John Ratey; User's Guide to the Brain
Book	Page		Topic
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	10		Trajectory of Evolution (diagram)
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	14		Development		4
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	48		Perception		34
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	54		Network synapses  that frequently participate in neural  activity end up as strong, permanent members of the neural network, whereas rarely used synapses wither away and die.		6
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	54		Brain's network structure aligns itself with the information that it  receives, so how it perceives that information determines its future functionality.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	54		"Use it, or lose it" -- use the senses and their neurons or lose them forever to premature death or to be recruited for another function.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	54		Brain is constantly receiving information about its current state, both from the senses, concerning events in the environment, and from internal messages about the position of the body, its level of arousal, the activities of various organs, and the chemical and nutritive state of the blood.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	54		Brain seeks to maintain a condition of internal constancy (homeostasis).		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	63		Smell accounts for much of what we taste.		9
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	63		Tastebuds on our tongues detect the presence of sugars, salts acids, and bases (sweet, salty, sour, and bitter).		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	63		Hearing, a small part of vision, touch, and taste all enter through the brainstem and are passed up to the thalamus.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	63		From the thalamus, millions of neural networks transfer signals to regions of the cortex specialized for each sense.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	63		From the thalamocortical circuits, signals are sent on for further processing to the limbic system.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	63		Limbic system often adds an emotional tag; it calls up memories and may initiate a bodily response.		d
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	63		Given the complexity of visual and auditory information, the brain tries to make sense of fine details before making decisions.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	63		Olfactory nerves project directly into the amygdala and olfactory cortex without mediation through the thalamus.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	63		Olfactory nerves have a hotline to the emotional brain, and only then is the information sent to the orbitofrontal cortex for more associating, and further processing.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	64		Sensing molecules in the air begins high within each nostril in the olfactory epithelium which contains olfactory receptors.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	64		Olfactory system recognizes certain smells from birth, notably ones that signal danger, such as those of rotting foods.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	64		Humans are capable of recognizing and differentiating as many is 10,000 odors.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	64		Olfactory system is similar to the immune system in that it is capable of recognizing a virtually unlimited range of molecular signals.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	65		Limbic system contains the brain's pleasure centers, many of which can be activated by the scents of food and sex.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	65		Brain's reward center is central to learning and provides a motivation for doing something or the sense of feeling satisfied.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	65		Olfactory apparatus is wired directly to the brain's pleasure centers that determines pleasure and disgust. It is a powerful trigger that can motivate us very quickly and directly, without the associations or abstract thinking necessary to respond to vision or hearing.  It is simple, direct, and powerful.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	65		Many species use pheromone signals to direct essential behaviors such as mating, feeding, flight, combat, and nurturing the young.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	65		Pheromones can be detected in extremely small quantities over long distances.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	65		Humans emit pheromones in all body fluids.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	66		Over sensitivity of the amygdala has been implicated in anxiety, panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	66		Olfactory projections also found in the hypothalamus, the brain's hormonal center, which is responsible for the fight-or-flight response.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	67		Somatosensory System (diagram)		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	68		Epilepsy that starts in the limbic area is notorious for overwhelming the sufferer with strange or overtly foul odors and tastes during a seizure.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	68		Very few individuals are capable of "imagining" smells very well.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	89		Much of the processing by the auditory system -- much more than for the other senses -- is accomplished long before we are conscious of it.		21
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	89		In the waystations along the path from the ear to the point when we become aware of them, the sound signals are adjusted and refined.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	92		Auditory System (diagram)		3
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	93		Once the ear processes incoming sound, the auditory information is sent to the brainstem through the auditory nerve, which has only about 25,000 nerve fibers -- very few compared with the billions of neurons involved in touch or vision.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	93		Auditory information must be assessed in the ear before it is sent to the cortex.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	93		In the brainstem, sounds are sorted according to tone and Into units defined by timbre, or the quality of the sound.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	100		Vision System (diagram)		7
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	110		Attention and Consciousness		10
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	112		Rudolfo Llinás, Chief of Physiology and Neuroscience, New York University School of Medicine.		2
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	112		Brain is a powerful prediction machine, continuously making elaborate mental maps of the world that are reliable enough for us to predict what lies ahead, both in space and in time.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	112		All animals that move most have some predictive power.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	113		For an animal to move and interact with its surroundings, it must coordinate its muscles with what it sees, hears, and feels. In primates the command center for this activity is in the ventral premotor cortex.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	113		Brain constructs maps of its surroundings; subsets of neurons interact in the background to maintain those maps.  When new data comes in, the neurons reconfigure the maps.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	114		Reaction to stimuli, ongoing interaction between neurons, and predictive maps of the world all work together to create consciousness.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	114		Before we can be conscious of something, we have to pay attention.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		Scientists have identified four distinct components within the attention system: (1) arousal, (2) motor orientation, (3) novelty detection and reward, (4) executive organization.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		At the lowest level of monitoring, the brainstem maintains our vigilance -- our general degree of arousal.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		Brain's motor centers allows us to physically reorient bodies so that we can immediately redirect our senses to possible new threats or reward sources.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		Limbic system accomplishes both novelty detection and reward.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		Cortex -- especially the frontal lobes -- commands action and reaction and integrates our attention with short- and long-term goals.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		Arousal is the ability to suddenly increase alertness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		Fear is still a good arouser.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		As humans learn to think with greater abstraction, the novelty from within the forum of internal thoughts also excites arousal.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		Arousal is controlled by the reticular activating system, which connects the frontal lobes, limbic system, brainstem, and sense organs.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		Incoming information from the senses, or thoughts, can arouse us, and depending on its startle value, it alerts the rest of the arousal circuit.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		Hippocampus -- a key player in memory -- also communicates with the reticular activating system.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		In actions of survival, the second step after startling is to orient the body -- and specifically the body's sense organs -- toward the novel object in question.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		Like the arousal system, motor orientation is basically involuntary.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	115		We do not need to think before we perk up our ears or turn our heads.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	116		Mesolimbic pathway (a group of dopamine containing neurons), which is a key driver of the limbic system.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	116		Limbic system is integral not only to attention but to many other brain functions, notably emotion and social brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	116		Detecting novelty and seeking reward are two primary forces that direct the selection of where to focus our attention.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	116		Reward system produces sensations of pleasure, assigning an emotional value to a stimulus, which also marks it for memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	119		Attention System and its Dysfunctions (diagram)		3
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	125		Addiction Pathway (diagram)		6
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	130		Most humans can easily manipulate their own focus of attention.		5
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	130		Objects outside the periphery lose their distinguishing features, falling out of our consciousness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	130		Attention, memory, and consciousness build upon one another to give us higher-order cognition.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	130		Many ADHD patients describe their conscious experience as a blur, or as filled with static.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	130		Some researchers say that our attention spotlight is driven by the relationship between working memory and long-term memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	130		Working memory is a significant part of the executive function of the prefrontal cortex.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	130		Systems that handle working memory are located in the frontal lobe, right in front of the areas concerned with motion and process.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	130		Systems that handle working memory rely on the long-term memory system to encode the information via the hippocampus and other parts of the cortex		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	131		Working memory holds small amounts of information for only a few seconds at a time.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	131		Working memory allows us to remember a telephone number long enough to dial the phone.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	131		Without mental rehearsal of the information, we lose the contents of working memory within a few seconds.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	131		Information in long-term memory remains reliable over extended periods.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	131		We use working memory to conceptualize immediately occurring events and long-term memory to direct the present and plan for the future.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	131		Working memory is brain's RAM or rapid access memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	131		Working memory is a space where many things can be held together and manipulated, so we can process them, evaluate them, rehearse them, make decisions about them.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	131		Both working memory and long-term memory are necessary for [human-type] consciousness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	132		Working memory and long-term memory allow us to prioritize certain stimuli over others by keeping the less important issues circulating in the background, though at the ready to be called upon.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	132		Importance of memory systems to consciousness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	133		Difficult to distinguish clearly between attention and consciousness.  We can know and remember things even when we are not paying attention to them, or are not even "conscious" of them.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	133		Two different brain states each day -- waking and sleeping.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	133		Attention, memory, and consciousness collaborate to create different states.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	133		During both waking and sleeping, there is an ongoing den in the cortex.  Neurons are constantly interacting with each other, even if they are not currently being called upon to perform a specific duty.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	133		Rudolfo Llinás at New York University has discovered that all areas of the cortex emit a steady level of noise, or oscillation, at a frequency of about 40 Hz.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	133		Some areas of the cortex, humming along at 40 Hz, are phase locked, meaning there oscillations are in unison; they keep the same beat.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	134		Llinás and other researchers have suggested that the neurons perform in synchrony because they follow a kind of conductor in the brain. The prime candidate for the conductor's function is the many intralamina nuclei, located deep within the thalamus.