A July 2015 study found that dynamic proprioceptive activities—which specifically involve the cerebellum—increased working memory by 50 percent. Working memory creates the mental workspace that facilitates creativity and fluid intelligence. In the passage below, I cobbled together a timeline of various studies I’ve written about in previous Psychology Today blog posts. All of these findings are part of my ongoing attempt to solve the riddle of what role the cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”) plays in cognitive and creative processes.
Mandatory sterilization of people with cognitive impairments during the Nazi regime is an…
The protein produced from the gene is normally purified from the milk of the animal. This method has been used in goats to produce the drug antithrombin for treating people with defective blood clotting. Bacteria aren’t the only organisms which can be genetically modified to produce drugs – plants and animals can be used too. For genetically modifying plants, a GM bacterium is first made using the process outlined above. The bacterium then acts as a vector, infecting a plant cell and inserting its DNA into the genome of the plant cell.
What is the minimum number of standard deviations below the average that qualifies…
Language and general knowledge are unaffected, andrecognition memory seems to be relatively well preserved compared to recall.Confabulation (discussed in detail in Section 9) is common, as in Kapur andCoughlan’s (1980) ACoA patient SB ….. Hubel and Wiesel carried out an experiment on kittens and adults cats in 1963 which proved that the visual cortex develops during a critical period early in life. First, they prevented visual stimulation in one eye by sewing up one eye of each kitten. Several months later, they unstitched the eye and found that the kittens had gone blind in one eye.
Because there is insufficient time for neural impulses to travel from your brain to your muscles after you have sensed the stimulus, and for your muscles contract to click on the mouse (or trackpad or touchscreen), you must have started your mouse click well before you were consciously aware of the visual stimulus. A table in the link shows average reaction times, adjusted for age (reaction times tend to slow with age, especially after 60). Amongst other things, I’m hoping The Great British Intelligence Test will show us is what we can do, not only to maximize but also to protect our brain power.
A 60-year-old patient complains of headaches which are worse in the morning and…
But what if we told you that the relationship between brain size and cognitive abilities is not as simple as it seems? In this post, we’ll delve into the significance of brain size in human evolution, examining its correlation with body size, cognitive development, and the broader evolutionary journey of humankind. By the end, we’ll also explore the complexity of the cerebrumiq human brain, its protective skull, and how all these factors interlink to create the incredible cognitive abilities we possess today.
- Anything that means learning is severely affected can be included in this group.
- “On the tenth day afteroperation the patient was again responsive, but was disoriented, irrational,and slightly facetious and used obscene language” (p426).
- Profound Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD)PMLD is another term to separate the most severely learning delayed from others with learning delays, so that support can be matched.
- What’s more, we now know far more about the extent to which these changes are influenced by the world around us, and even by the choices we make in our day to day lives.
- However, with deteriorating press and the discovery ofchlorpromazine antidepressant drugs in 1952, the numbers started to fall.
A class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) work by binding to serotonin reuptake proteins within synapses, blocking the proteins and preventing them from reabsorbing serotonin. When habituation occurs, the action potentials that result from the stimulus dampen down over time. The repeated exposure to the stimulus decreases the amount of calcium ions which enter the presynaptic neurone, which means that fewer vesicles containing neurotransmitters release their contents into the synaptic cleft. This means that there are less neurotransmitters to bind to receptors on the postsynaptic neurone, so less sodium ions channels open in the postsynaptic neurone. Less depolarisation of the membrane occurs, which may not reach the threshold potential.