Why psychologist study the brain

A lesion is a general term for any abnormality in tissue, usually caused by disease or trauma. This gives us more information about neuroanatomy and also about the influence the brain has on behavior. MRI of a brain lesion : Cancerous lesion i. Dualism is the idea that the mind and the body are two separate entities. Since the body is a physical entity and the mind is not, for many centuries philosophers and later, psychologists usually operated under the assumption that the body and the mind were of different kinds of substance.

Rene Descartes famously theorized that the mind and body were separate, since he could doubt that he had a body because he might be dreaming, but he could not doubt that he had a mind since something was doing the doubting.

Thus, the central claim of what is called Cartesian dualism is that the mind and the body are two separate substances that interact. There is an ongoing debate today over whether the mind and body are separate materials, or whether consciousness can arise from purely physiological processes. This is known in psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, and artificial intelligence as the hard problem of consciousness. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Brains hardware is dominant in software possibilities.

Hardware modelling helps understanding the software, the mind. Suppose your car engine brakes down and you do not really understand how such an engine works. You can try to think, to theoretisize on the cause of the breakdown, but without engine knowledge the outcome will be poor. Also, when other unprofessionals gather around your car and try to help, the outcome, again is hopeless.

The same is true for psychology, depression, learning, personality, schisofrenia etc, all symptom hunting without basic knowing. There is no alternative to generalized modelling of human mental functioning and that is what you will have to do. In order to start, I want to give you some ideas to progress on, or to modify in your way. Before so, some words on science in general. Science is to condense the vast amount of data in a field. The psychology community use mostly statistics, zero help in the direction of general mental understanding or symptom theories mostly based on schools like behavior, or cognitive cognitive here as open, empty, do it yourself contents.

I want to use modelling brains hardware , and categorization brains software. Part 1, a model of the hardware function Part 2, a model of the attitudes system Part 3, a model of the capabilities learned how to do. Part 1 The signal processing in the brains is extremely slow, not gigaherz like in computers, but about 40 Herz, so 40 steps per second because of the nature of the conductors and switches electrochemical, salt-ions.

Yet the response speed is very fast. If a say car, you immediately know , that this item exists and what it is etc. This speed can only be performed by a specific model of brains organization. Suppose a playground of a large school, with 20 million children. A teacher wants to speak to Tommy A computer would transport children to the teacher, the teacher would see if this child was Tommy So 2 steps. This is the first principle, distributed intelligence. If a question is put on the ask bus, it can only be meaningful if all listeners use the same format.

The conscious system uses a small amount of broad busses for communication, this can only be efficient if all mental jobs use the same busorganisation.

The control of these multitasking environment can block, maybe by stress too long blocking on one task. This I consider schisofrenia.

So maybe early schisofrenia could best be treated by organizing constant taskrotation programs. Think of moving e. If you know some basics, moving your right leg sideways etc, you can combine these basic units to sequences. If you know words, you can combine these units to phrases If you know intelligent stories, you can combine these units to other intelligent outcomes.

The conscious system is however to slow to really construct complete new things. If you talk it gets the phrases form your phrasecollection etc. If you move it gets your moveinstructions from your move-elements-collection etc. The hierarchical part is the place in the row, like money on the bank. The same must be true in human mind. Eg a tilted picture is first put upright, separated in relevant parts and then bussed. Part 2 The attitude system.

The software and the hardware system of the brains must be compatible, so using similar organization. Consider a triangle, with one angle on top. In the top, the most aggregate level, the most generalized level, the most abstract level, you will find ideals, beliefs , masterknowledge etc.

It directs all lower abstraction levels. The attitudesystem is organized in a number of areas, with some crossinterference. Once belonging to one such stream, everything else is of little importance in politically relevant themes.

Intelligence, amount of information, etc. The top level ideal is top important regarding attitude. One could mirror this triangle along the baseline, creating a second, downward triangle. This triangle contains the emotional output, also organized in more and less aggregate levels. Again, like in the former theme, one could divide people at first relation beginning in a small number of statistically idealgroups. Over time, things happen and these may severely damage the upper levels of beliefs, hope, and ideals.