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	134		Intralamina nuclei of the thalamus receive and project long axons to many areas of the brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	134		Information flowing back and forth between the intralamina nuclei of the thalamus and the rest of the brain modulates itself, setting up a regular loop of electrical activity oscillating to a synchronized beat of ~40 Hz.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	134		During waking there are large burst of electrical activity in every brain region, in addition to the steady 40 Hz oscillation.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	134		During non-dreaming sleep, the intralaminar nuclei are inactive; there is no 40 Hz oscillation.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	134		During dream sleep (REM sleep), the 40 Hz background oscillation returns, and is again accompanied by heavy regional activity, similar to that which occurs during waking.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	134		In dreaming, the cortex activates itself purely from within.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	134		Internal inputs such as thoughts come from everywhere and the brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	134		Where in the brain does sensory input go to become conscious experience?  The answer is, nowhere and everywhere, but the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus are a crucial part of the system.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	135		Consciousness (diagram)		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	135		One of the most appealing explanations for consciousness is the proposal that the recurrent network set up between the thalamus and the cortex is the neurology of consciousness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	135		The thalamus is connected to the cortex by the intralamina nuclei, which project long axons to all areas of the cerebral hemispheres.    These areas in turn send backprojections to the same intralamina nuclei,    and when the circuit is humming with a steady oscillation,    consciousness may result.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	135		It is only when the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus can synchronize the brain's neural networks that we become conscious.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	135		When the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus recruit enough neuronal assemblies (gestalts), the oscillations become ordered.  They then spread their influence, co-opting more networks to join them, and consciousness arises and widens.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	136		During sleep, the 40 Hz oscillation is gone. The intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus are "idle."		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	136		If we are knocked unconscious, it disturbs the electrical synchrony of the feedback loops that maintained brain's neural circuits.  Until the intralaminar nuclei can recover and get the 40 Hz feedback going again, the brain cannot regain consciousness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	136		Consciousness is the sustained, synchronized ~40 Hz electrical oscillation among the brain circuits.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	136		Research has shown that it the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus are damaged, the person enters a deep and irreversible coma.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	136		If the damage to the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus occurs in only one hemisphere, the individual does not become comatose, but does lose the power of awareness of half his body.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	136		Although one entire side of the body may be paralyzed, a patient dramatically fails to perceive this and often rigorously denies that he is disabled in any way.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	142		Through everyday life, certain neuronal groups are selected to thrive while  others die owing to lack of use.		6
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	142		Infants show selective attention and preferences from birth.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	142		Values are the basic biases and tendencies that allow an individual to give meaning to experiences.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	142		Each newborn must create its own particular understanding of the world.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	142		Each individual throughout life continually reinforces, adds to, and sometimes changes his view of the world.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	142		Basic unit of the selective process is not the individual neurons but the neuronal group.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	142		There are perhaps 100 million neuronal groups in the brain, and they range in size from 50 to 10,000 neurons.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	142		Neurons are only effective in groups,    working toward a single goal,    such as discriminating color    or producing emotion.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	142		By virtue of their size, neuronal groups can compensate for individual cell deaths.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	143		Edelman's most important concept is that of reentrant signaling.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	143		Reentrant signaling is the communication between maps that allows us to construct complex perceptual concepts such as "chair."		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	143		Reentrant signaling is necessary because, although we were born with rudimentary abilities such as detecting color and movement, our perception of objects must be actively created.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	143		Our ability to recognize an object according to its value, labeled name, and meaning is not  innate.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	143		The different pieces of a concept are transported back and forth between regions in the brain, until they resonate with each other -- sustained at the 40 Hz oscillation -- and lock in the idea of the concept such as "chair."		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	143		Many maps that are created are inventoried by the cerebellum, basal ganglia, and hippocampus. These three areas keep track of maps everywhere else in the brain.  Together, they form a kind of supermap which contains multiple local maps.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	143		Cerebellum, basal ganglia, and hippocampus create a system of interconnections for whole categories of information, as well as patterns of motor activity.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	143		End result of the complex value system of loop-within-a-loop layers of maps is the infinite variety of each person's thoughts and behaviors.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	143		Your concept that "chair-hood" in the brain is a global rather than a localized affair.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	143		Each region of the brain contributes to the recognition of a 'chair,' which explains why recognition can be triggered by a number of different sensory elements.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	144		Ability to make the leap from these different sensory elements to the global concept is what Cubist painters depend on in their fractioned images.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	144		Edelman's biological theory of consciousness seems to succeed where past models have failed.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	144		Develop our self conceptions through experience over time.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	144		Attention is the formal director of consciousness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	147		Movement		3
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	152		In obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), there is a "locking" of the neural circuits from the basal ganglia up through the anterior cingulate gyrus and the orbitofrontal cortex.		5
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	152		Anterior cingulate tells the orbitofrontal cortex what it should pay attention to, while the orbitofrontal cortex itself identifies what seems to be an error in behavior.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	152		Typical OCDer is a perfectionist who is interminably searching for error.  All of these concerns have roots in the motor system of the frontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and the basal ganglia.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	152		In Tourette's syndrome, there is a combination of obsession and compulsions, with tics and rituals.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	152		Neuroscientists now think that a key area involved with a troubling tic it is the caudate nucleus, part of the striatum, which acts like a gear shift for the attention system.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	153		Bizarre involuntary muscle movements of chorea.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	153		Tourette's disease and OCD are related disorders.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	154		Brain uses the same machinery for many overlapping functions.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	156		Only an organism that moves from place to place requires a brain.		2
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	157		While the sensory cortex, located just behind the primary motor area, provides a significant source of input to the motor cortex,    a great deal of information about our thoughts, past experiences, emotions, and stored memories also floods into the motor areas, contributing meaning, depth, and complexity to our movements and actions.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	158		Parallel handling of motor and cognitive functions helps when we have trouble mastering one or the other.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	158		Sometimes you may have been unable to solve a problem until you take a walk or go for a drive -- distinct motor acts governed by largely automatic programs.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	158		Often times it helps to talk out loud when they come across a complex or foreign word we don't recognize.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	159		Movement Brain (diagram)		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	160		Motor system allows us to shift back and forth    between deliberate and automatic movements    and deliberate and automatic cognition.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	160		The ability to shift back and forth between deliberate and automatic movements    allows us to perform many different tasks    at the same time.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	160		Hierarchical organization of the motor system.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	160		Shifting back and forth between deliberate and automatic functions.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	160		Brain stem and spinal cord    have the hardwired neuronal networks    responsible for internal fixed actions, such as maintaining heartbeat and reflexes.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	160		Basal ganglia and cerebellum are intermediate between the brainstem and the higher cortical areas.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	160		Motor cortex and premotor cortex    receive large amounts of information from other brain areas    and send out instructions to the musculoskeletal system and organs.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	160		Command center in the prefrontal cortex    deliberates, makes choices, and sends out the signals    that inhibit or excite the lower levels.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	161		Flow of communications between the levels    from brainstem to prefrontal cortex    is constant and reflective,    feeding back on itself as each moment advances,    so decisions and actions are as appropriate as they can be.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	161		Several brain centers    work in concert    to orchestrate a particular function.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	161		Vision is processed in the occipital lobe.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	161		Speech is processed in the temporal lobe.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	161		Areas of the brain heavily associated with executing particular functions are actually places where inputs converge from other brain areas, especially emotion, cognition, memory, and perception, before the brain determines which actions and behaviors it will order.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain			Coordinated sets of muscles produce a common component of many movements,    such as reaching,    while others would be added    to provide the fine tuning necessary to make movement unique,    e.g. grasping to pick up a paper clip.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	163		Motor Homunculus (diagram)		2
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	163		Cerebellum is Latin "little brain."		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	163		Information about body movement and position enters the cerebellum.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	163		Spatial orientation and posture.  The only reason you remain upright    and don't fall down because of gravity    is constant monitoring by the cerebellum.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	163		Cerebellum    adjusts postural responses    at the brain stem,    which sends messages down the spinal cord that control muscles.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	163		Cerebellum control    is being accomplished all the time,    without our being aware of it.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	163		Motor and premotor cortex control such things as specialized movements of the face and limbs, particularly manipulative movements involving the arm, hand, and fingers.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	164		When we are happy we smile, and when we smile we feel happier.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	164		One of the major emerging principles    in the neurology of the 1990s    is the notion that the feedback between the layers or levels of the brain    is bidirectional;    if you activate a lower level,    you will be priming an upper level,    and if you activate a higher level,    you will be priming a lower level.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	164		The well-connected motor cortex    guides complex actions    that require the coordination of several muscles.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	165		Professional violin player's brain.  Playing a stringed instrument involves considerable manual dexterity and sensory stimulation of the fingers of the left-hand.  MRIs reveal that the neuronal region representing the digits of the left-hand of string players is substantially larger than that in other people.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	165		Anterior cingulate gyrus appears to play a crucial role in initiation, motivation and goal-directed behaviors.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	165		Anterior cingulate gyrus is well connected with the amygdala    and other structures of the limbic system    that regulate our emotions, the fight-or-flight mechanism, and conditioned emotional learning.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	165		Anterior cingulate gyrus assesses how important something is,    determines an appropriate response,    and decides how quickly the response will be executed.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	165		New actions are planned using knowledge of sensory information and past experiences.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	168		In Parkinson's disease, the substantia nigra at the base of the brain stops producing dopamine.		3
