So here we are, our first real post. Are you excited, because
I am. So today we’re going to talk about brain damage. “What the heck?” You ask
incredulously, why would anyone interested in psychology care about brain
damage. (Hopefully you’re interested in psychology and not stalking random
blogs). Brain damage is very important to the field of psychology because it
helped us realize that different areas of the brain had different functions. So
what is brain damage, what does it mean when someone has brain damage? Most
people can’t correctly describe what having brain damage does to a person, but
they’ll use it to describe all kinds of people, like this Bill Cosby video.
Brain damage produces
an inability to recognize faces, to perceive motion, a shift of attention to
the right side of the body and world, increase or decrease hunger, memory
impairment, changes in emotional responses and other effects. Although we can
study the effects in humans, and get great results, those studies are limited.
One limit is that few people have damage that is confined to just one area of
the brain. Another is that no one has the exact same kind of damage. So to
better understand brain damage, scientists have turned to producing damage to
the brains of lab animals. To do this, scientists employ several research
techniques to study the effects that they cause to the brain. One us an
ablation, which is a removal of an area of the brain with a surgical knife. However
there are problems involving the tiny structures below the surface of the
brain. So scientists employ another technique called a lesion, where they
create the damage. To create that damage, they use a stereotaxic instrument. To
create the lesion, the scientists anesthetize the animal, drill a hole in their
skull, insert and electrode and pass an electric current that is sufficient
enough to cause damage to the area. A couple more techniques that are used are
the gene-knockout approach and transcranial magnetic stimulation. Although
studying brain damage yields interesting results, scientists encounter a
problem, and that is that they must specify the exact behavioral deficit. For
them to even try to narrow down the possibilities, they would need to perform
several other behavioral tests. But that’s a topic for another day. So that’s all
the time we have today, I hope this was in some way interesting to you and you learned
something new. Hopefully you weren’t bored halfway through this post and left,
but if you did read through the whole post, thank you for taking the time to do
so.
