375: Vision Pt1

1. Visual Illusions
1. Why study visual illusions?
1. They tell us about some of the assumptions that the visual system is making
2. Ill-posed Problem
1. 2D on the back of your eyeball but 3D in your brain.  How does that happen?
1. Visual shortcuts and illusions help us understand those shortcuts
2. The Eye
1. The retina
2. The cornea and the lens do all the focusing on your eye
1. Cornea does about 80% of focusing
2. Lens does about 20%
3. Fovea
3. The Retina
1. Light has to pass through several layers before it gets to photoreceptors at the back of the eye.  Kindof a backwards way of setting it up.
2. Two types of Photoreceptors
1. Cones
1. Color visions
2. Daylight vision
3. Fine detail
4. 3 types of cones
1. Short - blue
2. Medium - yellow
3. Long - red
2. Rods
1. low-light vision
2. More sensitive to Motion (but not the only thing giving you motion)
3. More sensitive but they have less acuity
4. Fovea
1. No rods in the fovea, there are only cones in the fovea
2. This means that you are not very sensitive in the fovea
1. So to see something dim you can look to the side of the object, like a dim star, and you will see it better
3. Rods are in the periphery.  Why is that a good thing?
1. So if something is going to hit us that we are not paying attention to then we can move.  that is why it's important to be sensitive in the periphery to motion.
5. Retina
1. Photoreceptors project to bipolar cells which project to ganglion cells
2. Blindspot
1. Area where there are no ganglion cells so no photoreceptors.  But you don't see a whole in your vision because your brain makes assumptions about the surroundings.
1. It assumes that what is surrounding the blind spot will continue.  Color constancy.
2. Why don't glaucoma patients have a similar brain assumption as the blindspot?
1. You have always had your blindspot so developmentally you could assume that your brain has gotten accustomed to it.  Glaucoma is new.
2. Scotoma
3. If cones see colors and rods do not, then do you see color when you are getting a glass of water at night?
1. Yes, but things will look blue because rods are the most sensitive at around 500 nm
2. You also have horrible color vision in the periphery but if you already know the color then your brain will make an assumption about the color.
4. The image on our retina is upside down and backwards.  Why don't we see the world upside down and backwards?  
1. Because the image has always been that way and our brain is used to it.
6. Retinal Ganglion Projections
1. Optic nerve
2. Optic chiasm
3. Optic tract
4. LGN
1. In the thalamus
2. projects to the primary visual cortex
3. The left part of the brain receives images from the right side of space and vice versa
7. Primary Visual Cortex
1. Located in the occipital lobe
2. What does it do?
1. The visual system must solve a number of problems
2. Chief among these is the impoverished stimulus
1. Impoverished Stimulus
1. This is the lack of information that you receive but your brain will make assumptions to make up for it.  Like seeing 2D but perceiving 3D
3. Another problem is indeterminacies in the visual input
3. Low-level vision: we assume that we can't get much information out of this array of intensity values. 
4. High-level vision: Taking the output of the low-level processes and transforming it to get objects and their properties
5. First thing your visual system does is find the edges
1. They are important because edges define boundaries
2. Edges are invariant to lighting conditions
3. How do you find edges?
1. You visual system takes individual columns and finds the average.  If the average is different then it is probably an edge.  Does the same thing for rows and diagonals.
2. Well then why don't you see something like a hat, with many edges, as a bunch of different objects?
1. It's because we also take the average of larger objects.
2. You assess these averages at more than one scale.

