Rita Carter; Mapping the Mind
Book	Page		Topic
Carter; Mapping the Mind	16		Limbic System main modules - hypothalamus, amygdala, thalamus, putamen, caudate nucleus, hippocampus
Carter; Mapping the Mind	24		Phineas Gage		8
Carter; Mapping the Mind	26		Scanning the brain, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging fMRI, positron emission topography PET, magnetoencephalography (MEG)		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	29		Neurotransmitters -- dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine (ACh), noradrenaline, glutamate, enkephalins, endorphins		3
Carter; Mapping the Mind	29		Dopamine pathways		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	29		Serotonin pathways		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	34		Two hemispheres of brain.		5
Carter; Mapping the Mind	35		Auditory input is processed on the opposite side of the brain to the ear through which it enters.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	37		With left hemisphere damage, a patient will draw an outline that is fine, but the details are neglected.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	37		With right hemisphere damage, a patient  will draw only the details.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	40		Corpus callosum is a thick band of axons that connects the two hemispheres.		3
Carter; Mapping the Mind	41		Left/right hemisphere split often shows up in our reactions to art.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	42		Human species got where it is largely by  forming complex social constructs.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	43		Visual information flows back and forth between two hemispheres, so each side of the brain has the full picture.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	45		Anterior commissure lies below the corpus callosum.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	46		Lefthandedness		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	48		Split-brain patients		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	57		Tourette's syndrome showed significant activity in three brain areas: (1) dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is concerned with generating appropriate action, (2) basal ganglia, which is concerned with the control of automatic movements, (3) anterior cingulate cortex, which is concerned with focusing attention on actions.		9
Carter; Mapping the Mind	59		Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) a loop of activity in the brain.  It runs between the (1) caudate, which triggers the urge to do something, through the (2) orbital prefrontal cortex, which gives the feeling that something is wrong, and back to the (3) cingulate cortex, which keeps attention fixed on the feeling of unease.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	59		In OCD, the urges are more complicated than in Tourette's.  Instead of being compelled to shout a word or move a limb in a particular way, people with OCD are driven to carry out complicated routines to still an ever present feeling of unsettlement or doubt.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	61		Caudate nucleus is closely connected to the amygdala, which gives rise to feelings of fear.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	62		OCD associated with overactivity in the caudate.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	62		Tics are created by flurries of activity in the putamen.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	62		Feelings of dissatisfaction may be brought about by low dopamine levels.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	62		Eating disorders may be due to faults in the hypothalamus.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	63		Brain uses a carrot-and-stick system to ensure that we pursue and achieve the things we need to survive.  A stimulus from the outside or from the body is registered by the limbic system, which creates an urge, which registers consciously as desire.  The cortex then instructs the body to act in whatever way is necessary to achieve its desire.  The activity sends messages back to the limbic system, which release opioid-like neurotransmitters, which raise circulating dopamine levels and create a feeling of satisfaction.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	65		Hypothalamus is a cluster of nuclei, each of which helps to control our bodily urges and appetites.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	66		Lateral and ventromedial nuclei of the hypothalamus act like ON and OFF switches for appetite.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	67		Dopamine connection		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	68		Addiction		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	70		Typical male/female sexual responses are brought about by separate parts of the hypothalamus.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	71		Sexual brain		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	73		Direct stimulation of the temporal lobe can produce strong erotic feelings.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	73		Is very 'gay brain'?		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	75		Brain's 'Touch map' -- area associated with genitals is about as large as the rest of the chest, abdomen and back put together. --  Somatosensory cortex.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	76		Oxytocin floods the brain during orgasm.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	81		If the neural pathways from the limbic system to the cortex are blocked or severed, emotions cannot register.		5
Carter; Mapping the Mind	82		Emotional stimuli are registered by the amygdala.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	83		Just as three primary colors can produce an almost infinite range of hues, so a handful of basic emotions are mixed to produce complex feelings.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	84		Emotions need to be expressed to influence other people.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	86		Voluntary smile circuit; Spontaneous smile circuit.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	88		Human faces can express a vast range of emotions.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	91		Emotional information is sent to the conscious brain and the amygdala via two routes.  The path to the amygdala is shorter, so emotional reactions are faster than conscious ones.		3
Carter; Mapping the Mind	92		Lack of normal brain activity is typical of violent criminals.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	93		Amygdala is underactive in people with psychopathic tendencies.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	96		Thalamus receives stimulus and shunts it to amygdala and visual cortex.  Amygdala triggers fast physical reaction.		3
Carter; Mapping the Mind	98		Emotional brain.  More neural traffic rises up from the the limbic system than down from the cortex.  Emotional part of our brain has more power to influence behavior than the rational part.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	99		Brain of a depressed person shows less activity than that of someone who is healthy.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	101		Depressed person is without drive or desire to do anything, yet abnormally fixated on their intense emotional state.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	102		Brain areas overactive in depression form a vicious circle of negative feeling.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	103		Anatomy of joy		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	104		For years, scientists have documented a connection between mania, depression and creativity.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	104		Tennyson family tree		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	105		Creative life of Robert Schumann		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	106		Brain's raw material is information.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	111		Recognition		5
