the factory, you get paid x amount of money, humans are more productive and tend to work harder at a constant rate in terms of productivity when they know they get rewarded every time they work whereas if you have these lulls where you don't have to do anything during a certain amount of time and then get a reward during a certain amount of time, then you'll have an oscillation -pay ppl by the hour vs. production

long-term potentiation (LTP)

-Two areas connected by axons and take an electrode and give one side a little zap->next cell synapses onto another cell and when you record you will see a little bump -After see electrical disturbance->what if stimulated once every 30 seconds, will see a little bump -If did it in a row->train of stimulation, on other neuron expect things to sum together and get larger response->burst of connective energy elicits a response: -Can come back and if have given all eight stimuli close together and then next day did one stimulation->get an even larger response -Bc you gave a ton of responses in a row as a train of stimulation, this cell now has a heightened response the next time even if it's been some time since it was stimulated like that -Saying that this cell has a heightened response now to a single stimuli bc in the past, it has been given a lot of input simultaneously in this same pathway and this particular response is showing that the cell is acting differently based on previous experience cell has had: -doesn't work if stimuli staggered

Holes in James Lange Theory

-Walter Cannon: some animals will still express emotions such as aggression or fear if the brain is surgically separated from the system that supplies nerves to the body -although there are subtle differences in bodily responses to various emotive stimuli, it seemed unlikely that the emotion to be experienced could be determined by that sole factor -also pointed out that emotions emerge quickly—so quickly that a particular physiological response would not have time to occur before the emotion is experienced -Philip Bard and Cannon: observed that cats still expressed fear when their cortex was separated from the lower brain and spinal cord: According to the James-Lange theory of emotion, this drastic disruption of bodily feedback should have diminished emotional expression

HM (Henry Meliasan)

-Young man in early 20s visiting William Scoville for treatment for debilitating epileptic seizures bc his seizures didn't respond to medications (Intractable epilepsy: had life-threatening seizures) -Scoville suggested removing the hippocampus->it has been implicated in the generation of seizures: bilateral hippocampectomy (hippocampus removed)->His case unique bc Scoville made a bilateral lesion of the medial temporal lobe->This lesion was much cleaner and more precise than the typical brain damage noted in patients suffering brain illness or trauma -did decrease frequency of his seizures -Developed anterograde amnesia: no longer form long-term memories, but can recall memories formed before the surgery -not able to form new memories: Reflected that he thought he was still in time where he had surgery -Systematic evaluation of HM suggested that his temporal lesions: -Loss of declarative memory/explicit memore: caused severe deficits in the conscious retrieval of events and facts: Consists of episodic memory and memory for word meanings and concept-based learning known as semantic memory -The finding that a relatively small brain area played such an important cognitive function was a bombshell in the neurological literature->At that time, memory was thought to be more diffusely represented throughout the brain. -suggested that a brain contender for Lashley's illusive memory engram involved the hippocampus -Milner's systematic evaluations, however, revealed that not all of H.M.'s memory systems were negatively impacted by the surgery->ex. when she asked H.M. to perform a challenging mirror-tracing motor task, she noted that his performance improved each tim (motor performance (slower than other control subjects) suggested he did remember

Darwin and emotion

-animals experience emotion -Charles Darwin published The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Following decades of observations, he introduced the idea that animals experience emotions in a fashion similar to humans. Darwin's observations emphasized threads of continuity observed in emotional responses across species -emphasized that a limited set of emotions exists across species and cultures: more aversive/negative emotions like fear and aggression present in reptiles birds and mammals but more positive emotions difficult to observe -Positive emotional experiences are thought to involve many of the same brain mechanisms as aversive emotional experiences do, with additional activation of the brain's reward systems and neurochemicals such as opiates and GABA

ischemic stroke

-brain itself has blood vessels in it that get blocked or occluded in some way or have a clot form -Stroke where whatevers downstream that blood vessel was supplying is no longer supplied to that area -Blood bring two really important things for neurons functioning: 1. Brings them glucose: food 2. Oxygen: need to do oxidative phosphorylation and regular metabolic processes in the mitochondria -medical emergency -800,000 ppl in US per year: every 40 seconds -5th leading cause of disease -Up to 80% can be prevented -Heart health important -Stress

what is sensitization doing?

-breaks the All or none law: action potential: same shape, same duration, same size -Sensitization you have axoaxonic serotonergic inputs the innervation of the axon is going to have the effect on that axon of making the potassium channels little bit slow-> -When have big sodium current->Na goes into the cell and then at top K channel open and K comes into cell and goes to resting membrane potential; here: action potential will change its shape a little bit bc the K channels are going to open up a little bit slower->doesn't get curved the way it should in time bc K channels slower to open->allow intracellular voltage to continue to go up -AP have different shape -Serotonin is making two g protein coupled protein cascades become activated and its going to in addition to reducing potassium conductance and increase calcium conductance->have all these somatic vesicles that are mobilized to this active zone where they can be released-> -Longer depolarization: second cell get more neurotransmitter->more energy in first cell's terminal so more neurotransmitter being released and then more opportunity for that second cell to receive signals from the neurotransmitter and then react

emotional regulation->ex of resilience

-certain individuals, such as tortured prisoners of war, have experienced such an intense form of stress that it seems impossible that any human could have survived it. -Prisoners of war can have extreme resilience -In a recent interview, Shumaker conveyed the importance of looking inside oneself to find coping mechanisms that enable one to survive torturous circumstances and move on. This was how he built emotional resilience -Resilience: refer to the psychological response of springing back after a stressful situation -also refers to an individual's ability to cope successfully with acute and chronic stressors -anything that diminishes the stress response aids emotional resilience

peptide hormones

-consist of chains of amino acids. -Ex. oxytocin, vasopressin, calcitonin -Hypothalamic hormones/releasing hormones: Peptide hormones that travel to the anterior pituitary from the hypothalamus (for example, CRH) -chains of amino acids, do not easily travel across cell membrane (CRH, oxytocin); more than 50 amino acids are protein hormones (prolactin) -How these hormones interact with the cells? -Cannot pass through the cell membrane; instead they bind to a receptor protein -Kick off metabolic process -The hormone-receptor complex changes its shape, activating a G-protein -The G-protein activates cAMP, the "second messenger," which influences the cell's functioning -Ex. oxytocin and prolactin

cerebellum

-contributes to motor skills by initiating the activation of deep cerebellar nuclei that receive information from excitatory climbing mossy fibers or inhibitory processes from Purkinje cells, the principal inhibitory cells of the cerebellar cortex 1. the presentation of a tone (conditioned stimulus) activates mossy fibers extending from the pontine nuclei, subsequently projecting to the granule cells in the cerebellar cortex 2. interpositus nucleus, a deep nucleus in the cerebellum, plays a role in the conditioning necessary to form the association between the tone and the eye-blink; damage to this area impairs conditioned responses -the length of the synapse surface area increases in the interpositus nucleus following conditioning -Changes in the cerebellar cortex, specifically in an area known as the paramedian lobule that regulates limb movement, accompany acrobatic training in rats->when compared with rats that had merely exercised (with no motor training), the rats that had been trained in a challenging obstacle course had increased numbers of synapses for each Purkinje cell -procedural learning results in several forms of neuroplasticity throughout the cerebellum->extent and duration of this plasticity remain under investigation

PTSD

-defined as a mix of intrusive memories of a traumatic episode and accompanying avoidance of relevant triggers for the event. It typically leaves the patient with chronic hyperarousal and other emotional distortions -evident that biological predispositions interact with the person's encounter with an emotionally threatening event -Once diagnosed, a characteristic marker is a heightened autonomic response such as heart rate reactivity in response to a stimulus related to the emotional event.: -ex. hyperresponding to loud noises in street that sound like gunfire -Researchers have observed reduced volumes of both the hippocampus and the ventromedial PFC in PTSD patients relative to control subjects without PTSD. Further, fMRI scans implicate several brain areas in PTSD -follows an emotionally traumatic event and is characterized by: -a tendency to reexperience the troubling event via flashbacks or intrusive thoughts -an avoidance of stimuli that have been associated with the event -increased arousal, even when no threatening stimuli are present -negative alterations of mood and cognition

How does stress negatively affect the memory system?->David Diamond

-developed a stress model in which rats encounter unavoidable exposure to a cat, a natural predator. -compared with rats simply placed in an unfamiliar cage with no cat exposure and with control rats placed in their home cage, the stressed rats that were placed in a cage with a cat positioned outside exhibited less evidence of a low-threshold version of LTP. Further, the stressed rats exhibited more errors on a water maze task, which is a hippocampal-dependent spatial learning task -research with rats suggests that stress adversely affects the hippocampus by altering cell survival as well as neuronal morphological and metabolic functions->evidence suggested that stress produced by predator exposure resulted in lower levels of neural cell adhesion molecule in the potential prey, a glycoprotein that is critical for neuronal development and synaptic plasticity in mature brains. This was accompanied by compromised spatial memory -Stress impairs memory systems: stress exposure compromises cognitive functioning may explain your performance on certain academic assignments and exams. However, research suggests that stress-induced memory impairment is not permanent. When rats are taken out of the stressful environment and housed in a familiar environment, memory recovers

at least 4 versions of these receptors

-different versions of receptors for neurotransmitters; both respond to neurotransmitters -Different receptor types are able to do different things in the cells because they work differently -Mu (3 subtypes) -Delta (2 subtypes) -Kappa (3 subtypes) -Nocioceptive -These work with the same neurotransmitter (opiod system) to give information about the state at any particular time so whether a particular thing you did was good and should be repeated or whether it was bad and should not -Signals to give some kind of feedback about what was the outcome of the decision or the experience the sensory stimulus causes -how we give ourselves feedback

equipotentialists

-disagree with localizationists -when you learn something it goes in a lot of different places and it's kind of diffused across brain (not just one location) -Karl Lashley: Series of experiments to provide evidence Pavlov was wrong and it was more distributed throughout the brain -Father of studying interaction between brain behavior in US -first to run rats in mazes -Multiple mazes: all a little different: Start and stop box: rat placed in start position and then they make their way through the maze the very first time that they're in the maze, stumbles on reward by accident by exploring -At some point in maze, end location -Next time in maze, go a little faster bc looking for reward -After each time they'll learn the maze->then will take the most direct point once they've learned it from the start box to the finished box -Early notion of operant conditioning: learning what behaviors would be rewarded -Did not believe that learning happened in a particular place in the brain->if learning did occur in a certain place in the brain, then you should be able to take out that place in the brain and learning wouldn't be able to happen or it wouldn't be able to express it -Whole lot of cuts through the brain on each animal -Theory was that if learning takes place in the cerebral cortex, and he severs certain sections, then if this specific section was where learning and memory was held in the brain, then this would mean behavioral would be extinguished (learning and memory not a thing) -When he did this rats still able to learn and retain info from the maze -Started to scoop out areas of the cortex: could still learn the maze -two ideas as a result: -mass action -idea of equipotentiality -spent entire career searching for the memory engram (memory traces in the brain) in the cortex, since the cortex was a logical place for the memory engram to be located because it was the most recently evolved area of the brain and learning is considered an advanced brain function and cortex more readily assessable than deeper brain areas -Rodents in his lab managed to learn the mazes regardless of location of the cortical lesions -After failing to identify a specific area of the cortex that seemed to be responsible for the transformation of experiences into memories, Lashley concluded that memory was the product of multiple regions of the cortex contributing equally to memory formation -Theory of equipotentiality: The theory that multiple brain areas contribute equally to a particular task or function

