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To study the brain in psychology, we need tools that accurately represent the complex organ and provide data scientists and medical personnel can analyse. These data must reflect the brain activity and functions and show precisely where the activity occurs in the brain.
Modern technology has made significant advances in studying the brain in relation to behaviour, allowing more profound, less invasive insights into how the mind works. However, the history of how the brain was studied before this time is still critical and was essential to the discovery of language centres before these new experimental techniques became available.
So we will cover both the older ways of studying the brain in psychology and the modern methods of studying the brain.
Before delving into the methods of studying the brain in psychology, here are some important terms to remember:
Spatial resolution is the degree of accuracy that a technique achieves when examining brain activity. It is the accuracy with which the exact areas of brain structures and activity are identified.
Temporal resolution is the degree of accuracy in determining brain activity over time that the technique provides. It relates to when the activity virtually occurred and how accurately the technique can record this information.
Post-mortems were the first official technique for examining the brain. It is now usually performed by pathologists who examine the body and brain after death.In a post-mortem, the brain is treated with a chemical fixative to make it resistant to handling and cutting. This way we can analyse the different sections. Usually, autopsies are good for finding damaged areas of the brain and assigning the injured area to a function, depending on how the patient behaved or suffered while alive.
Broca's area, located in the frontal cortex, is a good example of where a post-mortem examination could identify a functional area in the brain after a patient had suffered from speech problems while alive. Post-mortem examinations have a high spatial resolution, but cannot prove that the damaged/examined areas are definitely responsible for specific functions.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) detects the change of blood flow in the brain using a magnetic field and is one of the modern ways of studying the brain. This technique can also be used to the brain in relation to behaviour. It does this by detecting the change and flow of oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobin during neural activity. Active brain areas consume more blood and fMRI machines can measure this.
This produces a neuroimage of the brain with areas of activity highlighted.
They usually have a highly detailed spatial resolution but poor temporal resolution.
Electroencephalograms (EEGs) are where electrodes (up to 34) are placed on the head/scalp with conductive gel. These electrodes detect patterns of activation and electrical activity in the brain. These patterns are represented as brain waves:
Alpha.
Beta.
Theta.
Delta.
The amplitude is the brain wave's size and intensity, and the frequency is the distance between each wave, showing the speed of activation.
EEGs have a great temporal resolution but poor spatial resolution.
Event-related potentials (ERPs) are very similar to EEG because they also use electrodes and record the tiny electrical changes in the neurons of the brain. The difference is that researchers must present participants with a stimulus many times, and each wave response is added to a pool of data. This creates a smooth activation curve of the collected data, called statistical averaging.
Statistical averaging allows ERPs to remove background noise that has nothing to do with the stimulus, so researchers can say with greater certainty that activation is due to the stimulus and not just background noise. The waves have peaks and troughs that represent cognitive processes in the brain and are called event-related potentials.
They have a high temporal resolution, but like EEGs, poor spatial resolution.
The different types are post mortem examinations, fMRI, EEG and ERP.
We typically study the brain by asking participants to perform a task and then measuring brain activity whilst they complete the task. Alternatively, we may give them a stimulus and measure brain activity during the stimulus. Post-mortems study the brain after death, usually done so if the patient has died due to trauma or damage to the brain.
Post-mortems, fMRI, EEG and ERP.
These include post-mortem instruments used to extract and examine the brain, functional magnetic resonance imaging machines measure blood flow, and EEGs and ERPs, which use electrodes to measure brain activity.
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