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	168		Parkinson's disease can often be checked with the drug L-dopa.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	171		Motor function takes place under the influence of attention and emotion, which have evolved to rapidly size up and respond to eminent danger.		3
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	171		Attention and emotion are the primary processes that our bodies and brains use in the combined effort to thrive and survive in the face of continual challenge.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	171		Brains use attention to constantly survey our internal and external environments to determine what is important and what is not.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	171		Emotion provides a quick, general assessment of the situation that draws on powerful internal needs and values.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	171		The most fundamental attention system involves the fight-or-flight response.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	171		Autonomic nervous system oversees the body's vital functions through subconscious signals that originate in the anterior cingulate and are relayed to the hypothalamus and the spinal cord.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	171		Autonomic nervous system has two reciprocal and complementary branches:    the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems.    These have neurons that regulate the internal organs, such as the heart, lungs, stomach, and genitals.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	172		Autonomic nervous system frees up the cortex to pursue the conscious services of sight, speech, hearing, thinking, emotion, and voluntary movement.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	172		The instant after the amygdala shouts emergency, the parasympathetic nervous system ever so briefly suppresses the heart rate, breathing, and other internal functions.  It quiets all systems so that you can fully take in information and focus on perceiving and evaluating, and creates a bodily delay so the cortex can efficiently access the situation.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	172		Sympathetic nervous system drives up your blood pressure, pulse, and breathing, and produces adrenaline so your muscles can spin you around and prepare you for fight or flight.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	172		Hypothalamus directs the pituitary gland, the body's master gland, which secretes hormones affecting every major gland of the body. These systems activate the amygdala and the brainstem, triggering the sympathetic nervous system to put the body into overdrive.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	173		Some people who are prone to high anxiety    and yet must do things such as gives speeches    get help on drugs called beta-blockers.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	173		Beta-blockers block adrenaline    from pumping up in the large muscles    and also acts to lower blood pressure and pulse.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	173		Many actors say they welcome a touch of stage fright    because it "puts them own edge"    and gives their performances more passion and energy.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	174		Most incoming sensory information is sent first to the thalamus, which then relays it to the sensory and frontal lobes for detailed analysis and response.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	174		When emotionally charged information comes in,    the thalamus sends it on a more rapid pathway to the amygdala,    bypassing the upper brain's input since there is no time to think about how to respond.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	174		Amygdala uses primitive, general categorizations -- primary emotions -- to activate an immediate aggressive or defensive response.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	174		Specialized cortical networks in the right hemisphere and frontal lobes    are responsible for secondary emotions    and for modulating the more primal emotional responses of the amygdala and the limbic system.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	174		Humans and members of other species communicate emotions primarily through facial gestures.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	174		Expressions of emotion such as crying and laughing are controlled by the amygdala and brainstem.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	175		When a stroke patient is asked to smile, the person cannot move a side of the mouth.    However when told a joke, the person can laugh spontaneously.    Muscles can respond    to the automatic and implicitly learned responses in the basal ganglia.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	175		Brain's motor function affects so much more than just physical motion.  It is crucial to all of the brain functions -- perception, attention, emotion -- and so affects the highest cognitive processes of memory, thinking, and learning.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	176		Motor activity takes place in three stages.  First we analyze the incoming external and internal data.  Next we formulate and monitor a response plan.  Then we execute the plan.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	176		Ability to link information from motor, sensory, and memory association areas is crucial for thought processing and the ability to contemplate and plan future actions.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	176		Cerebellum is very much involved with the integration of information and the timeliness with which the information gets processed -- all crucial to thinking, learning, and memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	176		Gauging the oncoming traffic to judge when you can cross the street safely.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	176		Motor programs continually reorganize into sequences of motor movements that reflect what we learn each time, to lead to a well-thought-out and successful performance.  We are always modifying and learning through movement.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	176		Basal ganglia are heavily involved in Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease and are now being shown to have significant influence on thought and memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	176		Basal ganglia are believed to be the gatekeepers, or controllers,    of sensory influences on cognition    as well as motor control.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	176		When they are not working properly, structures of the basal ganglia fail to appropriately shut down certain movements and thoughts, which leads to irregular movements, tics, and obsessive-compulsive behavior.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	177		Precise burning of a small spot in one of the basal ganglia, the globus pallidus,    can provide relief from some of the tremors and muscle rigidity associated with Parkinson's disease.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	177		Sequencing is a motor activity    that involves manipulating and organizing the serial order of information    and integrating this information with previously learned data.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	177		Motor function affects the highest order of mental function:   self-awareness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	177		Self-awareness level of thinking is the ability of the human cognitive process to monitor itself and reflect not only immediate responses but on past and future potentials as well.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	177		Self-awareness requires mental rehearsal, imagery, thinking, decision-making, and voluntary actions.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	177		Humans have the ability to monitor and evaluate the self in a variety of mental settings based on prior experiences and the ability to project future outcomes.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	177		Neural basis for self-awareness includes cognitive action -- the human capacity for forming and manipulating imagined constructs.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	177		Movement, memory, and learning    are so closely interrelated    that it is difficult to talk about one without referring to the other.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	177		Learning,    like thinking,   requires the ability to sequence and manipulate    information and memories    in order to perform a new task.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	178		Learning, memory, and thought    require the manipulation of knowledge    about previously acquired knowledge.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	178		Within the first 5 or 6 hours    of practicing a new motor skill,    the brain shifts the new instructions    from short-term memory to the area responsible for permanent motor skills.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	179		When people initially learn a task,    the prefrontal cortex -- involved in short-term memory and many kinds of learning -- is relatively active.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	179		After 5 or 6 hours,    the neural links that form the brain's internal model of a task    shift from the prefrontal region    to the motor control region.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	179		Even without intervening practice,    after 5 or 6 hours    the brain's formula for a procedural task    is virtually hardwired into the brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	179		Research studies suggest that a newly learned skill can be impaired, confused, or even lost    if a person tries to learn a different motor task    during the critical 5 to 6 hour period,    when the brain is trying to stabilize the neural representation and retention    of the original task.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	179		Motor development in infants,    especially at the crawling stage,    has been found to be crucial in the development of learning readiness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	179		Motor development in infants greatly impacts reading and writing skills.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	179		Movement provides practice handling objects and interaction that is needed for visual development.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	179		Studies suggest that feedback is necessary to maximize learning.  The brain is exquisitely designed to operate on feedback, both internal and external.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	179		Substantia nigra is critically involved in the feedback process of learning.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	179		During the feedback process, the brain is self-referencing, which allows our interactions to provide constant feedback,    crucial to our ability to learn.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	180		Extensive linkages between movement and learning.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	180		Gesturing and pantomime speed up the process of learning to talk.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	180		Babies make certain gestures before they can say the corresponding words.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	180		Relationship between signing and vocal development.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	180		Children who signed were found to be significantly ahead of those who didn't in acquisition of vocabulary as well as in cognitive and IQ test.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	180		Signers showed high motivation to communicate and talked earlier than non-signers.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	180		Walking impacts human development as it facilitates cognition, spatial relations, communication, and social ability.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	180		Normal babies begin walking between the ages of nine and seventeen months.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	181		Highly intelligent social species such as wolves, bears, and dogs continue to play as adults as a way of cementing social bonds.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	182		Memory		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	185		We can know ourselves only because we can remember.		3