Timothy Bliss and Terje Lomo: looked at how experience altered specific synapses in the hippocampus (long term potentiation)

-discovered that certain afferent neural pathways exhibited plasticity when stimulated with a high-frequency stimulus. Further, this modification seemed to be long-lasting, hence its name, long-term potentiation (LTP) -three afferent pathways shown to express plasticity are located in the hippocampus. They include the perforant pathway, the mossy fiber pathway, and the Schaffer collateral pathway: the perforant pathway and the Schaffer collateral pathway appear to be specialized for associative learning because LTP is contingent on the activation of the postsynaptic cell

confabulation

-effortlessly make up stories to fill in gaps in their memories -Been documented in patients with orbitofrontal cortex damage -these false memories typically include bits of true information so that, to the affected individual, fabricated segments of fuller stories seem to be fully believed as honest reflections of their currently perceived reality. For this reason, confabulation has been referred to as honest lying -patients with OFC damage fill in the memory gaps with somewhat realistic stories -Korsakoff's syndrome: individuals experience an atypical loss of short-term memories. -Because lesions in the dorsomedial thalamic nucleus are evident in the autopsied brains of these patients, this brain area has also been cautiously implicated in spontaneous confabulations

learning and memory

-enable animals to survive in a changing real-world environment in which there are fewer absolutes than probabilities -Have a behavior and then teach them how to do a behavior and characterize this behavior where is this happening like the hippocampus and then what cell type and what receptor -What goes on at a molecular level will lead to big changes in behavior -Helpful in terms of thinking about types of classical models we have for learning and memory and that these are ways to try to get into these more complicated systems of behavior -appears that learning experiences continuously sculpt the brain by enhancing existing neuronal connections, modulating and producing new networks, and pruning unnecessary connections when appropriate: most adaptive neural strategies do not always coincide with increased numbers of neurons or connections

Walter Cannon and near death experiences

-explored potential explanation of claims that people throughout history had been frightened to death -consulted historical accounts of case studies in which a person had died for no apparent medical reason after being frightened -Voodoo death: argued that the many cases he had presented were a result of the person believing that he or she was condemned to death because of a voodoo curse, consumption of a taboo food, or some other form of condemnation BEHIND THE SCENES: -In his initial analysis, Cannon hypothesized that voodoo death stemmed from persistent and extreme activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Thus, the adrenaline release, resulting from the "cursed" victim's perceived lack of control and impending doom, overstimulated the cardiovascular system in a fashion similar to that of an overdose of cocaine -Richter: proposed that the complementary arm of the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system responds excessively, thereby calming the person to death. -Rats could survive extended swimming sessions when there was no escape route-> if the rats had to face this situation with freshly trimmed whiskers, depriving them of sensory feedback, they would drown, likely because of heart failure -After discovering that the surgical removal of the adrenal gland (adrenalectomy), failed to protect the stressed swimming rats from death, Richter concluded that their death was not caused by the overexcitation of the sympathetic nervous system, but by the overstimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system -Vagal tone: inhibition of heart rate resulting from stimulation of the vagus nerve -Samuels: suggested that both the sympathetic and the parasympathetic arms of the autonomic nervous system are likely involved -Certain systems likely predominate at different times, with the sympathetic nervous system having a greater influence earlier in the process and the parasympathetic nervous system controlling the later events -also observed cardiac lesions that could lead to heart failure. Systematic studies with mice suggest that sympathetic activation, even in animals whose adrenal glands had been removed, leads to the cardiac lesions. Thus, the lesions may be a result of direct interactions between the nervous system and the heart, rather than a result of the release of stress hormones

evidence that says prolonged vigilance and stress response take a toll on the immune system

-extensive research on humans experiencing various forms of chronic real-life stress and have reported that immunosuppression is most often observed -ex. when assessing the immunological response in the form of antibody production to certain vaccines, medical students showed stronger virus-specific T-cell responses if they reported less emotional stress and more social support than their student counterparts with more extreme forms of stress. Additionally, individuals who were caregivers for their spouses suffering from Alzheimer's disease exhibited weaker antibody responses to vaccinations than age-matched control subjects who were not caring for a loved one suffering from Alzheimer's disease. These findings suggest that stress levels may be an important factor to consider when administering vaccinations. Further, these results highlight the increased immunological vulnerability of individuals facing chronic, unrelenting stress

are the differences between male and female functionally relevant?

-from biological perspective, this is expected: Females do lots that males don't do -There are different hormonal systems and behavioral systems between the two -Problem: is one brain is better than the other -Wrong: brain has been evolved specifically to be perfect in the sort of body that they're in

hemorrhagic stroke

-have a blood vessel that gets weakened and it bursts so hole in blood vessel in the brain -The blood can leak out into brain tissue; problematic for two reasons: 1. Blood not getting to where it's supposed to go 2. Blood is in there and pooling up and you know that the brain has a very limited capacity to where the tissue can be because the skull is there: More volume, it will push against parts of your brain around it and that will compress them and lead to dysfunction as well

Activity stress research condition

-housing rats in cages, restricting their feeding to one hour per day, and giving them unlimited access to activity wheels, rats were allowed to eat as much as they could for one hour -Initial studies: health consequences were severe -Usually run 1 to 15 miles per day, in this expt they ran up to seven miles a day and even though usually active at night, the rats in this expt became increasingly active during light hours -When food was placed in cages, instead of jumping on food bowl as expected, they typically hopped in activity wheels and ran before going to food bowls. -Had stomach ulcers, hypertrophied or swollen adrenal glands, and shriveled thymus glands (similarities to anorexia) Plausible Explanation: -running can become more reinforcing than eating: One study: dopamine blocked by antagonist->rat's excessive amounts of running subsided -Dopamine fuels a reward circuit in the brain that involves the nucleus accumbens -Another study: rats kept in cooler temps exhibited greater amounts of running than rats in warm temperature -More uncomfortable lab conditions became, more likely the activity-stress rats would run -Not a case of maladaption->if food in wild became scarce, movement to another area would likely lead the animal to locate more plentiful food. -Caged rat has same biological urge to run but the behavior leads to its demise rather than to its rescue from starvation -reinforcement-omission effect: responses strengthen when an animal is not rewarded, perhaps bc of frustration

ADHD

-interruption in attention is associated with ADHD -characterized by inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity and affects approximately 6% of children and adolescents -Less conservative estimates have suggested that up to 20% of boys in certain school systems have prescriptions for ADHD medication -Drugs that are traditionally used to treat this disorder modulate dopamine functioning, involved in executive attention functions -Dopamine is also involved in reward system: pharmacological agonists for the dopamine system (e.g., methamphetamine or Ritalin) may enhance the saliency, or relevance, of target stimuli during the learning process -an enhanced sense of reward may result from arriving at the correct answer with appropriate dopaminergic activation->This focused attention could facilitate the consolidation of memories associated with various academic assignments -Problems with methamphetamine to treat ADHD: Some research documents therapeutic success, whereas other research reports no positive benefits of the drugs. -Controversies with how prevalent it is

Philosophical continuum

-localizationists -equipotentialists -When you have two views->middle is usually correct (gray in terms of understanding)

Paul Maclean

-named the limbic system: involved in emotional responses -Proposed triune brain: 3 in 1 brain that evolved but we still have the basic functions the brain stem reptilian brain (basic brain) and more complex with emotion with paleo mammalian/rodent and then more recent neo-mammalian brain (primates) -How mammalian brain different from other brains -Vocalization -Lactation and nursing -Play -^all three related to parental experience -Maybe having offspring and providing care is the signature characteristic of mammals and paved way for complex brain with social interactions->how powerful parental care has been to the evolution of mammals and what it has taught us about own brains and how we think -focused on rats: wonderful moms -Can't thermoregulate so mom makes sure they are huddled together; she has to groom their anal genital area to stimulate them to eliminate urine and fecal matter -Her brain changing to take care of animals->maybe pregnancy could marinate the brain so that she could care for these offspring once the offspring were there->environment offspring creates enriched environment -Early on->when put mama rats to test they were good at finding food so very efficient when getting food (not a lot of time to make mistakes or think about where to go)->foraging behavior -If rats are timid, they will stay in dark covered safe space and more excited rats wil be outside dark -Mother rats completed more successful trials than the virgin rats -expt. Another behavioral task: dry land maze and like kitty swimming pool->had baited wells and if they have food in it they're baited->systematically teach them that not every well that has reward food (fruit loop) and only certain ones and through habituation they are shown that there's just one well that is baited so need to remember which one that is -Moms can navigate these better -Take fruit loop out to see what rats would do if they expected it to be there but wasn't -Maternal rats exhibit adaptive strategies and check out other wells

action-outcome associations

-probabilities computed in the brain in decision-making challenges are related to action-outcome association -the various rewards associated with specific actions are determined -rat research suggests that the dorsomedial striatum and the OFC play roles in the learning and encoding of these associations -different valuation systems may exist that confuse action-outcome calculations and ultimate response options

procedural memories may indeed be more difficult to form in old age—even more so than declarative memories

