PSYC 2000 Chapter : Categorizing The Brain
Document Summary
Historical attempts: organized the nervous system based on location in the body, central nervous system: brain, spinal column, peripheral nervous system: everything else, somatic: sensory/ muscle functions, automatic, peripheral: maintains homeostasis, sympathetic: reacts to stressors. Cell types: brodmann areas: focused on structural rather than function, translates well to most individual brains, but there is variability with across people. Lateralization: right side: visual processing, music, left side: language, numerical estimation, online calculation, connected via the corpus callosum, motor and sensory functions of one side of the body are processed by the opposing hemisphere. Left brain versus right brain: about 95% of the world population is lateralized such that verbal functions arises from the left hemisphere, whereas visual spatial functions arise from the right hemisphere. In about 5% of population, this lateralization is reversed. 20% of people that are left handed show reversed lateralization. Split-brain patient: bundle of 200-250 million axonal projections connecting the two hemispheres.