The problem of relationmanagement on lower abstraction levels is that it is more and more trending towards a relation, not being special but normal , average, not valuable. Without the source, life organization as you would like, is a problem. And how much ideals and hope are left for a next relation, how much damage. Of course such damage is reflected in the emotional results part. A crosstheme interference example can be seen when eg the woman has strong justice feelings in the woman-man rights environment.

Being militant here must rain in the marriage relation, sometimes it may rain hard. For instance, when an individual suffers a stroke, a blood clot deprives part of the brain of oxygen, killing the neurons in the area and rendering that area unable to process information. In some cases, the result of the stroke is a specific lack of ability. For instance, if the stroke influences the occipital lobe, then vision may suffer, and if the stroke influences the areas associated with language or speech, these functions will suffer.

In fact, our earliest understanding of the specific areas involved in speech and language were gained by studying patients who had experienced strokes. It is now known that a good part of our moral reasoning abilities is located in the frontal lobe, and at least some of this understanding comes from lesion studies.

For instance, consider the well-known case of Phineas Gage Figure 4. Although, remarkably, Gage was able to return to work after the wounds healed, he no longer seemed to be the same person to those who knew him. The amiable, soft-spoken Gage had become irritable, rude, irresponsible, and dishonest.

Although there are questions about the interpretation of this case study Kotowicz, , it did provide early evidence that the frontal lobe is involved in emotion and morality Damasio et al. More recent and more controlled research has also used patients with lesions to investigate the source of moral reasoning.

Michael Koenigs and his colleagues Koenigs et al. In one of the scenarios the participants were asked if they would be willing to kill one person in order to prevent five other people from being killed. As you can see in Figure 4. In addition to lesion approaches, it is also possible to learn about the brain by studying the electrical activity created by the firing of its neurons.

One approach, primarily used with animals, is to place detectors in the brain to study the responses of specific neurons. Research using these techniques has found, for instance, that there are specific neurons , known as feature detectors , in the visual cortex that detect movement, lines and edges, and even face s Kanwisher, A less invasive approach, and one that can be used on living humans, is electroencephalography EEG , as shown in Figure 4.

An EEG can show if a person is asleep, awake, or anesthetized because the brainwave patterns are known to differ during each state. EEGs can also track the waves that are produced when a person is reading, writing, and speaking, and are useful for understanding brain abnormalities, such as epilepsy. A particular advantage of EEG is that the participant can move around while the recordings are being taken, which is useful when measuring brain activity in children, who often have difficulty keeping still.

Furthermore, by following electrical impulses across the surface of the brain, researchers can observe changes over very fast time periods. Although the EEG can provide information about the general patterns of electrical activity within the brain, and although the EEG allows the researcher to see these changes quickly as they occur in real time, the electrodes must be placed on the surface of the skull, and each electrode measures brainwaves from large areas of the brain.

As a result, EEGs do not provide a very clear picture of the structure of the brain. But techniques exist to provide more specific brain images. Functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI is a type of brain scan that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain activity in each brain area.

The patient lies on a bed within a large cylindrical structure containing a very strong magnet. Neurons that are firing use more oxygen, and the need for oxygen increases blood flow to the area. The fMRI detects the amount of blood flow in each brain region, and thus is an indicator of neural activity.

Very clear and detailed pictures of brain structures can be produced via fMRI see Figure 4. The images of these slices are taken repeatedly and are superimposed on images of the brain structure itself to show how activity changes in different brain structures over time.

When the research participant is asked to engage in tasks while in the scanner e. Another advantage of the fMRI is that it is noninvasive. The research participant simply enters the machine and the scans begin. Although the scanners themselves are expensive, the advantages of fMRIs are substantial, and they are now available in many university and hospital settings. The fMRI is now the most commonly used method of learning about brain structure.

There is still one more approach that is being more frequently implemented to understand brain function, and although it is new, it may turn out to be the most useful of all. Transcranial magnetic stimulation TMS is a procedure in which magnetic pulses are applied to the brain of a living person with the goal of temporarily and safely deactivating a small brain region. In TMS studies the research participant is first scanned in an fMRI machine to determine the exact location of the brain area to be tested.

Then the electrical stimulation is provided to the brain before or while the participant is working on a cognitive task, and the effects of the stimulation on performance are assessed.