-procedural memories formed during childhood can last a lifetime. By the time a person is 70 years old it may become more difficult, but not impossible, to learn new motor skills. -Although several factors may be responsible for these effects, a likely key factor comes from observations that procedural learning requires a larger neural commitment, or number of synaptic modifications, than declarative memory does. Thus, it is likely that the regulation of neuroplasticity and cellular pruning differs for different types of memory systems

testosterone in aggression

-produced in males by specialized cells in the testes -In most mammalian species, castration results in dramatically decreased levels of aggression. However, there are exceptions. -testosterone seems to be more influential in the developmental organization of aggression than in the activation of aggressive responses, especially in male prairie voles. Thus, particularly in this species, testosterone appears to be more important in establishing the neural foundations of the aggression brain network (organization) than in triggering the response (activation) later in the adult stages of the vole's life -Although females also produce testosterone, a causal link to aggression is less clear in females. Therefore, most aggression research has been conducted in males. -studies suggest that the relationship between testosterone and aggression is weaker in humans than in nonhuman animals -When human males are assessed in competitive social interactions, testosterone is positively correlated with aggression -presence of testosterone receptors in key brain areas involved in aggression (e.g., orbitofrontal cortex, hypothalamus, amygdala) provides further support for the role of testosterone in aggressive responses -assessed testosterone levels in prisoners convicted of violent crimes: Their findings suggest a strong positive relationship between criminal behavior and testosterone levels. However, as discussed above, the time delay between the violent crime and the measurement 0f the criminal's testosterone levels is a methodological challenge -research suggests that fluctuations, such as the degree of increase, rather than stable levels of testosterone represent one of the most dramatic modulators of aggression

DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone)

-provide a buffer against the effects of stress hormones in the brain and other tissue -related to increased neurogenesis, which may protect against the onset of stress-related mental illnesses -been shown to be related to reduced anxiety and enhanced emotional resilience -DHEA metabolites, for example, interfere with glucocorticoid receptor activation in the hippocampus, ultimately resulting in neuroprotection against damaged or dying neurons -higher levels of DHEA are associated with protection against stress-induced responses and better performance

two main types of aggression

-reactive-impulsive aggression: person highly emotionally aroused, as with out-of-control anger -more directly regulated by the limbic structures -controlled-instrumental aggression: more purposeful type of aggression -regulated by higher cortical systems

sensitization experiment with aplysia

-same situation with habituation but add another thing to it -Do same thing w gills and add another neuron to the neuron pathway used for habituation: Other neuron are interneurons: -Facilitating interneuron: input from skin receptors that were strongly stimulated -Still going to do habituation but then apply a noxious stimulus to another part of the aplysia so facilitating internueron is coming from the tail where the skin receptors were strongly stimulated by weak shock and will interfere with the circuit of the habituation response and it will allow you to have much larger response to the siphon->gives enhancement like first time received the light touch (may occur for up to an hour after shock to tail) -Interneuron coming down and synapsing on presynaptic sensory neuron with an axoaxonic synapse (axon on axon): releasing neurotransmitter onto the axon of the sensory neuron in original circuit and releasing serotonin on sensory neuron: Serotonin modulate the synapse on presynaptic side that allows whole circuit to change; have several synapses going on

John O'Keee and John Dostrovosky

-set out to understand why the hippocampus was so important in rats' spatial memory for laboratory mazes -When recording from individual cells in the hippocampus, it appeared that such sensory information was not activating the cells. Rather, the cells became activated when the rats were located in specific locations, or places, in the maze—leading to their eventually becoming known as place cells -the hippocampus appeared to have special sensitivities to the external environment, allowing the animal to form a cognitive, or spatial, map of its environment -research suggests that although the environment alters the brain's structures, the rat brain is hard-wired for assessing spatial information and forming neural navigational systems in new environments -

prairie vole

-share a nest and home range and often travel together -Used to identify key neurobiological foundations of this bond -Bond for life->after one parent dies, living partner rarely forms a new bond -Generally, when given a choice between the familiar mate and a new one, the voles choose the familiar mate -implicated the role of the posterior pituitary hormones oxytocin and vasopressin in the formation of these strong social and romantic bonds -Study: the prairie voles were allowed one hour of cohabitation with an opposite-sex prairie vole. They were then placed in an apparatus in which the prairie vole from cohabitation and a new opposite-sex prairie vole were tethered to different chambers. The test prairie vole could chose to spend time with either one (or neither). Preference is determined when the test prairie vole spends more time with one over the other. Following pretreatment with either vasopressin or oxytocin, both males and females showed an increased preference for the familiar prairie vole compared with the males and females that had received no hormonal manipulation -When neuropeptide systems blocked with antagonists: administration of oxytocin and vasopressin failed to have an effect -vasopressin has been generally thought to be more influential in the male brain than in the female brain, these results provided evidence for the importance of both oxytocin and vasopressin in both males and females

social attachment more than love

-still demonstrates the biochemical mechanisms underlying increased motivation to be with a friend or loved one -Humans: brain-imaging studies indicate that areas of the brain such as the right PFC (which has been implicated in negative emotions) deactivate when a picture of a romantic partner is viewed and brain areas rich in vasopressin and oxytocin receptors are activated

Gerd Kempermann

-suggested that the mammalian brain's hallmark ability to create new neurons creates a survival advantage by allowing mammals to adapt to a changing environment -"Networks that are too stable cannot acquire anything new": the presence of adult neurogenesis ensures that the development of the dentate gyrus never comes to an end. -hippocampus is more developed in species that are opportunistic and adapt to new environments. Rats and humans, each with respectably sized hippocampi, thrive when faced with new habitats and challenges: -Although dolphins are known for their advanced cognitive abilities, their habitat is more homogenous than that of land mammals. That is, dolphins are always in the water, whereas land mammals can inhabit many different terrains, from underground burrows to trees. Accordingly, the size of dolphins' hippocampus (including the dentate gyrus) is small relative to the massive overall size of their brains

sympathetic activation and parasympathetic withdrawal

-the second tier of the stress response, the HPA axis, is a bit slower considering that the peak glucocorticoid plasma levels occur over the 20 or so minutes after the introduction of the stressor -autonomic nervous system sounds the body's alarm, and the HPA axis amplifies the message so that the appropriate brain areas are activated to resolve the crisis for the long term -Once the brain is activated via the autonomic nervous system, HPA axis, and relevant sensory information, several brain areas play a role in managing the impending stress: -Neurons in various nuclei in the amygdala respond to specific aspects of fear-related stimuli in an attempt to mobilize energy for the appropriate fear response -Neurons in the locus coeruleus interact with the amygdala to further fine-tune the stress response -PFC and hippocampus are important for interpreting the contextual aspects of the threat -Hippocampus also contains neurons with receptors for glucocorticoids, neuropeptides, serotonin, and noradrenaline -glucocorticoid receptors are seen in several brain areas, suggesting that many brain areas are involved in interpreting and responding adaptively to threats. In total, these areas are involved in functions as diverse as learning, memory, decision making, and basic hormonal and neural aspects of emotional arousal.

evidence stress leads to immunoenhancement

-thorough examinations suggest that some of the decreases in physiological measurement values such as the number of white blood cells (leukocytes) may represent redistribution, rather than actual degeneration, of cells to more effectively handle the immunological challenge. Dhabhar has stated that since the white blood cell numbers quickly return to baseline levels on the removal of a stressor, it is likely that the cells were not destroyed, just deployed to more active battle stations in the immunological challenge. Dhabhar's research suggests that they are redistributed from the blood to organs such as the skin that are possible access points for pathogens, especially when an animal is exposed to an acute stressor such as an attack from a predator. -Research suggests that the adrenal stress hormones alert the immune system of the impending threat. Therefore, even the anticipation of an attack, because of conditioned responses, can activate the immunological response. When an animal has undergone an adrenalectomy (removal of the adrenal glands, the source of corticosteroids), the immunological response is no longer observed

generalized adaptation syndrome

-thought that anyone experiencing chronic stress would exhibit effects similar to those he observed in his stressed rats -symptoms he identified are consistently associated with chronic stress. -Now know that individuals possess very different strategies for coping with stress -growing scientific interest in identifying factors related to individual differences in coping strategies—and the health outcomes, if any, of these divergent coping styles -The primary stress responses Selye noted included larger adrenal glands, shrunken thymus glands (involved in immune functions), and gastric stress ulcers

aggression

-tied to levels of circulating hormones Studies that showed that levels of androgen higher is correlated with violence and more aggressive behavior -More violent crimes commited by males -Correlative relationship not causative -Just a correlation -Some studies show levels of female hormones are higher in those who have committed violent acts -Case report of female in UK in murder crime for insanity plea that her violent acts occurs at same point in menstrual cycle -Aggression can be due to: -intraspecific->two males -Predatory: -Fear induced -Frustration -Maternal: fear for pups->lash out at intruder -Sex-related -Shows complexity of emotional circuits -represent complex social responses typically associated with defending or acquiring various types of resources -characterized as behavior that appears to have the intention of harming another individual -Although various forms of aggression such as maternal aggression and defensive aggression have adaptive value for humans and nonhuman animals, inappropriate displays of aggression are considered pathological by clinicians. When it comes to aggression, there is a fine line between adaptive and maladaptive consequences

Eric Kandel

-when the Aplysia's siphon is gently touched, it retracts its gill. After several touches, however, the animal will habituate, or adapt, and cease to respond with the gill reflex. It appeared that the gill reflex was not worth the effort for such a nonthreatening stimulus. If the touch is paired with a tail shock, however, the animal will become increasingly sensitive to this threatening stimulus by responding with a much more intense gill retraction. This sensitization reflects a form of classical conditioning in the sense that the animal associated shock with the siphon touch. -From this discovered importance of transmitter release between sensory and motor neurons->a single pairing of the tail shock and siphon touch activated neurons that released serotonin (Facilitatory interneurons influence the release of serotonin on presynaptic terminals that synapse onto the motor neurons and either enhance or diminish the response) -Serotonin subsequently increases levels of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP, a second messenger in cellular signaling) in the sensory neurons and leads to the production of cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA), an enzyme that facilitates synaptic transmission and behavioral sensitization -Without the physical stimulus, simply injecting cAMP or PKA into the sensory neuron also results in increased transmitter release -Discovered evidence of structural changes in the Aplysis -When the sensory neurons from the Aplysia demonstrated habituation to the nonthreatening touch to their siphon, fewer presynaptic terminals were observed than prior to the habituation, leading to fewer synaptic connections with motor neurons and interneurons->suggested that the nervous system was restricting the neural connections in the form of synaptic connections, leading to diminished response to the nonthreatening touch -in the sensitized animals, the number of presynaptic terminals had more than doubled: Changes were also observed in the dendrites of the postsynaptic cells in response to the added sensory input; emerging evidence suggested that structural changes in both the presynaptic and the postsynaptic cells accompanied long-term memory in the classically conditioned Aplysia -emerging evidence suggested that structural changes in both the presynaptic and the postsynaptic cells accompanied long-term memory in the classically conditioned Aplysia

