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The Human brain

The Human brain. By Sophie. What is psychology?. Psychology is the study of the mind and behaviour, understanding why human beings behave the way we do. The science of psychology was established in 1879, by a man called Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig, which is in Germany.

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The Human brain

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  1. The Human brain By Sophie

  2. What ispsychology? • Psychology is the study of the mind and behaviour, understanding why human beings behave the way we do. • The science of psychology was established in 1879, by a man called Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig, which is in Germany. • Psychology also includes such things as animal research and human organizational behaviour e.g. How schools are organised. • The symbol for psychology is based on a pitch fork because a long time ago people thought that mental illness was associated with the devil. They didn’t under stand the science of the human brain and the psychology of behaviour.

  3. Intelligence testing • In 1869, Sir Francis Galton published a book about intelligence. In the book he wrote that: intelligence is inherited through your genes. • In 1905, Alfred Binet claimed that individual differences in intelligence can be found only through measures of complex processes such as: memory, imagination, attention and comprehension. In 1904, Alfred Binet was appointed to a commission concerned with how to integrate(mix) retarded children into the public school system in Paris. The committee decides that special education programs should be provided for them and proposes that a system should be designed for identifying retarded children entering school. Alfred Binet set out to develop a scale that can differentiate children who are slow learners from children who are learning at a normal rate. He collaborated with Theodore Simon, a young physician who has worked with retarded children in the past. The result is a scale designed to measure a variety of higher mental processes such as memory and imagination. To test their scale, Alfred Binet and Simon draw samples of children from schools, hospitals and orphanages. They use these samples to try out the various tests they have designed with the goal of selecting those tests that clearly discriminate between the slightly retarded and the normal school population. In 1905, Binet and Simon introduce their intelligence scale and provide guidelines for its administration. They stress that the scale is appropriate only for assessing whether or not a child is of normal or inferior intelligence and is not designed to uncover the psychologically unstable or insane.

  4. How understanding of the human brain has changed? • In 1669, Nicolaus Steno said "The brain, the masterpiece of creation, is almost unknown to us“.  • In the fourth century B. C, Aristotle considered the brain to be a not very important organ that served as a cooling agent for the heart and a place in the body where the spirits circulated freely. • Over the years, various scientists/researchers worked out the structure of the brain but they didn’t understand how it worked. • In 1811, Charles Bell discovered that the nerves for each of the senses can be traced from specific areas of the brain to the end organs. • In 1848, Phineas Gage had an accident when an iron bar went through his head. Scientists discovered that when you have a severe injury to the frontal lobe of the brain, personality and behaviour can change dramatically. • In 1862, Paul Broca, who was a neurological (nerves and the brain) scientist, found the location of the speech centre of the brain in the left frontal (front of brain) lobe.

  5. How understanding of the human brain has changed? (continued) • In 1874, Carl Wernicke discovered that people with language difficulties often drop joining words, such as but, and, or. Other people speak fluently, but their speech seems to as if they are no longer able to choose the precise words they mean. He discovered that these particular kinds of aphasia result from damage to the area where the temporal and parietal lobes bang in the back of the brain. • In 1896, Emil Kraepelin is the first person to discover that manic depression is a separate illness to schizophrenia. • In 1900, Sigmund Freud discovered that the unconscious mind drives much of human behaviour. Yet this constant tension between a person's repressed drives and his expected social actions often causes psychological distress. Freud suggests that one of the ways this tension is resolved is through the fantasy world of dreams. • In 1906, Their research details the basic changes that neurons undergo during the functioning of the nervous system and describes the mechanisms that govern the connective processes of nerve cells within the nervous system. Cajal is also the first to isolate the nerve cells located near the surface of the brain, which are now known as Cajal's cells.