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	185		Memory is a central functionality that brings together learning, understanding, and consciousness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	186		A memory is only made when it is called upon.  In its quiescent state, memory is not detectable.  We cannot separate the act of retrieving and the memory itself.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	186		Bits and pieces of a single memory are stored in different networks of neurons all around the brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	186		Formation and recall of each memory are influenced by mood, surroundings, and gestalt at the time the memory is formed or retrieved.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	186		Memory changes as we change over time.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	186		Each memory arises from a vast network of interconnecting pieces.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	186		A memory is a tiny bit different each time we remember it.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	186		Frontal cortex is the part of the brain that organizes the bits and pieces of a memory into a temporal, logical, and "meaningful" story. However, it must be set in motion by the amygdala, which provides an emotional tag to a memory, a "meaning" that helps cement the pieces.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	187		Antonio Damasio proposes "convergence zones" that oversee the collection of the names of objects and animals and other zones that unite sensory information about people, perception, and emotion.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	187		Convergence zones enable us to automatically conceive of objects, ideas, or interactions as a whole, if the pieces have been put together enough times.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	187		Damasio also proposes that there is a hierarchy of convergence zones.  Lower convergence zones link to cues that allow us to understand the general concept of a "face" while higher convergence zones allow us to recognize specific faces.  Linking the two are intermediate convergence zones that differentiate details in individual faces -- nose line, pallor, eye shape.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	188		Hippocampus does not store memories.  It has been likened to an intelligent collating machine, which filters new associations, decides what is important and what to ignore or compress, sorts the results, and sends various packets of information of of other parts of the brain.  It is a way station that hands out the pieces.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	188		Sleep, associated with dreaming, is important to human memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	189		When the brain forms concepts, it constructs neuronal maps of its own activities.  The neuronal maps categorize, discriminate, and recombine the various brain activities needed to form ideas and emotion.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	190		We need and use certain types of memory more than others; our brains can extend the regions response for specific functions, even recruit new regions to help. By exercising our brains we can strengthen our memory.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	191		Memory research with sea slug Aplysia that Eric Kandel of Columbia University made famous.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	191		Each and every new experience causes the neuronal firing across some synapses to strengthen and others to weaken.  The pattern of change represents an initial memory of the experience.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	191		Long-term potentiation (LTP) is the cellular mechanism that causes synapses to strengthen their connections to one another, coding an event, stimulus, or idea as a pattern of connections.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	191		LTP blazes a new trail along a pattern of neurons, making it easier for subsequent messages to fire along the same pattern  The more the pattern is refined, the more permanent the message -- the new learning -- becomes.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	191		As neurons in the chain strengthened their bonds with one another, they began to recruit neighboring neurons to join the effort.  Each time the activity is repeated, the bonds become a little stronger so that eventually an entire network develops that remembers the skill, the word, the episode, or the color.  At this stage, the subject becomes encoded as memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	191		Motivation can affect how encoded a memory becomes. When there is a reward, the pieces of memory are more strongly bonded.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	191		Adding a reward leads to having many more neurons encode the memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	192		Once memory connections become firmly bonded, they tend to last, but over many years they can fade.  If a memory is not occasionally reused or reinforced, the connection may weaken, disband, or die.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	192		Allan Hobson, psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, shows that brain wave activity in the hippocampus during dreaming actually rehearses memory patterns, either to harden newer experiences into long-term memories or to keep fading connections alive.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	192		PET scans show that during REM sleep there is communication between the amygdala, the anterior cingulate gyrus, and the occipital lobes, structures that have long been linked to attaching emotional significance to memories and dreams.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	193		Human brains are capable of constantly recognizing and reorganizing relationships in everyday experience while simultaneously comparing current flows of experience to past memories.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	193		Juxtaposition of the past and the present is an important aspect of LTP, for although it is rapidly induced, it is also easily disrupted by new stimuli, shifts in attention, high brain temperature owing to illness, and neuronal electrical disturbances such as seizures and electroconvulsive shock.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	193		Another implication of LTP is that the act of learning "exercises" the brain, giving it the stimulation it craves.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	193		A well-toned brain often has more blood capillaries and glial cells, which, together, cater to the furious metabolic and nutritional needs of the brain's neurons.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	194		As we all know, there is a big difference between short-term and long-term memory.  Short-term memory lasts for minutes or hours, while long-term memory lasts longer than a day.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	194		For certain memories, the time in between the short-term and long-term memories is used to consolidate them from less stable to more permanent forms.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	194		Short term memory is also referred to as "working memory."		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	194		Working memory gives continuity to what we are aware of from one moment to the next.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	194		A computer is far too simplistic a device to compare to the dynamic living organ inside one's head.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	194		Initial consolidation of a short-term memory occurs in only a few hours, but conversion to a long-term memory does not happen until the information has been sent by the cortex to the hippocampus.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	194		Research suggests there is a special window of time during which the transition from short-term to long-term memory is possible.  This window is essentially the time needed for neurons to synthesize the necessary proteins for LTP.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	195		Role of REM sleep as a process for reliving new and old experiences so that they become more permanently etched as long-term memories.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	195		Remembering something in the short term uses proteins that are already present in synapses.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	195		To shift memory into the long-term, new proteins that reconfigure synapses are needed.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	195		Synthesis of new proteins in synapses is controlled by a protein known is CREB, which is thought to act like a switch that triggers the production of new proteins.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	195		CREB Is involved in developing a tolerance to drugs, from medically prescribed antidepressants to illegal substances. CREB probably works with other proteins in the processes of learning.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	195		Because there is such a staggering number of neuronal connections in the brain, the amount of parallel processing occurring at any instant is awesome.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	196		Working memory is the mental function that holds multiple connections together as we think a thought or perform an act from beginning to end.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	196		Working memory is what makes us human.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	196		Working memory allows us to consider our actions now in relation to what we are going to be like in the future, which gives us the uniquely human ability to make judgments, anticipate consequences, and take or shirk responsibility.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	196		Working memory is part of the executive function of the prefrontal cortex.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	196		Inhibition is a crucial part of learning because it prevents noise from distracting our focus on what matters.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	196		Although forgetting can be frustrating, it is a necessity -- otherwise trivial memories would clog our minds.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	197		Memory System (diagram)		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	197		Problems with working memory are crucial to many of the symptoms of ADHD.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	198		Working memory can transfer information to long-term memory within 60 seconds of encoding.    The memory is quickly re-organized to minimize dependence along the fleeting short-term memory function, and it is the subjective, interpreted information that is later retrieved for use.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	199		We can never describe in exact detail what was actually presented to us.  For as soon as we experience something, we immediately interpret it and rewire it.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	199		Explicit versus Implicit memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	199		Human memory is distributed throughout the brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	200		Procedural memory or skill learning is the first memory function to develop in the infant brain's early stages of growth.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	200		Episodic memory, which allows conscious recall of past experiences.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	200		Hierarchy and layering of memory system allows for many complex memory functions.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	200		The last stage of the brain's development creates the specialization of the hemispheres.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	200		Explicit memory encodes factual knowledge -- names,  faces, events, things.  It depends on an initial dialogue between the hippocampus and the temporal lobe.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	200		Implicit memory is responsible for the laying down of skills and habits that, once learned, do not have to be consciously thought about, such as eating, talking, walking, riding a bike, and the way to go about making friends.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	200		Implicit memory provides stereotyped but extremely reliable  movements, and involves the basal ganglia and cerebellum.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	200		Explicit procedural memory can become implicit when we are able to complete a task without referring to how we have done in the past.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	201		PET scan research has shown that the location of memory in the brain changes when explicit memory becomes implicit.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	201		One important example of implicit memory is metamemory -- the ability to have knowledge of one's own memory capability.  Metamemory operates when a word is on the tip of our tongue and we know that we know it, but can't bring it to the front of our mind.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	201		People who have lost significant parts of their frontal cortex do not have the notion of what they have forgotten.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	201		Episodic memory is the capacity to place facts and events in time and refer to them freely.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	201		Episodic memory also constitutes storytelling.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	202		Semantic memory is detached from personal experience. It is cognitive rather than autobiographical.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	202		Semantic facts differ from episodic facts only in that they are removed from a specific moment and place.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	202		Episodic memory is by necessity far more plastic that semantic memory, but it also far less reliable and can be distorted by all sorts of distractions, including fear, anxiety, and stress.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	202		Semantic memories are often acquired by rote.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	202		Language depends largely on semantic memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	202		In order to have a universal system of symbolic representation, we need a system of recall for personal knowledge -- knowledge such as the meaning of words, grammar rules and syntax.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	202		Research studies suggest that the hippocampus is critical only for episodic memory. People with severe amnesia due to damage to the hippocampus can still have surprisingly good semantic memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	203		Basic types of memory -- sensory, motor, visuospatial, and language.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	203		Memories can be recalled from any number of sensory cues.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	204		Movement is a fundamental basis of learning.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	204		Without the fine motor control we have over our vocal cords, speech would be impossible.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	204		Cerebellum plays a leading role in motor memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	204		Patients with the lesions in the cerebellum have difficulty judging the velocity of an object, tapping a foot with a regular beat, and distinguishing different time intervals.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	205		In learning to play the piano, the main motor areas are brain regions that control the eyes for reading music, the ears for listening to sounds, and the fingers for manipulating the keys.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	205		For motor memories, prefrontal cortex plans and organizes events while the basal ganglia and hippocampus act together to store the memories for the long-term.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	205		Motor memory and skill-learning are intimately interrelated.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	205		People who learn to sing or play a musical instrument benefit from greater communication between the hemispheres.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	205		Playing the piano exercise is the entire brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	205		Playing the piano has a significant impact on a person's mental acuity, because the communication between the hemispheres becomes better than that of the average person.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	205		Creative and artistic individuals do indeed possess higher levels of interhemispheric communication.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	205		The creative meanderings and patternings of the right hemisphere are not enough for creativity; they must be joined with action or language (motor functions) coordinated by the left hemisphere.