Donald Hebb

-wrote book in 40s -Convergent activity strengthens synapses -Pavlovian conditioning: two things converge and strengthen association -When do not strengthen the association, you can weaken association -When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B is increased (p. 62). . . . When one cell repeatedly assists in firing another, the axon of the first cell develops synaptic knobs (or enlarges them if they already exist) in context with the soma of the second cell -Hebbian synapse theory of learning: -precursor to the subsequent theories of neuroplasticity -Modified neuronal circuits accompanying changes in behavior -Cellular assembly theory of learning: idea of several neurons firing simultaneously during memory formation->considered a precursor to the subsequent neural network theories proposed in behavioral neuroscience -basis for one of the most well-known sayings in behavioral neuroscience—neurons that fire together, wire together -Shatz summed up Hebb's research

three forms of attention

1. Altering: characterized by heightened vigilance and sustained attention -The frontal and parietal cortical areas, especially in the right hemisphere, are activated during alerting tasks and are modulated by the norepinephrine system arising from the locus coeruleus 2. Orienting: characterized by the selection of specific stimuli in the environment from multiple sensory options -Brain areas involved in the visual sensory system such as specific areas of the thalamus, superior colliculus, and frontal eye fields are involved in orienting, as are portions of the temporal and parietal lobes -modulated by the cholinergic system, stemming from the basal forebrain 3. Executive attention: characterized by the ability to supervise the direction of focused attention -The ACC, a brain area involved in both cognitive conflicts (competing events attracting your attention) and error detection, and the DLPFC, also implicated in various response conflicts, are associated with the attentional executive network and are modulated by the dopaminergic system. 4. Attention shifts between the three->Locus coeruleus neurons: play a role in facilitating your attentional shifts through these stages of alerting, orienting, and executively attending to the incoming call. -Shifts modulated by norepinephrine -essential for encoding relevant stimuli and more accurately perceiving relevant stimuli

two characteristics that cause hormones and neurotransmitters to be in different categories

1. Hormones generally travel through the blood and neurotransmitters go through the synapse 2. Time course of action -Hormones typically act much more slowly: hormones need to build up and travel through blood to their targets -Neurotransmitters typically act quicker

two stage notion of memory

1. Process to go to long-term memory (consolidation): decide if its important enough to go to long-term memory -Short-term memory going into long-term memory -Like shelving an important book 2. To use long-term memory it is retrieval: taking long-term memory and pulling it back out so that we can use it and work w that information -Find book on shelf and retrieve the book -May have problems with this -If somebody does give you retrieval cue, then you should be able to use that to access memories that are stored -Able to access info you previously couldn't

three characteristics for LTP

1. Specificity: specific to only trained synapses->only the ones that have been used robustly will then have this response 2. Cooperativity: if two neurons stimulate same synapse or input coming from divergent places and converge on the same cell at the same time that this co-stimulation constraints in both of these pathways even if one is weaker than the other to begin with 3. Associative: pairing weak and strong will strengthen both

serotonin in learning and memory

1. binding of serotonin molecules to the serotonin receptors of the sensory neuron blocks potassium (K+ ) flow via the increased levels of PK 2. Reduced flow of K+ extends the action potential duration, subsequently allowing greater influx of calcium (Ca2+) into the synaptic terminal -Calcium facilitates the movement of the synaptic vesicles to the presynaptic membrane, where they expel glutamate molecules into the synaptic cleft to activate receptors on the motor neuron

fos protein and immunocytochemistry

1. the researcher applies a primary antibody for the Fos protein to the tissue where it will bind to existing Fos in the brain 2. Next, to amplify the Fos protein signal, a secondary antibody is applied and will also travel to the Fos antibody and protein clusters 3. Subsequently, an enzyme complex is applied that will further bind and amplify the Fos protein signal->All of this will be "stained" a dark color following the addition of the enzyme substrate. -Images suggest that this area of the hippocampus is activated when animals are processing changing stimuli in their environment -Not viewed as immediately as they are with fMRI scans -Even with the stated limitations, the Fos technique has been extremely valuable for the identification of key brain areas enabling researchers to delve deeper in their attempts to understand how the brain learns new information.

androgen insensitivity syndrome

22 year old women for infertility issues that never cycled->had all the female sex organs and anatomy but couldn't conceived -when a 22-year-old woman visited a gynecology clinic in Romania because of amenorrhea (the absence of menstruation or menstrual periods), an examination revealed that she had breasts and female genitalia, but no underarm or pubic hair. She had no uterus and short vagina. blood test indicated that she had normal levels of progesterone and estrogen; however, her testosterone level was more characteristic of a pubescent boy than of a young adult woman. Genetic screening revealed that, surprisingly, the patient was genetically male, with X and Y chromosomes->a pelvic CT scan revealed undescended testes in the abdomen. surgically removed the testicles to prevent future health risks and also because the patient considered herself female. -characterized by insensitivity to androgens during prenatal development. AIS directs the sexual organization toward the development of a female -Had genetic defect so she had no androgen receptors (couldn't respond to it) -Actually XY individual chromosomally but when she developed as male, the SRY genes turned Wolffian ducts to testes, but no androgen receptors wouldn't go any further so she became female by default -So body looked female -Support groups; more ppl coming public -although the genetic composition of AIS women is quite different from that of XX women, their romantic relationships are similar, in all their varied forms->When these two groups of women were shown sexually arousing images, both groups responded with less amygdala activation than male subjects -suggest that romantic relationships are influenced by more than sex chromosomes

Kappa

3 subtypes -Opposite effect of mu -When something binds to them, makes you feel bad -Induce feeling of dysphoria (feel bad) -Bring dysphoria which indicates that was not a positive experience and you should not be doing that

expt focusing on early development and how neurons can regulate behaviors later in life

4 conditions of newborne mouse pups -Male mice; estrogen -Female mice; estrogen -Male mice; testosterone -Female mice; testosterone -To look at behavior in terms of sex: social preference test->put adult mouse in center of cage where it can choose if it can hang out with receptive female or with lovely sexually experienced male (interpret as sexual preference) FINDINGS: -Male; testosterone: act like males; spend all time next to female -Male; estrogen: act like males; female hormone didn't do anything; spent time next to female; estrogen no effect on them -Female; testosterone: act like males; spend time with female Early experience postnatally with large dose of testosterone ends up masculinizng females behavior; sex hormones can change behavior in adults when given to them early in life -Female; estrogen: act like a male; spend time with female indicating male sexual behavior; why do they act like males

Daegu

5% of mammals biparental and monogamous (Part of 5%) -Asked what if we took dad away and how that will affect the neurobiological mechanisms or the brains of the offspring and they looked at the frontal cortex? -Intact families had more spines than the ones coming from a single mother -Disruption of family unit without a replacement or compensation could have some long-lasting and immediate neurobiological effects -Akka culture: half of time within touch or arms difference with offspring -Variability in humans -Care children get does make difference to their brains

procedural memory animal studies

A classical conditioning model has been used in rabbits in which a tone is used as a conditioned stimulus and paired with a puff of air (unconditioned stimulus) delivered to the eye. In the eye-blink reflex conditioning task, the rabbit will learn to blink (a motor response) on presentation of the conditioned stimulus to avoid the inevitable puff of air -Research suggests that the brain area responsible for this form of motor learning is the cerebellum. Although the cerebellum lies relatively far from the hippocampus/cerebral cortex memory system for declarative memories, this revelation was not surprising because of the cerebellum's role in motor coordination -cerebellum

cost to shortcut system with amygdala

A police officer who shoots a person he later finds out to be holding a cell phone instead of a gun did not have the benefit of the sophisticated visual cortex weighing in on the decision. Thus, the shortcut response is a reflexive reaction that saves time; yet, the longer route activates higher circuits allowing the individual to exhibit a more informed voluntary action in response to the threat

Thorndike in class

American psychologist who did work on his cat -Put cat in little cage that had a front with a screen that the cat could pull a little chain that would release the front of the door so that it would fall off and cat could escape the cage -Cat just sat there and overtime needed motivating factor so put cat food right outside the cage and the cat saw the food and the cat was motivated to get the food so it would be motivated to get out of the cage -Second time it happened, cat will remember it was there before and that there was something that it did but not quite sure why or where but knew general area), and sooner or later -less time -Third day, narrowed it down a little more -Less time each time able to get out of cage

how the brain overrides the fear response to muster the energy to act

An innovative human neuroimaging study using nonpoisonous corn snakes provided clues about how the brain overrides the fear response to muster the energy to act. In this study, participants were first divided into two groups: -those with an expressed fear of snakes (fearful) -those with no fear of snakes (fearless). -Participants were placed in an fMRI scanner and given the opportunity to confront their fear of snakes by moving a basket with a live corn snake within close proximity of their head in the scanner. For a control condition, a toy bear was placed in the basket. The conveyer belt supporting the snake or toy bear was moved incrementally. For each trial, the participant had to decide to either advance the belt (to bring the object closer) or retreat the belt (to move the object away). In addition to brain activity, skin conductance was measured, and participants were asked to assess their own anxiety. Measures of skin conductance were obtained by placing recording electrodes on the skin to measure electrodermal activity. Increased activity represents heightened anxiety. RESULTS -fearful group exhibited higher levels of self-reported fear, as well as greater skin conductance reactivity -When the brain scans were analyzed, the subgenual ACC was observed to be more active in the fearful group than in the fearless group when the participants were overcoming their fear and advancing the snake closer to their heads when the fearful subjects succumbed to their fear by moving the snake away from their heads, increased activity was observed in the amygdala and the anterior insular cortex, a brain area that processes internal and external bodily functions including sympathetic arousal, than that observed in the condition in which the subjects advanced the snake toward them -Findings suggest that the neuroanatomical recipe for courage is an increased activation of the ACC accompanied by diminished activity in the amygdala and insula -An improved understanding of conditioned fear responses and neural pathways to courage may lead to the establishment of additional evidence-based therapies for anxiety and fearrelated disorders such as PTSD and phobias (a phobia is a disorder characterized by excessive fear of specific stimuli)

