Neuroscience Concept Map

Concept Map 2: Neuroscience Neuroscience is a very complex study and is classified as a scientific field of study that studies the nervous system and how it relates to mental and behavior processes. Since neuroscience is the study of the nervous system after all, many psychologist like to study it because our nervous system is what controls us. It spreads the messages from our brain to the rest of our body. This would be why the nervous system is defined as the way our body communicates with itself through the use of neurons. The neurons are what transports the information throughout our body. There are actually two types of our nervous system. These are the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system, but we will talk about

Your brain and your spinal cord are apart of this and that also happens to be the definition of the system. With your brain, there are three sections of it. You have the hindbrain which is the part of the brain that contains the medulla, pons, and cerebellum and it is responsible for keeping our body operating. The next section is the midbrain and it is the connection between the hindbrain and forebrain. It is the center for the eyes and ears and reticular formation is the main key here. The last section is the forebrain which contains many structures including the thalamus, hypothalamus, limbic system, and the cortex. It is responsible for more complicated ordeals that need the brain. The forebrain’s largest structure is the cerebral cortex and it is responsible for sensory functions, cognitive functions, motor functions, conscious experiences, voluntary actions, language, and intelligence. It is what you see on the outside of the brain and its actually very thin and wrinkly. The cerebral cortex is actually made up of four lobes as well. The four lobes of it are the frontal lobe, occipital lobe, parietal lobe, and the temporal lobe. We will start by talking about the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe is the lobe directly behind your forehead and it plays a role in thinking, memory, and decisions. This is the motor area and it is where Phineas Gage was injured causing him behavior changes. Within this area we have

As you can tell from the simple breakdown of the brain, when I talked about the central nervous system, there is a lot going on in the brain. The brain itself is a very complex study with its many parts and breakdowns but then you add behaviors into it. There are many behaviors that we do and all of this comes from the brain. To study them all combined is very complex and takes a long time to do. There have been times where a person has had their brain affected by some accident and that helps psychologist to study this, but there are times when they would have to use rats or other animals to experiment with this. We did figure out that there are similarities in our brains and those of animals so animals were often experimented on when looking at this. It did result in the loss of animals’ lives but without them we wouldn’t know the things we do about the brain. We owe a lot of what we know about the brain to the animals because without them we might not have been able to figure out the complex study of