POL SCI 2 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Frontal Lobe, Parietal Lobe, Autopsy
Document Summary
Human brain development is a structurally and functionally non-linear process and most major neuropsychiatric disorders are now thought to arise from deviations from normal brain development. It is therefore important to study both normal and abnormal brain changes with age. Post-mortem studies: provide information at molecular and cellular levels: limited by scarcity of human brain tissue, inability to provide information during life and inability to use longitudinal designs. Gm volumes develop nonlinear during childhood and adolescence. In comparison: white matter volumes increase roughly linear for the first 40 years of life, with a peak around the mid-forties. At younger ages, the relationship between cortical thickness and iq is relatively broad but approaches the more circumscribed frontal lobe regions in later adolescence: suggests increasingly localized dependence of gm thickness on cognitive function with increasing age. Reflects the coherence between temporal fluctuations in the blood oxygen level dependent (bold) signal across brain regions.