Skinner from lecture

Animals go about through their world just emitting behaviors and Skinner doesn't know why they're there but knows that operants are in the world that result in rewards that increase probability we act a certain way -if good, do it -if not good, punished, don't do it -Day one, do behavior number one then do behavior number two then behavior number three: May do 100 different behaviors and the last behavior would let cat out (figured out on own); Next day, something toward back half of behaviors they did to get out of cage; Next day, even fewer; on and on -Every behavior being rewarded or punished will shape future behavior and this is kind of the problem with society and how we should fix society -Hypothesized that behavior was all caused by just external factor which negates the idea of what we think of ourselves as humans with these ideas that we have our own thoughts and we have our own emotions and that they can drive behavior and in some ways it can contradict things: Hypothesized humans don't really think, which undermines concepts of humanity

uncertainty

Another variable that influences decision making -optimal decisions are often less than obvious because we cannot be certain of the outcomes of our actions. -Ex. one can easily experience several sources of confusion when approaching an intersection: a person may experience sensory uncertainty when trying to determine what color the light is, state uncertainty when trying to determine how far the car is physically from the stop light, rule uncertainty when trying to determine the chances of not having an accident if the car fails to stop for the red light, and evaluation uncertainty, an extension of rule uncertainty, which further evaluates the outcome of the potential accident -the processing of uncertainty is beyond the scope of this text; however, this variable has an important effect on adaptive decision making -A misinterpretation of internal or external uncertainty may lead to disorders such as depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and schizophrenia. -although few of us would admit to actually enjoying experiencing uncertainty, living in a world that is always 100% predictable also has its drawbacks: Negative aspects of monotony may explain why "Homo sapiens continuously strives to cross frontiers, reach higher ground, is addicted to exploration and invests so much store in scientific research—activities that abolish old uncertainties and endlessly create new ones"

human brain imaging studies

As researchers moved from case studies involving hippocampal damage to neuroimaging studies, the data began to indicate that, more than just processing novel information, the hippocampus plays an important role in forming associations among various types of stimuli -PET scans were used to assess cerebral blood flow while subjects were presented with pairs of words. The hippocampus was activated when subjects tried to associate the dissimilar words. In contrast, the hippocampus was not as activated when subjects reviewed the words to determine how familiar they were (a novelty detection task) or contemplated the meanings of the words (a semantic, or deep processing, task) -Imaging studies have also provided evidence that the human hippocampus is involved in the sequencing of events: participants watched a movie for the first time and were subsequently asked to place four pictures of different scenes from the movie in the correct sequence. this task involves evaluating the different scenes to remember their exact order in the movie. The control condition involved trying to sequence events based on how it appeared they should be sequenced (more of a logical inference task), as opposed to the participant's actual memory for the movie scenes. More activation of the hippocampus was observed in these fMRI scans during the movie sequence task compared with the baseline or logical inference conditions

Matthew White and Paul Dolan

Asked subjects from a German university to report their "feelings" associated with various activities, they determined that activities such as eating, resting and watching television were characterized as pleasurable but not often rewarding while work was rewarding but not pleasurable. -Pleasurable: immediate positive emotions -Rewarding: complex responses that may involve more long-term learning and anticipation in addition to positive emotions -Subjective well-being: subjective feelings of pleasure and reward and how these responses drive various behavioral responses. -Work: physical or mental effort undertaken to obtain desired resources

posterior insula

Back have primary receptive information: first processing area (posterior insula is the primary processing for emotional gut responses that come up from viscera)-> pain, temp, fatigue -Homunculus that has visceral body point by point so you know exactly where these sensations are coming from -Allow body to tell cortex what body is

two ways amygdala can process info coming in

Behavioral response: limited and ruled by amygdala -Interacts with the ventral striatum and the dorsal medial thalamus -Goes to thalamus and go to parts of the striatum that are lower down -On other side we are getting input coming in getting processed and then going out the central medial side->where amygdala is able to regulate its own autonomic gland responses and hormone responses: -Sends input to hypothalamus, midbrain, pons and medulla -Sending info to basal forebrain areas and other ares of hypothalamus -Lots of different visual, auditory, somatosensory, olfactory inputs are coming in straight to the amygdala and compared with other things and has outputs for both of these, so behavior is separate from autonomic and hormonal response pathways -Really fast and immediate, why? Amygdala is prescreening info and allows you to make decisions about these in a quick way before going to higher level processing; Quick, rapid decisions abt what is happening in the environment

how do these differences in males and females relate to genes

Concordance study: looks at a twin study, ppl who have identical genomes vs shared genomes vs unrelated genomes -Pair of identical twins (monozygotic): 100% same genes -Fraternal twins (dizygotic): sibling DNA (about 50% shared genes) -Siblings who were adopted: no genetic links -Same thing of pairs across groups: all raised in same kind of environment -Is there a correlation between the amount of genes that someone shares with another person and the chances they share a certain behavioral trait? -tested with homosexuality

things that diminish stress response

DHEA neuropeptide Y -both DHEA and NPY counteract stress responses by interacting with the corticosteroid and CRH responses

habituation

Decrease in responding to a repeated stimulus -every animal does this -Ex for humans: playing a tone and then a break -First time heard that: startle response (measure stress response, etc.) -If kept doing tone, learned that nothing bad happens after the tone so don't need to be startled so you would not have startle response for awhile -Difference between this and sensory adaptation is that this is happening on a psychological level, not at level of receptors themselves -works behaviorally -Depends on how you define learning and memory if its learning or memory: -Change in behavior Habituation not really saved? -Do it later: will do same thing again -Aren't able to access that same info a week later to have it change your behavior -associated with decreased levels of serotonin

animal studies with memory consolidation

Delayed matching-to-sample task: initially designed for experiments with monkeys: first ("sample") phase consists of the presentation of a single stimulus to the monkey. A delay of a designated duration follows the presentation. The real test comes with the following "choice phase" during which two stimuli are presented, one similar to the sample stimulus and one different. To solve the task, the monkey must be trained to reach for the stimulus that matches the sample stimulus -Delayed nonmatching-to-sample task: successful monkey must reach for the unfamiliar object. -Either way, the monkey must recall the sample phase of the task to perform successfully. If the monkey does not successfully perform the task, it is assumed to have a memory deficit, or version of amnesia -research studies provided evidence that medial temporal lobe lesions impaired performance, but the magnitude of the deficit was not as severe as expected based on observations of H.M. and other case studies -Mortimer Mishkin modified task so that each presentation of stimuli included unfamiliar stimuli: Ex. in the sample phase, an unfamiliar object was presented each time, instead of repeatedly using the same two stimuli for the choice task -animals with a joint lesion of the amygdala and hippocampus exhibited a performance deficit after the eight-second delay. The lesioned animals took more trials to reach the criterion for learning the task and made more errors in the 15- and 30-second delay trials -After establishing that the temporal lobe lesion-induced amnesia generalized to nonhuman primates, researchers were also interested in establishing a rodent model of declarative memory because rodents were much easier to study than primates: -rodents with hippocampal damage were not impaired in many types of learning tasks such as classical conditioning paradigms, researchers focused on spatial learning, following up on the research indicating that "place" cells were located in the rodent hippocampus -used Morris water maze -showed that rats with hippocampal lesions, but not cortical lesions, were significantly impaired in the place version of the task. On the contrary, both groups of rats performed similarly in the visually cued navigation task -

animal models display specific coping styles

Ex. when a predator is in the vicinity, a threatened animal may run, freeze, or attack -In one study, young pigs restrained on their backs exhibited varying responses to this stressful situation—some pigs wiggled, trying to escape, whereas others responded with no movement. -Generally, the pigs that tried to escape exhibited less activation of the HPA axis and bolder responses in social competition and novel environments; hence, these animals were referred to as proactive copers: View as more adaptive since allow the animal to change its behavior in response to changing circumstances -Those that did not move in the back test and had higher activation of the HPA axis appeared to be more inhibited and restrained in various environmental contexts and were referred to as reactive copers -also been investigated in rats. In one study, the temperaments of young rats were categorized as either shy or bold. Once profiled, rats were exposed to a novel stimulus every six months so that both behavioral and endocrinological responses could be recorded. In addition to consistently exploring each new object, the bold rats had lower stress hormone (corticosteroid) levels than the shy rats did each time both groups were assessed -long-term consequences of higher stress hormone levels across the life span came with a health cost because the shy rats had an average life span that was about 20% shorter than that of the bold rats -In another coping-strategy study in which pigs were restrained on their backs, researchers noted that some of the pigs were not consistent in their response. The pigs readily switched their coping behavior from active (trying to escape) to passive (not moving) or vice versa during subsequent testing. This flexibility also seemed to be an adaptive coping response. -You may imagine that if a person always responds with an intense emotional response, even when the threat does not warrant such a response, the allostatic load would build to dangerous levels, compromising other physiological systems necessary for maintaining optimal health. -To learn more about the nature of variable coping responses, researchers modified the coping test described above in the pig study for use with rats. As observed with the piglets, when rats were gently restrained on their backs they exhibited variability in their responses. Additionally, when tested twice, some were consistently passive or active, whereas others were more variable in their responses. The variable copers maintained variable responses in subsequent behavioral tasks. Furthermore, they had more NPY-affiliated cells in the amygdala and BNST than the more consistent copers did

Young research team

Feminine and masculine behavioral patterns developed in response to hormonal exposure early in development, Young's research team administered testosterone to pregnant guinea pigs during most of their 69 day gestation, so some of the female offspring were born with ambiguous external genitalia, neither clearly male nor clearly female -Females produced two ovaries but were termed hermaphrodites (both male and female gonads) -Intersex: any variation from typical XX or XY development -Females exposed to lower doses of testosterone during prenatal development showed no modifications of the typical female external genitalia. -Suggested that the female fetus was quite sensitive to exposure to androgens (male reproductive hormones) during fetal development, it is interesting to consider that estrogens (female reproductive hormones) start out as androgens. In the ovaries of females, the presence of a specific enzyme converts the androgens testosterone and androstenedione to estrogens. This conversion process is called aromatization -Next step: let the guinea pigs mature so sexual behavior could be assessed: -mature guinea pigs had their gonads surgically removed to eliminate any natural source of reproductive hormones. ->then compared with male guinea pigs who still had gonads in tact -Later, the guinea pigs without gonads were injected with androgens and housed with intact females->results suggested that androgen injections during prenatal development decreased the females' typical sexual responses and enhanced the likelihood that they would display male-typical sexual behavior when they received androgen injections in adulthood -male guinea pigs exposed to the androgen injections during prenatal development did not display any modifications to their typical sexual behavior. -The prenatal actions of hormones were thought to lead to the organization, or long-lasting structural differentiation, of the brain areas involved in sex-typical behavior: exposure to hormones during a more mature developmental stage was thought to lead to the activation of those brain areas --In humans, the presence of androgens is thought to be critical for triggering the development of either male or female external genitalia->typically external genitalia will match the genetic sex: Without the presence of a Y chromosome, the fetus will develop as a female (SRY gene)

how cortex helps us understand what's happening in terms of emotions

How we consciously know that we are experiencing an emotion -Typically able to direct what our body does using higher processes and we are in somewhat in control of emotions->instructive for us to know how the cerebral cortex is going to code this info to be in control of it -Some kind of input from the lower parts of our body -Need to have some kind of top-down approach of how we can self-regulate -Something in middle processing things -In terms of lower info things coming in so we know that when we experience emotions->sense them as body state: From interoreceptors for state of body; Cortex to know whats happening in particular area -insula -cingulate cortex -frontal lobe -reappraisal