  6. How understanding of the human brain has changed? (continued) Ink blot • In 1911, Henry Head discovered that aphasia and argues speech is not a localized function. • In 1921, Hermann Rorschach developed the ink blot test.(it is now known as the Rorschach test)The test has ten standard ink blots. Half of the ink blots are in black and white and the other half are in colour. A person is asked to describe what he/she sees in the ink blot pictures, and then his/her answers are analyzed by the test giver. The test contains three scoring areas -- location, determinants and content. Location refers to how much and which part of the ink blot is described. Determinants refers to the patient's description of the blot's shape or colour. Content, the most straightforward of the categories, refers to the types of objects described. • In 1929, Hans Berger invented the first electrical measuring and recording instrument fro recording activity of the brain. Commonly known as the EEG or brainwave test, Hans Berger's invention is now used routinely as a diagnostic test in neurology and psychiatry and as a common tool in brain research.

  7. How understanding of the human brain has changed? (continued) • In 1934, Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist discovered a treatment for depression. This operation(called lobotomy) involves severing the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain. Of the twenty-seven patients who have the surgery, twenty recover from depression and the other seven show improvement. Unfortunately, many also suffer from personality changes just as Phineas Gage did after his accident in 1848. • In 1936, Walter Freeman and James W.Watts did the first lobotomy in the United States. • In 1938, Albert Hofmann discovered and then made LSD(a very bad drug) from grains in bread. This drug also effected the middle ages(1400-1600) when they ate bread. This drug majorly effected the brain. • In 1944, Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Spencer Gasser shared a special award for their discovery of highly different functions of individual nerve fibres.

  8. How understanding of the human brain has changed? (continued) • In 1949, Walter Rudolf Hess discovered that the interbrain is responsible for coordinating the activities of the body's internal organs e.g. the heart and lungs. • In 1950, Karl Spencer Lashley designed some experiments and discovered the components of memory, which he called engrams. • In 1953, Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky describe rapid eye movement (REM)sleep, this was something they came across while doing research on children's sleeping patterns[Until then, scientists had assumed that the brain was passive and inactive during sleep. Eugene Aserinsky used an EEG to record the brain activity of a sleeping person and discovered that the electrical pattern was remarkably similar to that of someone who was awake. In contrast, the electrical waves between periods of REM sleep were slow and even, suggesting a brain at rest. Researchers now believe that people experience two kinds of sleep, orthodox and paradoxical, that alternate throughout the night in intervals of about 100 minutes. Orthodox sleep occupies 80% of the night and does not involve rapid eye movement. Paradoxical sleep (known as REM sleep) makes up the rest of the time and involves bodily movement as well as rapid eye movement. Newborns spend more than 20% of their sleep in the REM phase, which has led researchers to suspect that this part of sleep involves some sort of learning process.

  9. How understanding of the human brain has changed? (continued) • In 1963, Ragner Granit, Haldan Keffer, and George Wald shared a special prize for discovering how the eye passes images to the brain. • In 1974, M.E.Phelps, E.J.Hoffman and M.M.Ter Pogossian developed a machine (called P.E.T) that has visual information on activity of the brain. • In 1977, Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel discover how the retina(the back wall of the eye ball) transfers information to the brain. • In 1991, Erwin Nehar and Bert Sakmann discovered how cells communicate with each other. Single ion channels are like tunnels that run from the inside of the cell to the outside. Cells communicate with each other using the 20 to 40 ion channels they have. Neher and Sakmann developed a thin, glass micro-pipette, one thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, which allowed them to view these ions as electrical currents. • In 1994, Alfred G.Gilman and Martin Rodbell discovered G-proteins. G-proteins are important because they act as a kind of internal switchboard for the body's different communication pathways. For this reason, they are sometimes called "biological traffic lights." • In 2000, Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel discovered the signal transduction in the nervous system. Signal transduction happens when a message from one nerve cell is transmitted to another through a chemical transmitter. It takes place at special points of contact, called synapses. Each nerve cell can have thousands of such contacts with other nerve cells. Their research focused on one type of signal transduction between the nerve cells, known as slow synaptic transmission. Their discoveries have contributed to a greater understanding of the normal function of the brain as well as how disturbances in this signal transduction can give rise to neurologic and psychiatric diseases.

  10. How does the human brain work?

  11. Bibliography • http://psychology.about.com/b/2012/11/02/psychologist-psychology-definition-of-the-week.htm • http://www.mindfocus.net/nc00100.html • http://psychology.about.com/ • Google images • http://www.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/brainpages/brain.html • http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/history/1869.html?position=415.8?button=18 • http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_retina

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