Carter; Mapping the Mind	112		Visual cortex: V1, General scanning; V2, stereo vision; V3, depth and distance; V4, color; V5, motion; V6 determines objective position of object.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	112		"Where" path:  V1 -- V2 -- V3 -- V5 -- V6		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	112		"What" path:  V1 -- V2  -- V4		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	113		Neural pathways that convey sound information to different parts of the brain.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	114		Smell goes straight to the limbic system, a fast route to the brain's emotional center.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	115		Vast majority of the cortex is given over to sensory processing -- only the frontal lobes are dedicated to non-sensual tasks.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	115		All incoming sensory information (except smell) goes first to the thalamus.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	115		Thalamus acts as a relay station, shunting incoming data onto appropriate cortical areas for processing.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	117		Recognizing someone is a process, most of which is done unconsciously.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	123		Cortical "who?" recognition pathway ends in the frontal area with the conscious acknowledgment that a person is familiar.		6
Carter; Mapping the Mind	126		Phantom limbs are commonly felt for a long time after the real limb has been amputated.		3
Carter; Mapping the Mind	127		Many people hear apparently divine messages when they are in a state of excitement or stress.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	127		Phantom tastes and smells are well documented.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	127		Imaginary smells are a common feature in early Parkinson's disease.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	127		People who are depressed often report they can smell themselves or have a bad taste in their mouth.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	129		Patterns in the mind -- hallucinations, sounds, noises, voices;     distinguish between externally and internally generated stimuli.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	130		Illusions		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	136		Language allows us to juggle ideas in a uniquely creative way.		6
Carter; Mapping the Mind	138		Language areas of the brain are mainly in the left hemisphere.     Wernicke's area makes spoken language comprehensible.     Broca's area generates speech and may contain a "grammar module."     Annular gyrus is concerned with meaning.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	145		Animal noises, including Birdsong, differ from language in that they are largely hardwired and generated by the unconscious brain		7
Carter; Mapping the Mind	145		Music		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	147		Words and music are processed in different parts of the brain.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	148		Brain responds differently to a word according to whether (1) hearing it spoken, (2) seeing it written down, (3) speaking it, (4) considering which other words it relates to.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	149		Switch in brain activity from the language areas to the parietal lobes where spatial tasks are processed.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	150		Reading activates part of the visual cortex.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	150		Listening to speech makes the auditory cortex light up.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	150		Thinking about words makes Broca's area -- the articulation center -- light up.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	150		Thinking about words and speaking generates widespread activity.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	152		Some types of dyslexia may be due to what is known as a dislocation disorder -- a missing or inactive connection between two brain modules.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	153		Reading and writing involves more than just the language areas -- visual cortex feeds information in; the motor cortex is required to activate muscles for writing.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	154		In the human brain, the area that processes language in the left hemisphere is larger than the equivalent area in the right hemisphere.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	155		Stuttering may be due to competition for dominance between left and right hemispheres.  Neither side can decide which is in control, so that both try to produce words.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	157		Gossip -- the need to swap information about each other.  Evolution of hominid brain.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	158		Human brain holds billions of impressions, called memories.  At night, memory fragments are replayed and reassembled.  Each run-through etches them deeper into the neural structure until there comes a time when memories and a person who holds them are effectively one and the same.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	161		Human memory systems -- diagram		3
Carter; Mapping the Mind	165		Wilder Penfield's investigations of memory.  Dots show the places where stimulation elicited snatches of memory.		4
Carter; Mapping the Mind	166		Hippocampus is activated when people are asked to recall personal or 'episodic' memories.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	166		Finding your way around a familiar place involves the hippocampus, but only on the right side.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	166		False memories		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	169		H. M. amnesia		3
Carter; Mapping the Mind	171		William H. Calvin, University of Washington at Seattle		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	171		Jung said that dreaming goes on continuously, but you can't see it when you're awake.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	172		Brain tissue removed from HM's brain included the hippocampus -- diagram		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	173		As Alzheimer's disease progresses, the brain shrivels and shrinks.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	175		Brain has 100 trillion connections joining billions of neurons, so the memory capacity of the human brain is effectively infinite.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	175		Some people are able to memorize vast amounts of information by using various mnemonic tricks.  If you cannot remember a fact, link it to a meaningful memory.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	176		Alzheimer's disease first area to go tends to be the hippocampus.  People with Alzheimer's dementia often get lost.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	176		In semantic dimentia the temporal lobe is affected first, so people tend to forget general things like the names of objects.