Chapter 2: Cognitive Neuroscience
The Brain as the Organ of the Mind
- Cognitive neuroscientists assume that the brain is composed of specific parts or modules
- Gall and Spurzheim promoted phrenology → the study of shape, size, and protrusions of the
cranium in an attempt to discover the relationships between parts of the brain and various mental
activities and abilities
- Gall and Spurzheim arguments are reduce to three basic principles:
1. The brain is the sole organ of the mind
2. Basic character and intellectual traits are innately determined
3. Since there are differences in character and intellectual traits among individuals as well
as differences in various intellectual capacities within a single individual, there must exist
differentially developed areas in the brain, responsible for these differences
- Gall and Spurzheim believed that the more highly developed a function was, the larger it would
be, and that the larger the function, the more it would manifest itself as a protrusion on the skull
- They believed they could see a person’s weakness and strength by look at their skulls
- Localization of function: the idea that there is a direct correspondence between specific
cognitive functions and specific parts of the brain
- Franz was an expert at the technique of ablation; parts of the cortex of an animal are destroyed
and the consequences for behavior are observed
- If functions were localized in the cortex, the effect of ablation should depend on the area
destroyed
- Franz and Karl Lashely studied the effects of ablation of the frontal lobes in rats
- They made small holes in the rat’s skull and then observed the effect of the lesions on the
retention of a simple learned maze habit: only later would they examine the animal’s
brain to see “precisely where the lesions had occurred”
- Result: as long as sufficient tissue remained after the operation, the location of that tissue
was irrelevant
- Franz concluded that “mental processes not due to the independent activities of individual
parts of the brain, but to the activities of the brain as a whole” and that “it would appear
best and most scientific that we should not adhere to any of the phrenological systems”
- Lashley lesioned the cortex of rats in diff places and to diff degrees
- Rats had no problem going through the maze when it was easy or simple
- Performance declined as the difficulty of the task and/or the among of brain dmg
increased
- Law of mass action: learning and memory depend on the total mass of brain tissue remaining
rather than the properties of individual cells
- Law of equipotentiality: although some areas of the cortex may become specialized for certain
tasks, any part of an area can (within limits) do the job of any other part of that area
The relationship between mind and brain
- Consciousness is the narrower concept, often taken to mean what we are aware of at any point in
time
- Mind is the broader concept, includes consciousness, but also encompasses processes that may
take place outside our awareness
- Interactionism is associated w/ Descartes → believed mind and brain to be separate substances
that interacted and influenced each other
- Interaction took place in pineal gland
- Epiphenomenalism maintains that the mind is simply a by product of brain processes and has no
causal role in determining behavior
- Huxley used an analogy to demonstrate his position: the mind is to the brain as the steam
from a steam whistle is to a coal powered locomotive.
- You would not discover much about the locomotive by studying the steam from the
whistle, so you would not discover much about the brain by examining what goes on in
the mind
- Many adopt position similar to epiphenomenalism, believing that consciousness was
irrelevant an understanding of behavior
- Parallelism mind and brain are two aspect of the same reality, and they operate in parallel
- Studying mental events might reveal something of value about the brain
- E.g one might ask research subject to introspect and then record events in their brains as
they do so
- Isomorphism can be traced to Gestalt psychologists
- Gestalt means form or configuration
- Argued that consciousness tends to be organized into a coherent whole
- The doctrine of isomorphism holds that an experience and its corresponding neural
process share the same pattern
- The difference between isomorphism and parallelism is that the latter envisions more
than a simple point-for-point correspondence between mental events and brain events
Methods in Cognitive Neuroscience
Animal Models
- One basis for determining whether it is appropriate to use an animal model has to do w/ how
closely it resembles a human, either genetically or in terms of the phenomenon in question
- Almost everything we known about the micro-organization of brain structure and function is
derived from the study of animal brains, bc the research methods involved are too invasive to be
used on humans
- Homologous structures can be very difficult to identify across species, and the specialization of
diff animals lead to large differences in their neuroanatomy and neurophysiology
- E.g much of the rat brain is dedicated to olfactory input, while much of the human brain
is dedicated to visual input
Behavioral Studies
- A sensory system is part of the nervous system, composed of sensory receptors, neural pathways,
and distinct regions of the brain preferentially dedicated to the perception of information that
translates the physical world into perceptual experiences
- Six main sensory systems: vision, audition, taste, smell, somatosensory (touch as well as other
perceptions, such as muscle and joint movement) and vestibular (balance and spatial orientation)
- Behaviour can;t identify a specific link between behaviour and underlying brain mechanism
- E.g we move our eyes from point A to point B faster when the items fixated at point A
disappears from view
- The timing of when points A and B disappears and appear, researcher concluded that the
disappearance of an item at point trigger a disinhibition of the eye movement system, and
that a small midbrain structure (superior colliculur) plays a critical role in this response
The Study of Brain Inju