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	206		A beautiful sonnet or painting in someone's head must be expressed through an understandable medium, which requires fine-motor movements.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	206		Research studies have showed that training in the arts, which is in large part rehearsal of movements, extended to good learning in other areas.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	206		Albert Einstein played the violin regularly.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	206		People who hum or whistle a tune or take a walk while they are contemplating something are using motor programs in the brain to help them wander along in thought in search of neuronal connections.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	206		One reason motor function and memory are so closely linked, is that they are both coordinated by the frontal lobe.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	207		Our visuospatial brains constantly compensate for a lack of information, mostly by making up what is needed to fill in the gaps.  [Gestalts]		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	207		Imagery and perception have a unique interrelationship.  Lesions in the left hemisphere impair the perception of small details; lesions in the right hemisphere impair global representation.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	207		Language is fundamental to the development of sophisticated memories.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	207		In the evolution of language, our capacity for naming became possible only when the brain developed connections between the higher order motor and sensory areas such as the Broca and Wernicke areas.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	208		Confabulations -- false statements made without any intent to deceive, and with no root in any underlying psychopathology.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	208		Many people with brain damage to the frontal lobes often confabulate.  Statements can be complex, ranging from subtle falsehoods to elaborately bizarre tales.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	208		Stroke patients confabulate because their damaged right hemispheres can no longer detect anomalies in their lives, the most obvious being their left arm paralysis.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	209		Triggered rapid eye movement can evoke the retrieval of remote memories, as sometimes happens during dreaming.  In REM sleep, people often discover disturbing facts about themselves.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	209		In general, events that cause us great joy or pain are easier to recall that of other memories.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	209		Memories of dramatic or other highly emotional events remain unusually stable over time.  This is remarkable given how easily other memories deteriorate.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	210		Sensory elements of normal, everyday experiences are easily integrated into an ongoing personal narrative.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	210		Traumatic experiences are exceptional because the individual is often unable to formulate a unified conception of the harrowing experience, yet continues to be haunted by the powerful emotions of the experience.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	210		When attempting to relate a traumatic experience, the amygdala over reacts while Broca's area, crucial for language and speech, shuts down.  As a result, the person is "struck dumb" with each attempt to recall the traumatic episode and is unable to express the experience in words.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	211		Once the amygdala attaches emotional significance to sensory information,    it's emotional evaluation is passed on to the hippocampus,    which organizes the information    and integrates it with previous memories of similar sensory details.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	211		The greater the emotional significance assigned by the amygdala,    the more intently the memory is permanently recorded by the hippocampus.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	211		A traumatic experience,    a painful memory,    or a high incidence of stress,     causes the level of cortisol in the brain to rise.     Cortisol, the stress hormone, works by binding to receptor sites in the hippocampus.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	211		A traumatic experience    is recorded as separate    and dissociated from    other life experiences.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	212		Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	212		Child abuse is a major problem in our society.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	213		The repeatedly abused child    becomes more adept at using repression    to dissociate the experience    from his or her conscious awareness.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	214		Flashbacks of war veterans.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	214		Content of flashback may say more about what a person believes or fears about the past than about what actually happened.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	214		Multiple personalities. Each personality came forward to deal with the external world at a different moment in the patient's life.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	217		Forgetting in old age		3
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	217		"senior moment"		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	218		Almost everyone experiences some memory loss with aging.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	218		Long-term memory seems to suffer little with the aging, while working memory is very much affected.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	218		What marks Alzheimer's disease is a sudden decline in cognition.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	218		Consequences of Alzheimer's disease can be severe, and include the deterioration of memory, language, and perceptual abilities.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	219		When Donald Hebb reached 74, he noticed further changes in cognition.  His vision was poorer, his balance was less steady, and his forgetfulness had increased.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	219		Recent developments in brain scanning techniques show that age-related neuronal loss is insignificant.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	219		Parts of the hippocampus atrophy as we age, and this correlates closely with problems with explicit memory (facts and figures, faces, and things).		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	219		While few neurons are lost overall in the brain with aging, the basal forebrain, which provides the hippocampus with acetylcholine, suffers markedly.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	219		Both the young and the elderly have an increase in hippocampal blood flow when they recollect a recently studied word, but use a region of the prefrontal cortex when trying to retrieve the word later.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	219		For effective memory, the frontal lobes must work just as well as the hippocampus.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	219		Frontal lobes are also strongly affected by aging.  Changes there include neuron atrophy as well as a reduction in blood flow and glucose metabolism.  As the frontal lobes are the center of executive function, which logically sequences memory organization, poor frontal lobe functioning leads to a breakdown of temporal order and recall.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	219		Aging people often have difficulty remembering the order and timing of events.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	219		Weakening of synaptic connections, sometimes referred to is long-term depression.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	220		Dopamine, which acts as a chemical reward, keeps receptors on neurons open and receptive.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	220		A decline in dopamine might lead to the degradation of synapses and memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	220		As we age, our general worldly knowledge and verbal ability do not change at all, but the speed at which we store new information slows, mainly after the age of 65.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	220		A study of people ages 70 to 79 found that those with more education had more efficient memory function and experienced less memory change with the passage of time.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	220		Years of schooling trains people to learn the best ways to encode and recall memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	220		Mental exercising keeps memory strong by reinforcing synaptic connections in the brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	220		Subliminal messages		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	221		In 1957 owners of a New Jersey drive-in movie were told that they could influence movie patrons to purchase more popcorn and Coca-Cola by flashing short commands extremely rapidly on the movie screen.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	221		Messages that can be registered and incorporated into implicit memory can only be extremely simplistic.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	221		Subliminal messages have an effect because they are priming the brain to pursue a memory.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	221		Arouse the brain's smell and taste functions.  These turn on the amygdala and hypothalamus.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	222		Emotion		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	224		Information about an emotional stimulus enters the brain through the thalamus and from there follows two pathways: (1) to the cerebral cortex, where the cognitive assessment is made, or (2) to the amygdala and hypothalamus, which direct body reactions.		2
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	225		Amygdala as an emotional center.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	225		James Papez who proposed in 1937 that the thalamus divides information into two streams -- one that provides cognitive assessment and the other that creates physiological arousal and physical reaction to a stimulus.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	225		In the 1950s, Paul McLean at the National Institute of Mental Health named this visceral brain the limbic system, and it is still generally assumed to be the network in the brain that senses and generates emotions.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	226		Most researchers agree that there are four basic emotions -- fear, anger, sadness, and joy -- and that the other emotions are created from combinations of these four.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	226		Worry, anxiety, and stress all derived mostly from fear, with a little anger or sadness thrown in.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	226		Some researchers claim that surprise, disgust, and guilt are their own unique emotions.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	226		Research with brain surgery patients has shown that stimulation to certain brain areas results in complicated feelings such as that experience when having made a social faux pas at a cocktail party.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	226		One theory posits an inborn "set point" for mood, which is subject to the ups and downs of life but will inevitably return to some kind of baseline.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	227		In some people, "set points" for mood decline with age.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	227		It is important to realize that emotion is a way of communicating our most important internal states and needs.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	227		Emotional information goes directly to the amygdala and the insula, which then send directions to act to our motor systems in the brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	227		The limbic system comprises the amygdala, hippocampus, medial thalamus, nucleus accumbens, and basal forebrain, all of which connect to the anterior cingulate gyrus, which is the major gateway to the frontal cortex.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	227		Limbic system is the launching point of emotions and the emotional connector to the cognitive prefrontal cortex.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	227		All of the limbic system is wrapped around the system for movement.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	227		Emotions are played out physically in the body through internal motor activity, such as a more rapid heartbeat, and externally in such movements as a smile or a frown or a change in body posture, whether jumping for joy or sitting slumped in sadness.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	228		All of the outward behavior that results from emotion is composed of movement.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	228		Bodily expressions, especially of the face, are the first means of emotional communication between a baby and its mother.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	228		Social relationships depend greatly on proper body language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	228		Facial expressions of emotion and other behaviors such as crying and laughing are implemented by neural circuits in the brain. These responses are hard-wired into the brain.  They are present or appear soon after birth without any training.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	228		From an evolutionary perspective, emotion is the result of behavior that has been repeated over and over through the generations, such as escaping from danger, finding food, and mating.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	228		Primitive movement such as goosebumps, snarling, erection of body hair, flashing of feathers, and biting are all intimately connected with emotion.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	229		Basic functions such as happiness and sadness are separate functions, and they represent opposite patterns of activity in the hemispheres of the brain.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	229		Increased activity on the right side of the brain often signals depression, while activity on the left side often indicates happiness, euphoria, and even mania.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	230		People with more general activity in the left hemisphere have a more positive mood, while people with more activity in the right hemisphere have a more negative one.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	230		Research has shown that infants are born within an innate predisposition toward a more active left or right brain, meaning a happier or sadder temperament.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	230		Neural processes that underlie "worry" may reside in the right hemisphere.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	232		Fear is a universal emotion.		2