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	176		Memories are groups of neurons that fire together in the same pattern each time they are activated.  The links between individual neurons, which bind them into a single memory, are formed through a process called long-term potentiation (LTP).		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	176		Sematic dementia, which involves loss of factual memory rather than loss of personal memory, destroys the cortical area of the temporal lobe first, where semantic memories are thought to be stored.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	178		In Alzheimer's disease, plaques of an insoluble protein fragment, beta amyloid, accumulate in the cleft between neurons, blocking communication.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	180		Frontal lobes are where ideas are created, plans constructed, thoughts join with their associations to form new memories, fleeting perceptions held in mind until they are dispatched to long-term memory.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	181		Where, precisely, do I feel that "I" am centered?		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	181		Symptoms of schizophrenia, depression, mania, and Attention Deficit Disorder are mainly due to frontal lobe disorder.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Orbitofrontal cortex, prefrontal cortex, ventromedial cortex, anterior cingulate cortex (diagram).		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Orbitofrontal cortex -- inhibits inappropriate actions, allowing us to defer immediate reward in favor of long-term advantage.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex -- things are held in mind here and manipulated to form plans and concepts.  This area seems to choose to do one thing rather than another.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Ventromedial cortex -- where emotions are experienced and  meaning is bestowed on our perceptions.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Anterior cingulate cortex -- helps to focus attention.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Frontal cortex has enlarged dramatically during our transition from hominid to human and makes up about 28% of the cortical area of the human brain.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Back part of the frontal lobe is given over to parts of the brain that allow us to take physical action.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Language area (Broca area) which articulates speech, and the motor cortex, which controls movement.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Just in front of the motor cortex is a strip called the premotor cortex, or Supplementary Motor Area (SMA), where proposed actions are rehearsed before they are actually carried out.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Binding perceptions into a unified whole.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Prefrontal cortex -- this is the only part of the brain that is free from the constant labor of sensory processing.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	182		Think rather than daydream  -- prefrontal cortex springs into life, and we are jettisoned into full consciousness.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	183		Phineas Gage -- self-awareness, personal responsibility, purposefulness, meaning.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	183		Functional brain imaging has proved spectacularly successful.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	183		Although consciousness emerges from the cortex, it requires an entire brain to support it.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	183		Brainstem, midbrain, and thalamus are essential to support consciousness because they are part of a system that directs and controls conscious attention by shunting neurotransmitters to various parts of the cortex.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	184		A person in a deep coma may lock onto a moving target, so they may seem to be watching those who pass by. They might clutch at things and grimace when pricked with a pin. These actions are purely reflex but nevertheless deeply disturbing for those who see them.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	184		Blindsight is the ability of people to see things without being conscious that they are seeing them.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	184		Blindsight first came to light on the battlefields of the First World War when blinded soldiers were seen to.duck bullets even though they had no idea they were doing so.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	184		Blindsight is easiest to detect in people with a form of blindness caused by damage to the primary visual cortex (V1).		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	185		Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) -- lack of concentration, short attention span, physical restlessness.  So disruptive the normal play and schooling is impossible for them		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	185		Amphetamine-type drugs, which raise the level of excitatory neurotransmitters in the cortex, reduce ADHD.  The cortical activity they produce inhibit the limbic system, substituting thought for action and producing more controlled and focused behavior.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	186		Attention		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	188		Working memory		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	189		Skilled tennis and cricket players have hit a speeding ball before its existence can possibly be registered by the cortex, may be due to blindsight.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	189		Reflex actions seen in people in vegetative comas		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	189		Reflex actions do not involve cortical activity.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	190		Short-term memory		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	191		For a perception to be laden with emotion as well as sensory content, a parallel processing pathway must run from the limbic system (especially the amygdala) to the frontal lobe.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	191		At its most extreme, low frontal activity may result in catatonia, a state in which people fail completely to respond to their surroundings.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	191		Thinking is not just a generic term for the collection of skills housed in the brain.  It involves many of them: recollection and imagining in particular.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	192		Thought processing is done consciously.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	192		Thinking requires a degree of attention, a focusing of activity in which irrelevant stimuli are ignored.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	192		Two types of attention: (1) automatic engagement of the senses that occurs when your eye is caught by a flash of movement, (2) deliberate turning of the mind to a subject.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	192		Attention is created by a flood of neurotransmitters that turns important areas ON and unimportant ones OFF.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	192		Autism		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	195		Many brain regions are involved in directing and controlling attention.		3