- Paul Broca’s study of the loss of the ability to speak
- The condition is called Broca’s aphasia
- Broca described a patient who was unable to speak, but apparently was still able to
understand what was said to him
- Autopsy showed severe dmg to a part of the left hemisphere similar dmg in similarly
aphasic patient at autopsy
- Karl Wernicke identified patients who are able to speak but unable to comprehend what is said to
them or to produce coherent speech
- These patient may ramble incoherently, their words have no relationship to thought
- The lesions responsible for their symptoms were located in the left hemisphere in the area
that became known as Wernicke’s area
- This disorder is wernicke’s aphasia
- Broca’s area is responsible for speech production and Wernicke’s area is responsible for speech
comprehension
- But its not justified
- The aphasias are not particularly well defined, and it is recognized “that clinical aphasic
syndromes are comprised of variable clusters of symptoms”
Surgical Intervention
- Lashley used ablation to investigate localization of function
- Roger Sperry used surgical techniques, but in a more precise manner
- Interhemispheric transfer: communication between the brain’s hemispheres, enabled in large
part by the corpus callosum
- Conducted on cats and involve severing the optic chiasm (the area in the brain where the
optic nerves that transmit info from the eyes to the visual cortex across), w/ the result that
info coming from the right eye was projected only onto the visual areas of the right
hemisphere, and info from the left eye projected only onto the visual areas of the left
hemisphere
- Sperry severed the corpus callosum, it showed that it “plays the dominant role in interhemispheric
interaction”
- When the corpus callosum is severed info transfer between the hemispheres is disrupted
- Split brain: a condition created by severing the corpus callosum → the animal
behaved as if it had two separate brains
- Wenicke suggested that the left hemisphere was associated with linguistic functions
- Split-brain research led many to the general conclusion that the left hemisphere managed
“analytic” (e.g., verbal, rational) tasks and the right hemisphere, “holistic” (e.g., non-verbal,
intuitive) tasks
- it later became clear that there was no simple division of labor between the two hemispheres in an
intact brain
- the actual organization of intracerebral connections may well lie beyond the limits of
human comprehension”
- Sperry turned his attention to broad issues such as the nature of consciousness
- He argued that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, meaning that it is
neither reducible to nor a product of other features of the brain.
- Once consciousness emerges, then, it can have an influence on lower-level functions, a
process that may be termed emergent causation
- He recognized a “mutual interaction between neural and mental events” such that “the
brain physiology determines the mental events” but is in turn “governed by the higher
subjective properties of the enveloping mental events.”
- Describing the mind as supervenient, he argued that mental states may “exert downward
control over their constituent neuronal events—at the same time that they are being
determined by them”
Event-related potentials
- The earliest imaging technique, computed tomography (CT), provided detailed anatomical data
that revolutionized neurology and experimental neuropsychology.
- Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides similar images but with higher spatial resolution.
- Both produce high-quality “snapshots” of human brain structures and thus make it
possible to localize brain lesions, tumors, and developmental abnormalities.
- neither provides images of brain activity.
- To measure the time course of the flow of sensory information and response-related processes,
the electrical signals emitted by the brain can be recorded using electrodes placed on the scalp
(electroencephalography, or EEG).
- The electrical signals that occur after the onset of a stimulus, such as a word, make up a pattern of
electrical activity called an event-related potential (erp) and can be represented by waveforms
Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
- One assumption underlying positron emission tomography (pet) is that when a specific
psychological function is engaged, then only those parts of the brain responsible for that function
will also be engaged
- If a participant is given a specific cognitive task, the parts of the brain responsible for that task
will “work harder” than when the participant is not performing that task.
- When a part of the brain is active in this way, it will use up oxygen at a faster rate than
when it is inactive, and the need to replenish that oxygen in turn will lead to an increase
in blood flow to the area.
- The participant in a PET study is first given a radioactive substance that mingles with the
blood and thus circulates to the brain.
- This procedure allows for the detection of blood flow to particular areas of the
brain and makes it possible to construct images showing which parts of the brain
are particularly active in relation to the performance of different tasks
- One problem with PET methodology is that there are limits to the amount of radiation to which a
participant may be exposed, and therefore limits to the amount of information that can be
obtained from each participant.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI)
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) does measure blood flow (actually, the flow of
oxygen in the blood) while the subject completes some sort of task, and is capable of correlating
the location of brain activity with the cognitive behaviour.
- Advantage:
- Does not depend on radioactive signal
- Data can be acquired more rapidly using fMRI than is possible using PET
- The fMRI technique involves placing the subject’s head inside a very large magnetic field and
having him or her view some sort of stimuli, or perform some sort of cognitive task
- Changes in the flow of oxygenated blood can then be picked up as alterations in the
magnetic field, and this information can be used to construct an image of cortical activity.