aromatization

In developing embryo, testosterone is metabolized into estrogen through aromatization: turn testosterone into estrogen -In the ovaries of females, the presence of a specific enzyme converts the androgens testosterone and androstenedione to estrogens -influences sexual differentiation of the brain by contributing to the production of hormonelike substances known as prostaglandins that influence sex-typical development in rats by producing more masculinized sexual behavior and more dendritic spines on neurons in the medial preoptic nucleus

neuroanatomy of aggression

In rodent models of aggression, researchers create lesions of specific brain areas and observe the subsequent changes in aggressive behavior. When rodents display reduced aggression, this suggests that the lesioned area contributes to the initiation of aggression. -Researchers have found evidence that lesions of the following areas result in a reduction of aggressive displays between males: the lateral septum, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), anterior hypothalamus, and medial amygdala. A common feature of these structures is that they receive input either directly or indirectly from the olfactory bulb -also travels to the medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus, the ventromedial hypothalamus, and periaqueductal gray, brain areas that have been investigated and found to be important in other social behaviors as well -evidence indicates that lesions of the orbitofrontal cortex result in increased aggression, suggesting that this area inhibits aggressive displays -key components of the aggression circuit are also involved in a broader social behavior circuit -Following fighting, male and female rodents exhibit activation of cells in the lateral septum, BNST, anterior hypothalamus, and medial amygdala -In male rodents, aggression increases with electrical stimulation to the anterior hypothalamus. Aggression in male rodents decreases when the neuropeptide vasopressin is injected into this area. -existing research suggests that the rodent findings extend to primates. In male marmoset monkeys, electrical stimulation of the VMH seemed to increase the occurrence of vocal threats such as angry chatters and loud, piercing, shrill calls; whereas lesions of the anterior hypothalamus and preoptic area appeared to reduce the occurrence of vocal threats -Explorations of the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex in rhesus monkeys suggest that these areas are indeed involved in aggression->social context determines direction of effect -Amygdala lesions appear to increase aggression when the monkey is introduced into groups of monkeys with more threatening males -these same lesions appear to decrease aggression when the monkey is placed in less threatening social situations -Studies of humans have emphasized the role of the frontal cortex in aggression -Frontal cortex damaged-> aggressive behavior increases -a positive correlation has been observed between the degree of amygdala activation and rates of aggression. Supporting these findings, when people diagnosed with intermittent explosive disorder (characterized by diminished impulse control in social situations, including aggressive encounters) were assessed in an fMRI scanner, increased activation of the amygdala was indeed observed on exposure to pictures of humans with angry facial expressions. -Additionally, individuals with tumors in the area of the amygdala (who thereby experience stimulation of the amygdala area) have been known to exhibit uncharacteristic aggression; some have even committed murder -experiments and case studies across humans and nonhuman animals suggest that, in general, the amygdala initiates aggressive responses, and the PFC inhibits aggression.

case of highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM)

Jill Price: remembers everything -identified 10 additional patients with similar superior autobiographical memories -underwent extensive cognitive, behavioral, and brain assessments. Similar to the initial observations of Price's memories, these subjects' memories had become enhanced at around 10 years of age. Like Price, these subjects did not score above average on standard laboratory memory tests. Evidence of obsessive-compulsive disorder tendencies were observed for the subjects, expressed as the possession of meticulously organized collections of various items ranging from shoes to stamps -Brain-imaging assessments of these subjects revealed: -enhanced volumes of brain areas associated with compulsive disorders, namely the caudate and putamen in the striatum: provides further evidence that the HSAM ability shares neurobiological connections with compulsive behavior -Certain areas of white matter serving as connections among various brain areas were also larger in the HSAM subjects than in similarly aged subjects who were not classified as having HSAM -areas of the insula and parahippocampal cortex were also larger in the HSAM subjects -All is not lost, however, because learning about key memory mechanisms makes us more informed about behavioral and cognitive ways to enhance memory. Do have memory enhancing techniques: -Method of loci: requires the student to use a familiar location (e.g., his house) and mentally tack items from a memory list to various sites in the familiar location so that the list can be recalled by simply mentally walking through the familiar site

cellular modifications in the hippocampus

John O'Keee and John Dostrovsky -Recent research has confirmed the presence of place cells in very young rats, just two days after their eyes open, along with direction cells and grid cells in the areas surrounding the hippocampus -Place cells in hippocampus: fire when the rat enters a specific place in the open field -Direction cells: fire in the nearby subiculum when the animal points its head in a specific direction -Grid cells likely in surrounding entorhinal cortex: fire as the animal crosses compartments of an imagined coordinate system grid over a spatial area to allow it to determine the cumulative distance traveled. -Timothy Bliss and Terje Lomo: looked at how experience altered specific synapses in the hippocampus

Candace Pert

Johns Hopkins -Had a riding accident and broke her back so she was given morphine compounds during recovery -She knew that something about morphine interacted with nervous system and tried to figure out why: -Made radioactive morphine and incubated it with body tissue in order to see where it would bind->when she found out where it would bind she would find the receptors -Found receptors and worked with the cells that had them to see how they responded to external morphine (exogenous: given from outside source) -Worked backward to see if we have these receptors for this drug, then what naturally occurring version of the drug? -Do have normal compounds in our brain that can interact with those same receptors that the morphine did: endogenous (come from within us and produced by own bodies)->called these endorphins

learning

Learn to associate smells, tastes, thoughts, images, verbal phrases, certain faces, and holidays with rewarding outcomes and can also be negative -Brain areas: orbitofrontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, amygdala and hippocampus -Dopamine, serotonin and acetylcholine are key neurochemcials

Just as important to anticipate reward as to actually having the reward in terms of behavior

Like apple and tree example -Stepwise chain that's going to give you that dopaminergic squirt and you're basically going to change the sensory cue that is rewarding for you -If you have situation where you train a rat to have juice as a reward and you pair it with a light then eventually the animal will have a reward response when the light comes on instead of when they actually get the juice and you can chain this by multiple things by preceding things -System setting up so that the animal can predict the reward in advance because then it increases the probability of getting the reward if you expect it and act to get it -Works for negative rewards as well and will get less dopamine in that particular sense and there's actually a separate circuit that can go through and turn off that reward -Sensory info from the outside world can be associated with positive outcomes and then the positive outcomes get wired or mapped into our dopamine circuits in a way that cues you to do those things that help you make those decisions towards getting those things that are rewarding

mesolimbic system

Limbic system: bunch of different areas altogether -Nucleus accumbens part of limbic system -VTA to nucleus accumbens (ventral striatum): Output system from VTA that leaves through the ventral portion of the globus pallidus -May be helping to determine exactly what decision youre going to make in terms of what stimuli you are going to react to -Try to help you detect whats important about sensory info and process it here w the nucleus accumbens as well

Tangles (neurofibrillary tangles)

Made with tau: protein supposed to support microtubules->Holds these microtubules together like railroad ties so they stay going straight -Deficit with tau protein so they don't act the way they should and it destabilizes these microtubules and tau proteins gum up as well and make tangles inside the neurons and these tangles can prevent microtubules from taking there wares where they're supposed to go: Makes communication in neurons cut off

motherhood

Mothers: get more attention with child care -Mother and parents and other social relationships influences brain of infant->knew had brain influence connection going from mom to infact Interested in looking at whole maternal experience including having baby and interacting with the infant influence the mother's brain -Paul MacLean

Problems with emotions and how people have been treated

No way of controlling or helping ppl who have mental problems, especially in an emotional disorders: Used to lop off areas of brain involved in changing behavior and to remove these areas to change behavior -Psychosurgery: nothing damaged abt areas removing -Done to modulate output and change behavior -Thousands of years -Release evil spirits -1900s: had graphic and troubling time when we did psychosurgery on routine basis: Egas Moniz and Walter Freeman -1960s: couldn't do prefrontal lobotomies -Became something society let go of: -Didn't need these bc better behaviors -Admin of drugs: -Caveat: just being drugged against will->no difference between this and prefrontal lobotomy -Work w best available

cognitive appraisal

One way to alter the course of an emerging emotional experience -changing one's understanding of an event in a way that also changes one's emotional response to the event. -refers to the transformation of an emotional response by reinterpreting a negative experience as one that is less threatening to one's sense of well-being -can decrease the strength of physiological variables such as autonomic and neuroendocrine responses

operant conditioning/skinnarian conditioning/respondent conditioning

Outcome of behavior will result in shaping your behavior -Can be used for positive or negative things as well -Ex. cat to food is positive -Ex. put an animal in a cage and light will come in and then a shock will happen but if the animal pushes a button they will not get shocked to avoid negative stimuli -Animal learns that in a particular stimulus context there is a particular response that is most appropriate -Association is with the right response, not with another stimulus

Support for James-Lange Theory

Paul Elkman: When they monitored heart rate during different emotional experiences in humans, they observed higher heart rates in anger and fear responses than in happiness. Thus, although it was not clear whether emotional experience depends exclusively on autonomic activity, they found evidence of emotion specific autonomic activity -Another study: researchers measured emotional experience in subjects with spinal cord injury to determine whether a reduction in the intensity of autonomic responses would diminish one's ability to experience an emotion—as suggested by the James-Lange theory-> When they compared these subjects with healthy subjects or with subjects who had orthopedic injuries not involving the spinal cord, they did not detect any differences in emotional awareness -Other researchers assessed fMRI activity in subjects with spinal cord injuries (compared with healthy control subjects) in response to a conditioned fear paradigm involving an electrical shock to the upper arm. All subjects found the shock painful. Compared with baseline values, the researchers observed diminished activation in brain areas such as the posterior cingulate and PFC in the subjects with spinal cord injuries, but no activation differences in other brain areas -although brain activation patterns differ from the norm in patients who have disrupted feedback from the autonomic nervous system, these patients still seem to experience emotions in a similar manner to that observed in healthy control subjects. Taken together, these studies suggest that although feedback from the autonomic nervous system likely contributes to emotional responses, the brain is predisposed to generate emotional responses with or without autonomic feedback -pure autonomic failure disease -locked-in syndrome

evidence about the insula

Penfield experiments: aura sensation of seizures and remove locus to not have seizures. If seizure were to start in posterior insula, they would have an aura that was something like specific body response; feel bad in internal organs; if started in anterior insula they would feel an emotion: -These two areas being stimulated -Stimulate posterior insula: body responses -Stimulate anterior insula: feel emotional content