Carter; Mapping the Mind	195		One brain region controlling attention that is especially concerned with holding internally generated stimuli in focus is the anterior cingulate cortex, a region on the inside front edge of the longitudinal fissure, the deep chasm that runs from the front of the brain to the back.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	195		Anterior cingulate cortex is sensitive to information from the body and it is fiercely active when a person feels pain, and also becomes active when we are conscious of emotion.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	195		Thinking -- holding ideas in mind and manipulating them -- takes place in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  This is the location of the closely related activity, working memory.  Planning takes place in this area.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	196		The ability to make a plan of action is useless without the ability to carry it through..  Phineas Gage made a dozen plans a day and was unable to follow any of them through.  Essential requirement for following through a plan is to put aside things that are immediately attractive in favor of those that further a long term strategy.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	196		Neural ability for long-term strategy seems to be located in the orbitofrontal cortex -- the region that lies behind the bridge of the nose and continues beneath the bottom curve of the brain.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	196		Basic drives, urges and desires that motivate behavior come from the unconscious brain and are essentially reflexive, automatic responses to environmental stimuli.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	197		Children find it more difficult to resist their impulses, partly because they have yet to learn that self-control is generally a useful strategy, and also because the prefrontal lobes are very slow to mature.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	197		Until the prefrontal lobes are fully functional -- which may not be until a person is in their 20s -- the limbic system is a stronger force  A child does not have as much free will as an adult.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	197		Orbitofrontal cortex has rich neural connections to the unconscious brain where drives and emotions are generated.  The down signals from the cortex inhibit reflex clutching and grabbing.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	197		Orbitofrontal cortex appears to be the area of the brain that bestows a quality we may refer to as free will.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	197		Depression is marked by wide-ranging symptoms but the cardinal feature is a draining of meaning from life.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	197		In a state of mania a person is euphoric, full of energy, in a state of high creativity -- connections they see between things, which are all often invisible or overlooked by others, are often used by them to make new concepts.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	197		Area of the brain that is most noticeably affected in both depression and mania is an area on the lower part of the internal surface of the prefrontal cortex -- the ventromedial cortex.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	197		Ventromedial cortex is the brain's emotional control center.  It is exceptionally active during bouts of mania, and inactive during depression.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	197		Connections between the ventromedial cortex and the limbic system beneath it are very dense, closely binding the conscious mind with the unconscious.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	197		The connections between the ventromedial cortex and the limbic system has a special status -- this region best incorporates the whole of our being, making sense of our perceptions and binding them into a meaningful whole.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	198		Neglect		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	199		Neglect is best understood as a deficit of attention.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	201		The story of Phineas Gage emphasizes that morality, free will and responsibility for one's actions are rooted in the biology of the brain.		2
Carter; Mapping the Mind	202		Depression, mania, and schizophrenia are marked by changes in the activity of the frontal lobe.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	202		Paranoia -- a state in which everything seems to be linked together and some grand scheme.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	202		Mania, in behavioral terms, is the "sunny" side of paranoia.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	202		Paranoid delusions of schizophrenia also revolve around mysterious linkages, but the grand scheme is usually sinister rather than glorious.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	202		Aggressive and violent behavior.  Heavy neural down-traffic from the cortex inhibits the amygdala and prevents emotion from rising to consciousness.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	202		Throughout history, groups of individuals (usually young men) have violently attacked other members of society.  In this state they can carry out horrific acts of violence without being restrained by normal feelings of fear and disgust.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	203		Roger Penrose of Oxford University believes that nonbiological machines can never cross the chasm between computation and understanding.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	203		Roger Penrose has the strong feeling that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	204		Consciousness -- not a thing but a process -- Francis Crick, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	204		Biological usefulness of visual consciousness in humans is to produce the best current interpretation of the visual scene in light of past experience (either our own, or that of our ancestors embodied in our genes), and to make this interpretation directly available for sufficient time to the parts of the brain that contemplate and plan voluntary motor output such as movements or speech.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	205		Although working memory expands the timeframe of consciousness, it is not obvious that it is essential.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	205		Episodic memory, enabled by the hippocampal system, is not essential for consciousness.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	205		Attention is caused either by sensory input or by the planning parts of the brain.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	205		Actions seem to be the result of preprogramming.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	206		People with frontal lobe damage respond to cues in idiosyncratic or preconditions ways.		1
Carter; Mapping the Mind	206		Men with frontal damage damage often exhibit sexual aggression in response to what they see as sexual cues.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	206		One man changed from a lovable and gentle man to a 'sexual, over forceful pest who will not take no for an answer'.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	206		These modern-day Phineas Gages do not choose their fate.  In any normal meaning of the word, they cannot be said to possess free will.		0
Carter; Mapping the Mind	207		Some illusions are programmed so firmly in our brains that the mere knowledge that they are false does not stop us from seeing them.		1