- An experiment conducted by Bavelier is an example of FMRI study involving Broca’s and
Wernicke’s areas
- The tasks used in that study were sentence reading and the viewing of consonant strings.
- Sentence reading “invoke[s] many different aspects of language processing,” while
viewing “consonant strings is believed to activate only basic visual recognition routines. .
. . The comparison of these two conditions should reveal brain areas concerned with . . .
language processing”
- Examination of the pattern of activation that best characterized the entire group of
participants did show that Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas were more activated by the
sentence-reading task than by the viewing of consonant strings.
- other areas were also consistently more activated by sentence reading than by consonant
viewing
- Language is not simply localized in a few cortically well circumscribed areas
- According to Marshall and Fink (2003), “recent work [suggests] that functional localization is not
such a fixed property of brain regions as either lesion studies or early neuroimaging work might
have suggested”
- They illustrate this point with respect to Broca’s area.
- Neuroimaging studies have found that it plays “a role in natural language syntactic
processing, in processing musical syntax, in the perception of rhythmic motion, in
imaging movement trajectories
- Marshall and Fink conclude that “it is difficult to see how a single common function (localized in
Broca’s area) could underlie such a disparate collection of effects”
Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
- Magnetoencephalography (meg) is a noninvasive brain imaging technique that seeks to marry the
significant spatial resolution of fMRI with the outstanding temporal resolution of ERP.
- While the spatial resolution of MEG might not be quite as good as fMRI, it does have
significantly better temporal resolution (10 milliseconds or faster vs hundreds of msecs for fMRI)
because MEG measures the magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brain.
- An additional advantage of MEG is that it provides a direct measurement of neural activity rather
than the indirect measurement offered by fMRI and PET, which are intimately tied to changes in
blood flow in the brain.
- A third advantage of MEG is that irregularities in the head itself (e.g., the skull) do not have
much effect on the magnetic fields produced by neural activity, unlike the electrical fields used by
ERP.
Nevertheless, MEG has two limitations
- First, the decay of signal as a function of distance is pronounced for magnetic fields (as anyone
who has tried to push two magnets together will know) and therefore MEG is really good only for
detecting activity near the cortical surface of the brain.
- Second, MEG devices are not widely available (unlike fMRI) and therefore their cost
effectiveness is relatively poor
Connectionist Models
- Herbert Simon acknowledged that “explanation of cognitive processes at the information-
processing (symbolic) level is largely independent of explanation at the physiological
(neurological) level that shows how processes are implemented”
- Connectionism is an example of the latter: an alternative to the more traditional approaches
focused on information-processing (Schneider, 1987) that focuses on the
physiological/neurological level.
- Connectionist theory holds that the brain consists of an enormous number of
interconnected neurons, and that a model of the networks formed by these neurons might
help us to understand how cognitive processes work.
- Using modern brain imaging techniques such as diffusion tensor imaging (dti), researchers can
understand the organization of the neural interactions within the brain (e.g., how information
flows between and within brain regions).
- The two basic connectionist ideas are that:
1. Info can be broken down into elementary units (neurons)
2. There are connections between these units
- These connections can have different strengths, and a neural network learns by modifying the
strength of connections between elements so that the proper output occurs in response to a
particular input.
- Among the assumptions made concerning the way connections between neurons are formed and
strengthened is the Hebb rule, named after the Canadian [Link], one of the founders of
neuropsychology.
- The Hebb rule states that “when an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly
or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one
or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased”
- Another assumption of connectionist models is that many connections can be active at the same
time.
- This is an example of parallel processing as opposed to serial processing, in which only
one connection operates at a time.
- Thus connectionist models may also be described as parallel distributed processing
models
Combining Methods
- Data from human behavioral studies can be interpreted in the context of findings provided by
animal studies, allowing direct observation of neural functioning at a local level
- With dynamic imaging techniques such as ERP, PET, fMRI, or MEG, these links can be
expanded to map the connections between behavior and function.
- Fendrich, Wessinger, and Gazzaniga (1992) used the latter approach to study a patient with a
condition known as “blindsight.”
- Some people who have suffered lesions to the primary visual cortex are able to make
accurate judgments about the location of visual stimuli that they claim they cannot see.
- This “blindsight”has been attributed to visual pathways that bypass the primary cortex
- others have argued that it could be the result of spared functioning in the primary cortex
- Using psychophysical tests and an image stabilizer that allows for extended and repetitive
stimulus presentations to a very small area of the retina, Fendrich, Wessinger, and Gazzaniga
(1992) discovered a small and isolated island of blindsight in a hemianopic patient
- This behavioral result suggested that a region of cortex within the lesioned area had been
spared.