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	232		Amygdala serves to alert the animal to dangerous, novel, and interesting situations and to direct its response.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	232		Regularly overresponding to life's minor troubles can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, migraines, and ulcers.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	232		Malfunctions of the fear system are shown in disorders such as panic and phobias.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	232		Once we learn to be afraid of something, our brains become programmed to remember that stimulus, so it's hard to get rid of our conditioned fears.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		A loud, sudden noise will elicit a startle response from most people, since this type of noise is often associated with danger.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		When a stimulus like a loud noise is repeatedly paired with a dangerous situation, some people will develop an overactive startle response.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		War veterans and victims of abuse startle easily and often.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		People who startle easily suffer from physical ailments more frequently than the general population and have an increased incidence of cancer, which is associated with lowered immune response and raised levels of cortisol.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		A victim of early child abuse was afraid of everything, from new situations to her own shadow.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		The most poignant example of PTSD is seen in women who have been raped and cannot allow themselves to enjoy sex again.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		A. woman who has been raped is often indelibly programmed to be vigilant and fearful.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		Amygdala is the area of the brain most involved in fear.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		Stimuli have a direct pathway through the sensory filter of the thalamus to the amygdala, which can then mobilize the body to its brainstem connections.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		Amygdala is immediately triggered and you react before recognizing the threat.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	233		A slower pathway for fear, where the information about a fearful stimulus goes from the thalamus to the frontal cortex and then to the amygdala.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	234		Two pathways of stimuli to the amygdala can be seen as a low road and a high road of responses to danger.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	234		Path straight through the thalamic projection to the amygdala (the low road) is rough and crude but fast.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	234		Pathway using the cortex (the high road) gives a more accurate assessment and can be expected to lead to a more considered response, but it takes longer.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	234		Context is a collection of many stimuli and is dependent on accurate memory of situations.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	235		Hippocampus is the brain area responsible for assessing the context of situations.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	235		Hippocampus receives processed information from the cortex that has already been associated with the context of the situation and the fearful stimulus, bringing the whole picture into perspective.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	235		Contextual conditioning can be used in reverse to treat panic disorders and phobias such as fear of snakes, dogs, heights.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	235		Panic disorders and phobias can be treated with a technique called "flooding," a step-by-step process of gradually experiencing more and more of the fearful stimulus so that the patient can learn that snakes or dogs or heights are not invariably dangerous.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	235		Emotions are sustained by varied systems throughout the body.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	235		Person fearful of heights stops swaying at the sight of the ground far below.  The off-balance feeling subsides.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	235		"Flooding" treatment for panic disorders and phobias is straight cognitive behavioral training.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	236		Lesser cousins of fear are worry and anxiety.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	236		Anxiety disorders plague a significant portion of the population and reflect some of our most human concerns.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	236		Serotonin is the brain's brake and policemen; it prevents the brain from getting out of control from fear and worry.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	236		Serotonin has a calming effect that helps us to assure ourselves that we are going to survive and to elevate our mood and self-esteem.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	236		Anxiety is not all bad.  A little healthy anxiety leads to a greater ability to survive in our constantly changing world.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	236		The second universal emotion is anger.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	236		One out of five people experience attacks of rage that they report they cannot control.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	236		Aggression is an important part of the natural world.  Violent combat between males before mating.  Mothers also engage in aggression to protect their children from predators.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	236		Human anger is closely connected to the fierce defense of territory, mate, and self that many animals display.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	236		All social animals must control their anger and aggression.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	237		The most important thing to learn about anger is when and how to use it and control it.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	238		Verbalizing aggressive thoughts and feelings is the best antidote to violence.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	238		Very low or very high levels of serotonin in the brain can contribute to aggression.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	238		Some clinicians have of successfully treated anger and aggression with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) such as Prozac that make more serotonin available in the brains of people whose natural levels are low.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	238		Some research had shown that high levels of testosterone and increase aggression.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	239		Although sadness may appear to be a much more subdued primary emotion than fear or anger, it ranges just as widely, from mild melancholy to uncontrollable crying.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	239		Sadness seems to be related to an increase in activity in the left amygdala and the right frontal cortex, together with a decrease in activity in the right amygdala and the left frontal cortex.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	239		Prolonged sadness can result in sustained overactivity in the amygdala and frontal lobe.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	239		Sadness can slip into depression, which is characterized by emotional numbness rather than an intense feeling.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	239		Depression that is accompanied by anxiety can cause a person to become feverishly active, even suicidal.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	239		Classical depression, typified by a person sitting motionless in a chair with no intention of getting out.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	241		Depression may be characterized by feelings of despair, guilt, helplessness, and hopelessness.		2
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	241		Depression affects 3 to 5% of the population at any given time, and about 20% of people will experience major depression and their lifetimes.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	241		Depression is less genetically based than any other mental illness, and is the one most dependent on environmental factors.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	241		PET scans of the brains of clinically depressed individuals can open up new treatment options by identifying subtypes of depression and differences in responses to medication.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	241		PET scans have shown that people with below normal glucose metabolism in the front tip of the cingulate gyrus do not react positively to antidepressant drug therapy.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	241		Traditional approach to treating depression -- talk therapy.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	242		Last resort for people who did not respond to talk therapy or antidepressant drugs has been electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) -- shock treatments.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	242		In ECT, electrodes are placed on the scalp and a strong electric current is sent through the scalp to the brain.  To be effective,  the current must be strong enough to trigger a seizure.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	242		Because ECT succeeds in a majority of cases, some 50,000 people a year turn to it.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	242		Typical ECT regimen is three shocks a week for several weeks.  To prevent pain and injury during each  seizure, patients are put under general anesthesia.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	242		At the end of the ECT cycle, patients can suffer confusion and memory loss, some of which may be irreversible, and their mood may improve for only three to six months.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	242		A new technique, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), appears to have many of the advantages of ECT without nasty side effects. A coil of magnets placed against the patient's scalp sets up a magnetic field inside the brain.  This technique can target a specific region of the brain, notably the left prefrontal cortex,where activity is often lower than normal and depressed people.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	243		Neurotransmitters and endorphins play an important role in the perception of pleasure.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	243		Dopamine is a key factor in pleasure -- each of the pleasure centers uses dopamine as a transmitter.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	243		Pleasure is often muted in people who are taking conventional antipsychotic drugs, which block the dopamine receptors.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	243		Antipsychotic drugs are used to stop hallucinations and delusions, but often produce a state of joylessness and a lack of motivation and drive.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	243		Drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines work in the brain by increasing dopamine levels.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	243		A lack of internal rewards leads a person to self medicate with substances or with behavior that is rewarding.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	243		Different neurotransmitters systems cascade upon one another in the reward mechanism of the human brain; perhaps the most important interaction is that of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, a group of neurons that have a special relationship to reward and motivation.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	244		Nucleus accumbens is located just beneath the front of the striatum, a part of the basal ganglia which is involved in movement and cognition.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	244		In a study of the addictive effect of nicotine, rats were injected with nicotine directly into the brain, resulting in increases of dopamine and activity in the nucleus accumbens.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	244		Nucleus accumbens of the brain behaves similarly when cocaine, amphetamine, or morphine is administered.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	244		Difference between the actions in the outer shell of the nucleus accumbens and its inner core.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	244		Outer shell of the nucleus accumbens seems to be most involved in emotion, motivation, and addiction.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	244		Outer shell of the nucleus accumbens has direct connections to the limbic system and is part of the extended amygdala, which serves as a link between the midbrain and the forebrain.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	244		Nucleus accumbens is important for learning, in part because it tags information with a signal of intensity that tells the rest of the brain to pay attention.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	244		Understanding dopamine receptor subtypes could improve treatment for disorders ranging from alcoholism and drug abuse to gambling and sex and food addictions.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	244		One of the most intriguing emotions is love.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	244		One researcher distinguishes three distinctly different physiological and emotional categories of love -- lust, attraction, and attachment.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Lust evolved to get you out looking.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Attraction evolved to make focus and expend  your energy on one specific individual.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Attachment evolved so you would stay with one individual and raise your offspring once mating was accomplished.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Lust is associated primarily with estrogen and androgens.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Attraction is associated with elation and a craving for emotional union, which may be linked to the monoamines such as serotonin.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Long-term attachment behavior is evidenced by close body contact, separation anxiety, and a sense of calm, security, and peace with a partner.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Emotion is not one system in the brain but multiple systems that tie together workings of the brain and the body.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Physical sensations of emotional love are linked to increased quantities of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine in the brain's pleasure centers, as well as other chemicals such as oxytocin, endorphins, and phenylethylamine (PEA), known as the "love drug."
