the self and the brain

• Freud (19th century) The mind is divided into irreconcilable parts. Much of its content and process is inaccessible to awareness. • Experimental study of cognition (20th century) Much of our learning and memory is implicit. We have poor awareness of mental processes. Our awareness of mental activity develops well after its actual onset. Scientific work in the 20th century has destroyed ideas about the unity and accessibility of the mind. The view that has emerged is of the mind as a collection of interacting sub-systems, some relatively autonomous, some more associative, all working in parallel.

Gall believed in functionally specialized brain areas corresponding to elements of personality or character. He also (erroneously) believed that their size, as indicated by the corresponding protrusion on the skull, indicated the relative prominence of that character or trait in the individual

participates in vision processing. It processes and interprets everything we see.

vision, touch, attention, action

action, working memory, emotion, executive function

hearing, language, memory, vision

the semi permeable membrane that encloses the neuron

the short processes emanating from the cell body, which receive most of the synaptic contacts from other neurons

the cone shaped region at the junction between the axon and cell body

the long, narrow process that projects from the cell body

the metabolic center of the neuron; also called the soma The cell body pools the information arriving via dendrites and produces activation that travels down the axon to affect other cells.

the fatty insulin around many axons

the gaps between sections of the myelin

the button like endings of the axon branches, which release chemicals into the synapses

the gaps between adjacent neurons across which chemical signals are transmitted

which we will encounter when when studying emotion.

a bundle of some 200 million axons that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The corpus callosum is essential to the coordinated operation of the mind as we know it because the two hemispheres have significant divisions of labour between them.

• Homotopic connections - heterotopic connections

are between spatially analogous locations across the hemispheres

connect cells from one area of one hemisphere to another area of the other hemisphere.

between neurons that link areas within the same hemisphere.

In some cases, they allow the functional areas in the two hemispheres to cooperate. This happens in vision, for example, where some cortical neurons have receptive fields that span both visual hemifields connections

Callosotomy has a good record of helping patients leave behind their debilitating condition and return to some semblance of normality. The aftermath of the procedure also presents an excellent opportunity to experimentally study what a mind divided along the hemispheres is like.

• The corpus callosum is essential to the coordinated operation of the mind as we know it because the two hemispheres have significant divisions of labour between them. • it is beneficial to know as much as possible about the patient’s hemispheric specialisation of critical psychological functioning to avoid chance of tissue damage during operation