limbic system and emotion

Ppl kept adding to it: anything involved in emotion was looped in here -Synonymous for anything to do with emotion in the brain Paul Maclean: referring to a proposed circuit of specific brain areas involved in emotional processing-> incorporated Papez's circuit -Used Kluver-Bucy syndrome: observed in monkeys and humans with lesioned temporal lobes, is characterized by increased exploratory behavior and a dampening of emotional responses like fear and aggression-> MacLean concluded that the temporal lobes played a critical role in emotional expression, and he incorporated the relevant brain areas that had been identified up until that time into a proposed circuit known as the limbic system -Proposed that the body's responses to environmental stimuli were interpreted by various regions of the brain, eventually leading to an emotional experience -One of MacLean's most important contributions was his emphasis on integration of the relevant brain areas involved in emotional experiences -Respect the positioning of brain areas and their interdependence on one another (ex. proximity of amygdala and hippocampus) -limbic system survives as a label for a cluster of brain structures thought to be associated with emotional experience: More emphasis has been placed on the roles of the amygdala, hypothalamus, cingulate cortex, and PFC in emotional experiences compared with other brain areas -Right hemisphere known to be more engaged than the left hemisphere during emotional encounters -right hemisphere dominance was observed in a study in which subjects' brains were scanned while they were shown images of either threatening body language or neutral body language: fMRI scans indicated increased activation of the amygdala in the right hemisphere when the subjects viewed the threatening body posture compared with the neutral posture. This increase was not observed in the left hemisphere.-> provides evidence that, in addition to facial gestures, body posture is important in alerting us to threatening situations -the right hemisphere plays an influential role in processing emotional stimuli -amygdala -nucleus accumbens ACC and anterior insular cortex

James Papez emotional brain circuit

Proposed that: 1. sensory information from the environment was processed through the thalamus and was subsequently directed toward the sensory areas of the cortex as well as the cingulate cortex 2. From the cingulate cortex, neural messages were projected to the hippocampus via the neural pathway known as the cingulum 3. This information then traveled through the pathway known as the fornix to the mammillary bodies of the hypothalamus and on to the anterior thalamus via the pathway appropriately known as the mammillothalamic tract -this component of the circuit allowed for cortical control of emotional processing, perhaps explaining the impact of environmental context in the emotional expression observed in the Capilano Bridge study described 4. second neural stream projecting directly from the thalamus to the mammillary bodies before projecting down to the body's autonomic nervous system -the cingulate cortex played a pivotal role in directing information upward and downward to ultimately result in relevant emotional thoughts and feelings

sensitization

Put you in a room and have a tone and you might startle and habituate to it->will have you habituate and then give you a shock->then the tone you will startle again even though you habituated -The second stimulus arouses you again so now going to respond to other stimuli coming in as a startle: Small shock makes you more vigilant

dopamine and social bonds

Research with the prairie voles indicates that receptor densities of yet another neurochemical, dopamine, may also facilitate the tendency to form social bonds -Montane voles have more dopamine D1 receptors than the prairie voles do in the nucleus accumbens and PFC -Prairie voles have more dopamine D2 receptors in the medial PFC than the montane voles do: -when male prairie voles initially contact a female, more D2 receptor activity is activated in the male's nucleus accumbens, whereas more D1 receptors are activated once the bond is formed -peripheral administration of a dopamine agonist that increases dopamine activity in the brain also enhances partner preference

where does learning occur in brain for classic conditioning?

Richard Thompson: track down where something is happening in the brain -Nictitating membrane response: a third eyelid that animals have that we don't. A membrane that comes from the nose side of the eye over. (found in rabbits) -bunny blinking paradigm: Blow a little puff of air in a rabbits eye and when you do that rabbit will blink third eyelid -unconditioned stimulus: puff (aversive stimulus) -Know the pathway of the puff coming into the brain -unconditioned response: blinking/closure of nictitating membrane -Know the motor pathway that it takes to blink -conditioned stimulus: pair a tone (or number three) right before puff of air -Associate puff of air -Goes from ear to the brainstem auditory nucleus to the inferior colliculus to the medial geniculate nucleus to the cortex: Able to piece out pathway to figure out exactly when emotion or fear response would come into this -Conditioned response: blinking -What's different about responses is what elicits them but same response -Conditioned to this in such a way that if they knew it was coming, the person would close their eyes -In humans, do this puff to look for surface tension to see if your eye has too high intraocular pressure -Touch information: come in from a puff but to pair a tone with it, it will follow same pathways as ladoux's experiments->Goes from ear to the brainstem auditory nucleus to the inferior colliculus to the medial geniculate nucleus to the cortex-> Able to piece out pathway to figure out exactly when emotion or fear response would come into this -6th cranial nerve is will control the motor output: Motor response is run before it goes out to the 6th cranial nerve by the red nucleus -Rubrospinal tract: descending motor pathways

Solomon Shereshevsky (S) and Luria (neurologist)

S able to remember everything: so good at remembering that you could pass him a piece of paper with whole bunch of columns of numbers and take a look and 8 months later ask if he could add up column number three he would be able to do that -made a living off this -Turned everything multimodal: instead of just remembering what someone said and repeat it, he built pretty elaborate things that had sensory elements to them -not a happy person: -Wanted to forget things -Not necessarily able to use the information -Not necessarily smart because even though had all the info wasn't able to actively take them and use them to make a meaningful difference in his life

Feedback for whether an outcome is good or not

Something needs to report back the effects or the outcomes of your actions so that you are learning what a good thing is and what a bad thing is for you

sociopaths

Studies show not sizable differences in how big amygdala is but they have found there is a difference in the amygdala connections particularly to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (frontal lobe): decreased connections between the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala and other parts of brain as well

state dependent learning

Studies show that state you're in or the place that you're in when you learn information, you will be better at recalling that info on a recall task if placed in same exact situation -If train the animal when they are intoxicated, they remember when put in same situation they were

proximity of amygdala and hippocampus

Study: In an experimental task known as the attentional blink, human participants are asked to focus on two target stimuli that are distinguished by a specific color and appear against a background stream of stimuli presented at a rapid pace. Typically, participants see the first target, but when the second target is presented soon after the initial target, participants typically miss it, as if their attentional system had "blinked." But if the second target stimulus is an obscene word, participants see it with no problem -the heightened emotional response associated with the questionable word is responsible for this effect. Thus, the attentional deficit observed in the attentional blink task (model) diminishes with an infusion of emotional processing -Individuals with amygdala damage fail to show this emotion-induced recovery of the attentional blink, suggesting that the amygdala plays an important role in this example of emotion-facilitated attention -relates to the role of the hippocampus in forming memories-> An event has to be noted before it can become consolidated into a memory -the time it takes for an event to become a memory is adaptive because it allows the amygdala to first gauge the emotional relevance of the event; otherwise, all events would be processed with the same degree of relevance -In one PET study in which subjects evaluated images as either emotional or interesting, blood flow in the amygdala was significantly correlated with short-term and longterm memory recall of the image-> With limited space in our brains for neural networks supporting individual memories, remembering what we had for lunch yesterday does not deserve the same priority as remembering the face of a threatening individual or some other emotionally relevant event

Inattentional blindness

Subjects are told to watch a video of a basketball team and count the number of times the ball is passed among members of one of the teams, ignoring the passes of the other team. During this counting task, a person in a gorilla suit walks across the basketball court, stops and beats her chest, and then exits the scene. Remarkably, at the conclusion of the counting task, half of the subjects reported that they had not seen the gorilla. Using eye tracking, researchers have shown that even when those subjects were looking at the gorilla, they did not notice it. Thus, by selectively focusing attention on the number of ball passes made by certain players, the subjects failed to attend to a visual detail that, in another situation, could be relevant for survival -Directing attention away from various events is a tried-and-true tactic of magicians to keep their audiences from noticing how they are manipulated in various magic tricks -Neuroimaging studies have revealed various brain areas involved in attention and are providing clues about why intelligent people may not notice a gorilla that walks in front of them: -posterior parietal cortex has been associated with attention processes in general

James-Lange Theory

Suggest that emotions were the body's adaptations and responses to stimuli of special significance, also known as emotive stimuli-> if an assailant is chasing you, your nervous system tells you to run as soon as you see the assailant. Further, all the physiological responses involved in maintaining the running response contribute to your building fear -Emotions byproduct of reflexive bodily responses to threatening stimuli -Lange presented similar theory -^James-Lange theory of emotion: different bodily reactions that occur in response to different stimuli lead to the experience of emotions -Stimulus of sorts->stimulus will elicit a response-> elicits emotion -Response elicits emotion: behavior drives emotion -Bottom-up theory: what happens outside effects our top levels of processing

treatment for stroke

TPA: tissue plasminogen activator -given to stroke victims -Only effective in first three hours: window to clot up blood so don't have bleed out -Deficits after stroke typically localized to the place that was deprived of the blood during the stroke: -May have specific problems -Could have died off or could regain some function -Typically will last

slow encoding of rigid association

The associations acquired through classical conditioning, forms of habit, or procedural learning must be more rigid than the flexible associations previously discussed for them to be beneficial for adaptive response: Consistency more important than flexibility: ex.Blinking when a threat is coming to the eye (that is, the eye-blink conditioned response) or following through perfectly with a dance move that has been practiced repeatedly rely more on rigid response strategies -Form of memory involves basal ganglia and the cerebellum -Semantic memory, involved in the accumulation of knowledge-based concepts and memory for meaning, is also attributed to this memory system -Neocortex plays a role in this process, as it does in the acquisition of episodic memories -The degree to which you use the terms after the course ends will determine whether these semantic memories will continue to exist as long-term memories or be pruned away to make room for new memories.<-thought this was cute