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Brain chemicals associated with emotional love are the ones long associated with various states of euphoria and in particular with the ecstasy caused by drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines, as well as the high that long-distance runners report experiencing.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Chemical compounds in chocolate act like nicotine, causing the release of dopamine in the pleasure centers.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Pleasure stimuli elicit a small squirt of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin in the pleasure centers.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		One of the most joyous of emotions is laughter.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	245		Sometimes we laugh just because someone else is laughing.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	246		Laughter is "contagious."
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	247		Motivation is a process that ties emotion to action.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	247		Motivation is the pressure to act.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	247		Because motivation is at the heart of all goal directed behavior, many levels of the brain are involved.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	248		Ability to emotionally label certain stimuli or situations is the center of motivation.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	248		Cingulate gyrus is the main link between motivation and emotion.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	248		Cingulate gyrus has the appropriate sensory inputs to receive processed visual, auditory, and olfactory information and also receives inputs that reflect the internal states of the body.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	248		Cingulate gyrus has outputs to the basal ganglia for motor reaction and to the brainstem for physiological arousal.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	248		Cingulate gyrus also has connections to the hippocampus, important for memory.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	248		With all of its connections, cingulate gyrus is able to assess motivational aspects of the environment and compare them with memory in order to give the incoming stimuli different motivational priorities.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	248		Cingulate gyrus and its connections provides a person with the ability to judge what is worth pursuing.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	248		Several subcircuits are also involved in motivation.  Structures of the limbic system, thalamus, and basal ganglia interact to perform different parts of the whole task of perceiving, assessing, and communicating motivational influences in the environment.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	248		The several circuits and subcircuits of cingulate gyrus, limbic system, thalamus, basal ganglia, and perhaps others, hold various motivations in working memory and compare conflicting goals.  Ultimately, this leads to choice, inhibition, and the seeking of reward.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	249		One disorder of the motivation system is apathy.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	250		High doses of dopamine are usually needed to help patients suffering from apathy.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	252		Language
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	253		Ability to use language not just to communicate but to plan and direct future action is at the core of humanity.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	253		Language improves and refines our thoughts, allowing us to remove ourselves from the present, to symbolically hold objects in our minds and manipulate them into different potential sequences before taking action.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	253		Language is acquired with so little effort.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	253		44 distinct basic sounds (phonemes) that can be arranged into an infinite number of combinations.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	253		Language functions are distributed throughout the brain, and the locations can vary significantly from one person to the next.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	254		Silent articulation of speech -- our conversations and instructions to ourselves -- is what links thought, language, and action.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	254		Executive function of the prefrontal cortex is where we consider and plan.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	257		Chimps communicate with each other in the wild using approximately 36 sounds.  Each of these sounds has one meaning and is not combined or linked with others to create a new message.  It is the same 36 messages over and over again.		3
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	257		Homo sapiens use phonemes linked together in different combinations to form words.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	257		By the time we graduate from high school we know 45,000 to 60,000 words, and all are combined and recombined into phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	257		Specific combinations of sounds build words, phrases, and sentences.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	257		It is the set of rules that we use to link the meaningless phoneme sounds -- our grammar and syntax -- that allows us to expressed and understand  new ideas.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	258		Prosody, the distinctly human ability to modulate the voice, adding emphasis and emotional tones that help convey meaning.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	258		Humans did not simply evolve a larger brain, an expanded memory, a lexicon, or special speech apparatus; we evolve new systems for representing reality.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	258		Three million years ago the anatomy of our animal ancestor's voice tracts started to assume the modern form that gives us the motor movements necessary to form the sounds in our speech.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	258		Earliest homo sapiens appeared 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, and there is a general consensus that the fast-paced symbolic language we use in our speech today has only been in continual use for some 50,000 years.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	258		Universality of language in all human cultures and its consistency in structure and acquisition timeline in childhood.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	259		Regions of the brain that control sequenced hand movement and speech rely on the same mechanisms.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	260		Important to devise ways to warn about danger, share knowledge and desires, and formalized rules to ensure peaceful coexistence.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	260		With the advent of writing and reading 5000 to 6000 years ago, thoughts and memories became much easier to share, preserve, and build upon, which greatly increased the collective power of humans.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	260		Modern culture is tied to memory devices such as books and television.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	261		Extensive memory is required for success in using symbolic communication.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	261		In 1959, linguist Noam Chomsky at MIT revolutionized the study of language by providing evidence that language acquisition is a biological process, not a learnable body of external knowledge.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	261		Children raised under all sorts of conditions by all sorts of parents master complex rules of grammar at a very young age.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	261		Chomsky concluded that infants are born with a built-in propensity for handling the basic rules of language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	262		"Universal grammar" embedded in each child's brain, which specializes for the particular language by which the child is raised.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	262		Chomsky's theory has dominated research over the last four decades.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	262		Chomsky proposes that the "language acquisition device" is present at birth -- a genetic ability of the brain distinct from other cognitive functions -- and that environmental input is necessary to trigger it so that we can subsequently learn the words and grammar of a specific language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	262		Strong evidence for genetic language ability comes from the observation that children who are not exposed to any speech will invent their own language, which is complex in syntax and meaning.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	262		Deaf children who are not exposed to sign language manage to communicate complex thoughts by inventing their own system of signaling.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	262		Critical period for language acquisition.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	263		Genetic underpinning for language acquisition.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	263		Eight-month-old babies can recognize whether they have heard specific phonemes linked together in a particular order		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	263		Eight-month-old babies can detect clear patterns in the sounds of language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	263		Babies are able to use the statistical information in word sounds to learn where one word ends and another begins.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	263		Babies also use other cues to tell what is a word and what isn't, including pauses and changes in pitch, stress, and rhythm.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	263		Babies can pick out words by thinking like little statisticians, speedily detecting clear patterns in the sounds of language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	264		Very young humans learn so much about their world so quickly.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	264		Months before infants begin to produce words, they can very rapidly learn which sounds are likely to go together to form words.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	264		Whether our brains are prewired for language or not, the timeline of language development in children is incredibly consistent across cultures. This is the strongest evidence we have that there is some sort of language acquisition device, or innate capacity to learn language, present in every human brain at birth.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	264		The language development process actually starts before birth when neural connections are made from the speech a fetus hears while in the womb.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	264		Newborns prefer listening to speech in their own language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	264		Babies are responsive to mom's voice; almost immediately after birth, they orient toward it as opposed to other voices.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	264		Humans may have evolved to ensure a child's learning of language, as well as emotional bonding between parent and child.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	265		Earliest communications may be purely emotional with no literal meaning -- right hemisphere, which develops first, is stronger at interpreting the melodic tones of baby talk that mothers and fathers use when holding newborns.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	265		Music is recognized by brain circuits that are similar to those that recognize language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	265		Music centers, like language centers, are distributed throughout the brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	265		Left hemisphere usually contains most of the specialized language areas.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	265		Most of the specialized music areas are in the right hemisphere.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	265		Much of what determines whether incoming sound is considered to be music relates to the emotional content of the sound.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	265		Babbling helps babies tune up their brains, directing them to produce the sounds that they need for speech and to learn how to move the muscles, tongue, and voice apparatus effortlessly to make the sounds appropriately.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	265		By the time infants are six months old they group  phonemes in all sorts of combinations, and about ten months they group phonemes to form syllables that only correspond to the language of their environment.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	266		At a year to a year-and-a-half, babies begin using words and again to form short phrases.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	266		Third-year children progressively increase sentence length and complexity of syntax by adding word endings that represent past, present, future, singular and plural.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	266		English kids learn the irregular verbs of their language quickly and effortlessly, while German and French kids who learn English later struggle.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	266		German and French kids almost never have trouble with the constant switching of gender for nouns, while late learners of these languages always find it confusing.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	267		Broca's area in the frontal lobe of the hemispheres houses language production.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	267		Wernicke's area in the left posterior temporal lobe houses language comprehension.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	267		A bundle of connecting fibers integrate Broca's area and Wernicke's area.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	267		Speech production and comprehension are not independent systems.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	267		"Mirror neurons" -- same neurons are used to speak and hear the same words.  Neurons that fire when we throw a ball as well as when we catch it.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	267		Researchers have pinpointed sites in the cortex that control aspects of language as narrow as the naming of living things.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	267		Different centers of the cortex for regular and irregular verbs.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	267		Specialized cortical areas are not the same in all persons.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	269		Parallel activation of many small areas throughout the cortex.		2
