Neuroscience

Neuroscience comes from a merging of philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis with the biology of the brain to produce a new science based on five principles:

• Mind and brain are inseparable
• Each mental function is carried out by specialized neural circuits in different regions of the brain
• All these circuits are made up of the same elementary signaling units, the nerve cells
• The neural circuits use specific molecules to generate signals within and between nerve cells
• These specific signaling molecules have been conserved through millions of years of evolution.

Before molecular biology:

• Darwinian evolution
• Genetic basis of the inheritance of bodily form and mental traits
• Cells as the basic unit of all living things

Molecular biology united those three ideas by focusing on the actions of genes and proteins in individual cells. It recognized the gene as the unit of heredity, and the products of the genes, the proteins, as the elements of cellular function.

Emergence of the new biology of mind:

• In the 1960s, the philosophy of mind, behaviorist psychology (simple behavior in animals, and cognitive psychology (complex phenomena in people) merged, giving rise to modern cognitive psychology.
• In the 1970s, cognitive psychology, the science of mind, merged with neuroscience, the science of the brain, to create cognitive neuroscience

Behaviorism

Pavlov discovered worked on:

• classical conditioning - an animal is taught to associate a behavioral response with itsconsequences
• habituation - animal gets used to a stimulus and learns to ignore it
• sensitization

BF Skinner continued, focusing exclusively on observable behaviors

Parts of the Brain

• Central nervous system - a bilateral, essentially symmetrical structure with distinct parts. Receives sensory information from the skin through bundles of long nerve fibers, called axons, and transforms it into coordinated motor commands that are relayed to the muscles for action through other bundles of nerves
  • Spinal cord - contains the machinery needed for simple reflex behaviors.
  • Brain stem - conveys sensory information to higher regions of the brain and motor commands from those regions downward to the spinal cord. Also regulates attention.
  • Brain:
    • Hypothalamus
    • Thalamus
    • Cerebellum
    • Cerebral Hemispheres/ Cerebral Cortex - concerned with higher mental functions: perception, action, language, and planning
      • Basal ganglia - help regulate motor performance
      • Hippocampus - involved with aspects of memory storage
      • Amygdala - coordinates autonomic and endocrine responses in the context of emotional states