Morris water task

This task generally involves a swimming pool filled with water that is transparent during training as the animal (typically a rat) learns where a platform is located. During testing, the water transitions to a murky color so that the animal can no longer see the platform and must rely on spatial memory to locate it. The rodent can be released from varying start positions; additionally, experimenters may include visual cues to help guide the rodent as they evaluate the extent of its memory impairment. Although rats are excellent swimmers, they do not seem to like swimming, and they try to locate the platform as quickly as possible. Researchers measure the rats' performance using tracings of the rats' spatial paths to the platform, as well as the amount of time the rats take to locate it -many studies have confirmed the importance of the hippocampus in spatial learning in rodents, making the Morris water maze a "benchmark test of hippocampal function in rodents"

mechanism of LTP and glutamate

When glutamate is released, it'll be recognized by the ampa receptor on postsynaptic cell and then ampa will open up a channel that will allow sodium influx into the cell -Ampa is an ionotropic receptor that is glutamate activated and it allow Na to rush into the cell -Also realized NMDA could respond too: uniquely capable for doing things allowing for learning and memory allows calcium to come through: accept glutamate if 2 conditions met: 1. Have to be able to have the postsynaptic cell already be depolarized: Then there's magnesium particle that sits in the nmda receptor and blocks it and if cell is depolarzed due to ampa responding to glutamate, it will pop the magnesium ion out of the nmda receptor and it'll open up nmda receptor to sodium and calcium 2. Has to have glutamate present -Calcium can be a really potent intracellular messenger, so Ca come in and activate all sorts of things in the cell that can permanently change how the cell responds to stimuli: -Happens in the dendrites: postsynaptic side of the cell -Ca shows theres a whole bunch of stuff going on with activity, need more AMPA receptors so we can be more responsive to what is happening -Or Ca can change gene expression: Can make receptors more or less sensitive to glutamate

congenital adrenal hypertrophy (CAH)

a genetic condition resulting in exposure to higher-than-normal levels of androgens during gestation resulting from disrupted cortisol production -Adrenal glands -Hypertrophy: not doing what they should be doing -Hypothalamus: send signal to pituitary gland to send signal adrenal gland and adrenal gland making hormones and sending back to hypothalamus and pituitary, so due to feedback it can regulate -With CAH, feedback mechanism is broken->pituitary and adrenal glands think not being listened too so they up what they make, so adrenal glands making more androgens -So too many androgens, so girls have high levels of circulating androgens->put stereotypical girl and boy toys and these girls with CAH had "boy" toys and didn't effect boys -CAH girls have reproductive problems -Too many androgens early in life -Masculinization later in life -Observed in both males and females but more impact on females -Marked by ambiguous looking genitalia, treated at birth with hormone therapy -the research on these genetic females throughout childhood, puberty, and adulthood suggests that they engage in more masculine play than control females as children and, as adults, express more interest in male-dominated careers such as airline pilot, construction worker, or engineer -research provides evidence that women with CAH have better spatial abilities than matched control subjects -sexual orientation in women with CAH at birth and in women without the condition reported that although most women in both groups were heterosexual, the CAH group showed higher rates of homosexuality and bisexuality

Schachter-Singer Theory of emotion/two-factor theory

acknowledged the importance of both autonomic arousal and cognitive perceptions in the expression of specific emotions -emphasizes the role of context-dependent cognitive interpretation in transforming general arousal to a specific emotion such as fear or happiness -found evidence that the expression of a specific emotion is influenced by both cognition and physiology -Study: arousal was produced in subjects by giving them an injection of adrenaline. Following the injections, subjects were seated in a waiting room with a study confederate who had been instructed to act either angry or happy -When subjects thought they were merely receiving a vitamin injection that should not have any emotional side effects, they were more likely to mirror the emotions of the confederate than subjects who had been told about the expected side effects-> subjects who knew that the injection resulted in their feelings of arousal did not attribute their emotion to the confederate -subjects with no knowledge of the source of their arousal attributed it to the confederate and then refined their emotion to match the circumstances -Study supported role of cognition in expression of specific emotions: An attractive female interviewer approached men on either the Capilano Suspension Bridge in Canada (scary bridge) or a wider, sturdier footbridge over a 10-foot ravine that typically would not arouse fear -The interviewer asked the men to fill out a questionnaire that required them to write a narrative in response to an image of a woman. The interviewer then gave the young men her telephone number in case they had any follow-up questions. The experimenters were interested in the extent to which the men ascribed sexual content to the picture, as well as whether they called the female interviewer. RESULTS -men who crossed the scary bridge and likely had an accompanying sympathetic arousal response were more likely than the men who crossed the sturdy bridge to exhibit indirect evidence of sexual attraction by interpreting the picture as sexual in nature and by calling the female interviewer

ACC and unexpected outcomes

activated when an outcome occurs at an unexpected time, suggesting that the mPFC and ACC work together to signal the occurrence of negative surprises

memory and emotions

altered levels of hormones accompanying stressful events lead to both impairment and strengthening of the integrity of the memory circuits -A destination of cortisol is the hippocampus

fear

an adaptive response that mobilizes the brain and body to escape successfully from threatening situations -Predisposed fears of threats like heights and spiders -The nature of the most threatening stimuli has changed so drastically over the past several centuries that images that should evoke the greatest fears in contemporary society—guns, bombs, poisons—do not compare with images of the same stimuli that sent a chill down our ancestors' spines -emphasize the conserved nature of emotional responses through the years -When fear responses are observed in rats, the situational context influences the response-> On detection of calls or smells from a natural predator, the rat may freeze in restricted situations, such as a laboratory cage. However, if there is an escape path, the rat may vigorously flee -effective responses to threats typically include an accurate survey of the environment. However, in cases such as conditioned fear, thorough contextual assessments are bypassed for a more immediate response

medial prefrontal cortex

an area that has been implicated in the recognition of unexpected outcomes->Specifically, the mPFC monitors response-outcome associations. -inhibited if the predicted outcome occurs, and it is activated if the expected outcome fails to occur -been suggested that the mPFC signals the "unexpected non-occurrence of a predicted outcome" ->where the plasticity of our memory processes is valuable: If the contingency rules start to change, we must adapt quickly to avoid suffering the consequences of continuing with inappropriate responses.

hippocampus and long term memory

area in the brain that is in the temporal lobe and its involved in learning and memory -Has place cells: cells that when you put a rat in a maze and you hook them up to a recording electrode in the place cells in the hippocampus that when they run the maze and go through it, place cells are lighting up for specific spatial locations -Specific: took radial arm mazes and change it so 180 degrees flip then still know where they are in particular place -Process where when animals go to sleep you can tell that they are rehearsing if you're still recording from these place cells->If prohibit from rehearsing, interrupting consolidation so won't remember the maze

cholesterol

biochemically changed to end up with sex hormones (classes of molecules) -Androgens: ex. Testosterone -Estrogens: ex. Estradiol -Progestogens: ex. Progesterone

does the brain learn more from victories or defeats

brain scans were conducted while the physicians learned to discriminate between two fictional medical treatments introduced to them via virtual patient interactions. When the responses during the 64 training trials were evaluated to determine the progress of each subject, the physicians were categorized as either high- or low-performing subjects based on their performance -High performers appeared to learn equally from both successes and failures -exhibited higher DLPFC activity after failures -More successful and efficient at learning because they paid attention to and learned from failures during the training sessions -low performers appeared to learn significantly more from successes than from failures -showed more activity in this area following successes. -focusing only on the reward value of the successful trials, was less effective

John B. Watson

built off Pavlov to experiment psychological processes -proclaimed that Pavlov's research opened the door for psychology, which had previously been viewed as a subjective discipline, to establish itself as an objective laboratory science: A behavioral scientist could count the number of times a conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus were paired, determine the time delay between stimulus presentation and response, and evaluate the intensity of responses by counting the drops or volume of excreted saliva

episodic memory in other species

by manipulating caching, or food storing, opportunities, she has found that the scrub jays recall where they buried certain types of food. Depending on the time elapsed from the caching to collecting, the jays will retrieve the most appropriate food source. Specifically, when only 4 hours have passed, the jays will recover the perishable worms, but after 124 hours, the jays skip the rotten worms and retrieve the peanuts->these birds appear to be recalling past events and using that information to respond adaptively in the present. Although the exact brain mechanisms have yet to be determined in this particular task, it is likely that a small hippocampus-like structure is involved

Iowa Gambling Task and ventromedial prefrontal cortex

choice of playing between two stacks of cards. In one stack, you have rewards that are really high and losses low (stacked against you) or other stack has low wins and low losses (stack will win money). Ppl start playing with high risk cards, they will play for a while they'll start to lose money and switch decks so not playing with risk cards anymore -Ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions will play these card games and they will continue to play with high risk card game: involved w assessing when things are bad and then changing behavior and sending signal to viscera hey this is bad->if don't get this signal (don't get bad feeling in viscera) won't change behavior

stress response

composed of the sympathetic nervous system response and the related adrenaline response, as well as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and corticosteroid/cortisol response -Short-term activation of the stress response is critical when one encounters a threatening stimulus. -Cortisol: plays a central role in the stress response as it stimulates the sympathetic nervous system to mobilize energy resources, increases arousal, enhances vigilance, and sharpens memory -certain aspects of the PNS such as those related to growth, reproduction, digestion, and immune functions are temporarily compromised -When an individual is experiencing stress, it is critical for the brain to receive appropriate feedback so that baseline levels of stress hormones are reestablished once the threat has passed -CRH one of brain's most important mediators of stress response -Sympathetic activation and parasympathetic withdrawal occur almost immediately following the stressor, resulting in rapid adaptations in various physiological systems

processing-based memory system

consisting of three processing modes that vary across three variables: fast versus slow encoding, single-item versus associative encoding, and flexible versus rigid representation -Rapid encoding of flexible associations: As you go through your daily schedule, you are processing associations in a manner so that they can be accessed in various ways. -ex. While watching a television commercial featuring a dog one evening, you may recall a funny joke your friend told you about a dog earlier in the day and proceed to repeat the dog joke to your group of friends. -Indirectly accessing the memory of the dog joke and presenting it in a novel context represents the flexible components of the episodic memory system.

substantia nigra

contains dopaminergic neurons that project onto axons in the basal ganglia where the basal ganglia then has key role in helping us decide what behavior was important to do -Circuit: c/p->globus pallidus->thalamus->help us decide what to do -Dopamine made whole system worked

grandmother cells

convey that one's memory for one's grandmother may exist in a modest constellation of thousands of neurons rather than requiring the activation of all the billion cells in the medial temporal lobe; -Another version of the grandmother cell hypothesis is that a single cell contains the memory of grandmother, but this is unlikely especially because each of our memories would be extremely vulnerable to the effects of cell loss

working memory

current use of the term refers to keeping information readily accessible (holding it online) while working on a problem, as opposed to merely being able to remember recent events -associated with PFC -The incorporation of recent events required to solve the radial arm maze was considered a hippocampaldependent ability since the skill requires a healthy hippocampus

opioids

derived from a poppy flower; opium poppies contain opium and people found out that you can isolate the opium from the poppies and that if you ingest this substance then you feel good (pleasurable)-> 1900s found how to distill active ingredient in opium (morphine): started messing with it; modifying it so started adding side rings or taking things away to make new chemical compounds. One of the forms they made was heroin: supposed to be super form of morphine -knew these drugs made ppl feel good -If you find a drug that does something to our brains, then there has to be something within our brains that can receive drug->some kind of a receptor or some way of recognizing that drug->found by Candace Pert -very complex system