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	269		Thinking the word "cat" (silent naming) activates the motor speech areas.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	269		Combination of brain regions used to process language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	269		Brain region map is generally consistent among people, yet can vary.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	270		Constant interaction of movements and emotions in everyday conversation, since the patterns of our muscle movements help us encode certain words.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	270		We often used hand gestures when explaining ideas.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	270		We mouth words to ourselves when learning to read or when we come across a particularly difficult passage of text.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	270		Physical movement helps cement the learning.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	270		Gesturing and speech are closely bound.  They are acquired together in childhood and break down together in aphasia.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	271		Supplementary motor area, a region of the frontal cortex, is responsible for initiating and planning complex movements and is crucial to language.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	271		Complex sequences of movements of the face, tongue, and larynx require fine motor selection.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	271		Left frontal speech area that is part of the supplementary motor area.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	271		Supplementary motor area is activated when we need to recall a word without an external cue of an object or a picture.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	271		When we recall months of the year, motor areas become active.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	272		Studies have linked language production with complex motor skills, indicating that the two functions share neural networks.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	272		Aphasia is often accompanied by difficulties in complex movement sequencing (apraxia).		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	272		Insula, an area beneath the frontal and temporal lobes, could be the common sequencing site that binds together language and movement.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	273		Facilitation by music at the phonemic ("sounding out") stage of learning to read.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	273		Brain's emotional circuits may help language too.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	273		Human language lets us understand and convey not only the literal meanings of words but rich emotion, from a bitter report to a gleeful exclamation.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	273		Emotional language seems to be an independent system outside the Sylvian region.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	273		Some researchers have linked  emotion in language to distinct brain areas in the cingulate gyrus of the limbic system, right above the corpus callosum.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	273		Many victims of strokes in the left Sylvian region lose almost all language abilities, yet retain emotional speech. They may not be able to talk at all, but can shout swear words.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	273		Older emotional structures of the cingulate gyrus may be our main connection to primate vocalizations.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	273		Our crying, laughing, and shouting use the same brain structure, the cingulate, as a monkey's warning call when it spots a predator.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	273		Emotional part of language, or emotional prosody provides the melody of speech, variations in emphasis, pitch, and timing, as well as cues to the beginnings and endings of phrases.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	273		Ability to comprehend the emotional aspects of language or speak with feeling can be impaired without affecting the comprehension of the literal meaning of words.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	274		Only humans have brains in which there are two hemispheres that differ significantly in function and structure, and language is our most lateralized function.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	274		Language resides predominantly in the left hemisphere in 90% of the population.  About 5% have their made language areas in the right hemisphere, and another 5% split language fairly evenly between hemispheres.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	274		There must be a genetic inclination for left hemisphere dominance, but the right hemisphere also has the neural mechanisms necessary to support normal language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	274		After strokes that damage the right hemisphere, language usually remains intact, but strokes to the left hemisphere often cause language difficulties or loss.  This is true for all forms of language, from sign language to oriental pictographs.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	274		Try this lateralization test.  Repeat a passage of poetry while you simultaneously tap a finger on a table. It is significantly more difficult to tap the finger of your right hand then your left. Movement of the right finger is controlled by the left hemisphere and competes with neurons for the language areas.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	274		Linguistically ambidextrous.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	274		Despite the asymmetry of language, more connections between the hemispheres via the corpus callosum may result in better language functions.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	274		Women have more connections between the hemispheres via the corpus callosum than men and have higher verbal IQs.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	275		After a left hemisphere stroke, women are less likely to suffer a severe impairment in language skills.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	275		Language disabilities such as stuttering are more common in the minority of people whose language areas are more equally split between hemispheres, perhaps indicating difficulties in coordination.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	275		Only about 20% of left-handers show right-brain dominance.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	275		Right hemisphere determines the emotional state of speakers from their tone, and also is responsible for allowing us to understand metaphor and humor.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	275		Right hemisphere appreciates the whole picture and can thus see when you switch sense of meaning, which is the basis for most humor.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	275		After a right hemisphere stroke, patients can still communicate quite well, but they often lose prosody and can only interpret language literally.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	275		After a right hemisphere stroke, patients have difficulty using and understanding figures of speech, tones of voice, humor, and expressions of feeling.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	275		Right hemisphere activates not just in prosody, but also when a sentence is complex in structure, indicating that it may provide extra support in demanding situations.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	275		Comprehension of sign language increases activity in parts of both the left and right hemispheres.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	275		Regions within the left half of the brain control facial expressions according to linguistic content.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	276		Brain can coordinate the action of its many processing circuits to produce an integrated response to stimuli.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	276		Sign language gives us greater insight into how languages organize in the brain.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	276		Left hemisphere is dominant both sign language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	276		PET studies on deaf signers show that inner speech or self-talk occurs in the left anterior cortex, just as in hearing individuals.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	276		Left hemisphere houses language, including sign language.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	277		In most people there is a genetic basis that pre-wires the language function in the left hemisphere but the right hemisphere makes a good substitute if the brain is altered at an early age.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	277		Limited language impact of removing the left hemisphere of the brain in young children.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	277		Brain's plasticity allows neural connections to rewire after damage and provide for some recovery of function.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	277		Great variability among individuals in the location of language functions.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	277		By six months in the womb the fetus is already beginning to group together sounds in terms of phonemes it hears in its mother's speech.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	277		As early as six months after birth, the brain loses its sensitivity to phonemes that are not part of the language the infant hears every day.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	277		If brain damage occurs before the age of two, the brain can reorganize extensively, creating language areas in different regions.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	278		We lose flexibility in forming new language connections by age 7 or so.		1
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	278		People who grow up bilingual from birth store their native and second languages in the same area.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	278		Neurosurgeons navigate carefully around the brain's language sensitive areas to avoid impairing a patient's ability to speak.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	278		Before six months of age, infants of all nationalities can distinguish among the sounds used in all the languages of the world.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	278		As phoneme categories are formed, infant's brains select for the ones that they hear, and those that are not heard are lost forever.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	278		Infants can hear subtle differences between sounds that adults perceived as identical.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	278		Humans learn to deal with variations in how speakers pronounce sounds.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	278		Environmental input will have less and less effect on reshaping language connections after a child's age of six or so.		0
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	290		Social Brain		12
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	315		Social Brain (diagram)		25
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	336		Four Theaters		21
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	341		Four Theaters of the Brain		5
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	356		Care and Feeding		15
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	305		Cerebellum has connections to many parts of the brain involved in attention and is intimately involved with the higher functions, setting the timing and rhythm and other aspects of language, memory, and emotion.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	305		In addition to its role in motor control and balance, research has shown that the cerebellum is important as a mediator in cognition.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	305		Coordinating associations and attention is essential to entering into a relationship with another human being.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	305		Graceful social interaction depends on being able to pay attention to another person and to one's own internal states.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	305		Stroke victims with cerebellum damage struggle for the rest of their lives with simple physical maneuvers like walking up and down stairs.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	305		Instead of being able to automatically put their feet down in the right place on a stairstep, stroke victims with cerebellar damage have to consciously think about where to put their feet.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	305		Autistic patients and cerebellum stroke victims find it harder to shift their attention quickly from one thing to another.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	306		People with autism and those with cerebellum damage are slower to pick up on and react to new stimuli in the environment, making it harder for them to manage social interactions, which are characterized by constantly changing stimuli.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	306		Like putting our feet where we want them without having to think about it, our ability to put our attention where we want it without having to think about it is coordinated by the cerebellum.
Ratey; User's Guide to Brain	307		Autopsies on autistic persons show that almost all had cerebellum malformations and that there was significant loss of Purkinje neurons, which provide the only pathway for information leaving the cerebellum.
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