The area of psychology that seeks to understand how the brain affects behavior is known as biopsychology, although you may also hear this subject referred to as psychobiology or behavioral neuroscience. Neurons are the basic building blocks of life. These highly specialized cells are responsible for receiving and transmitting information from one part of the body to another. In order to better understand how a neuron works to transmit information throughout the body, it is essential to know the different parts of a neuron.
You've seen how a cell is structured and how nerve impulses are propagated down the cell, but how does this information travel from one cell to the next?
Neurons make up only a small part of the human body's complex communication system. The nervous system is composed of two main parts: the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. Additionally, the endocrine system plays an important role in communication. Technological advances in recent years have allowed scientists to study the human brain in ways that were not possible in the past. Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter.
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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. Biological Foundations of Psychology. 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.
The primary advantage of TMS is that it allows the researcher to draw causal conclusions about the influence of brain structures on thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Current research has used TMS to study the brain areas responsible for emotion and cognition and their roles in how people perceive intention and approach moral reasoning Kalbe et al. Neuroimaging techniques have important implications for understanding our behaviour, including our responses to those around us. Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues tested the hypothesis that people who were excluded by others would report emotional distress and that images of their brains would show that they experienced pain in the same part of the brain where physical pain is normally experienced.
In the experiment, 13 participants were each placed into an fMRI brain-imaging machine. Each of the participants was measured under three different conditions. In the first part of the experiment, the participants were told that as a result of technical difficulties, the link to the other two scanners could not yet be made, and thus at first they could not engage in, but only watch, the game play. This allowed the researchers to take a baseline fMRI reading. Then, during a second, inclusion, scan, the participants played the game, supposedly with the two other players.
During this time, the other players threw the ball to the participants. In the third, exclusion, scan, however, the participants initially received seven throws from the other two players but were then excluded from the game because the two players stopped throwing the ball to the participants for the remainder of the scan 45 throws.
The results of the analyses showed that activity in two areas of the frontal lobe was significantly greater during the exclusion scan than during the inclusion scan. Because these brain regions are known from prior research to be active for individuals who are experiencing physical pain, the authors concluded that these results show that the physiological brain responses associated with being socially excluded by others are similar to brain responses experienced upon physical injury.
People who feel that they are excluded, or even those who observe other people being excluded, not only experience pain, but feel worse about themselves and their relationships with people more generally, and they may work harder to try to restore their connections with others.
Chen, Z. When hurt will not heal: Exploring the capacity to relive social and physical pain. Psychological Science, 19 8 , — Damasio, H. The return of Phineas Gage: Clues about the brain from the skull of a famous patient. In Social neuroscience: Key readings pp. Diamond, M. New Horizons for Learning. Eisenberger, N.
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