375: Chapter 2 Flashcards

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370: Light & the Eye Pt3

1. Rods and Cones
1. Different spectral sensitivity scales
2. 3 cones taken together are most sensitive around 560 nm (yellowish)
3. The rod type is most sensitive around 500 nm (bluish green)
4. Purkinje Shift
1. At twilight bluish things seem brighter, while reddish/yellow things seem dimmer
2. This happens as you shift from reliance on cones to reliance on rods so since rods are most sensitive at around 500 nm (bluish green) blues start to get brighter
5. Rods
1. Take longer to adapt but they are more sensitive
2. With something like twilight where it gradually gets darker they adjust at about the same rate
2. Spectral Sensitivity Curves
1. Rods are most sensitive at about 500
2. Cones are most sensitive at...
1. Short
2. Medium
3. Long
4. Average = about 560
3. Basic Concepts
1. Convergence
1. why it's hard to be sensitive and detailed at the same time
2. Usually several receptor cells feed into one neuron
1. 126 million rods and cones converge to 1 million ganglion cells
3. Occurs in all sensory systems
4. Greater convergence leads to:
1. Higher sensitivity to faint signals (soft sounds, dim lights, light touch...)
2. Less specificity/acuity of signal detail (sound pitch, precise location of stimulus)
5. Higher convergence of rods than cones
1. greater convergence = greater sensitivity and less acuity
1. Rods individually take less light to respond
2. Trade off is that rod system cannot distinguish detail
2. 120 rods to one ganglion 
3. 6 cones to one ganglion
4. Cones in fovea have 1 to 1 relation to ganglion cells (no convergence)
5. Rods and cones send signals vertically through:
1. Bipolar cells
2. Ganglion cells
6. Signals sent horizontally (convergent):
1. Horizontal cells
2. Amacrine cells
6. Convergence Reduces Detail
1. All-cone foveal vision results in high visual acuity
2. One to one wiring leads to ability to discriminate details
3. Trade off is that cones need more light to respond than rods
2. Lateral Inhibition
1. Adjacent neurons compete with one another.  Why?
2. Adjacent sensory receptors send signals that inhibit each other in a competitive matrix
3. This occurs in several sensory systems, resulting in center-surround receptive fields
   4. Aids in detection of perceptual features
   5. In the retina, adjacent photoreceptors inhibit each other
4. Photoreceptor mutual inhibition helps with:
1. Edge enhancement, resulting in the mach band illusion
2. emphasis on relative brightness, rather than absolute brightness
5. Other illusions arise from lateral inhibition such as the Hermann Grid
1. Hermann Grid
1. People see an illusion of gray images in intersections of white areas
2. Signals from bipolar cells cause effect
3. Receptor stimulated by white areas inhibit the response of neighboring cells more than receptor stimulated by black areas
4. The lateral inhibition causes a reduced response which leads to the perception of gray
2. Mach Bands
1. People see an illusion of enhanced lightness and darkness at borders of light and dark areas
2. Low intensity (dark) areas have smallest input
3. High intensity (light) areas have largest input
3. Neural Circuits
1. Combining convergence and lateral inhibition helps solve perceptual problems
4. Neural pathways from retina to primary visual cortex

370: Light & the Eye

1. Rods and Cones
1. Rods
1. specialized for night vision and are more sensitive
2. Cones
1. specialized for day vision and provide better acuity
2. most people have short, medium, and long wavelength cones
3. Produce color sense
2. Fovea
1. There are layers in the retina
2. consists solely of cones
3. There are no rods in the fovea but they are all distributed throughout the periphery
4. Periphery
1. Poor color vision but good motion detection
2. Demonstration using crayons and a volunteer where the crayon started behind her head and slowly moved outwards till she could see the color
5. When you know what a color is and you look away, but you can still see it in the periphery, your brain will assume that the color is the same.
3. Blindspot
1. A spot on your eye that has no receptor fields
2. Your brain fills it in so that you never notice
1. Our brain is very adept at ignoring things that are constant and detecting change
4. Transduction
1. Taking one form of energy and changing it into another form of energy
2. Transduction of Light
1. Visual: receptors that are sensitive to light
1. Rods and cones have outer segments with two components
1. Opsin: large protein
2. Retinal: a light sensitive molecule
2. Occurs when retinal absorbs one photon and changes its shape
5. Isomerization
6. Just one photon needed to change the firing rate
7. Transduction of Light
1. Isomerization triggers an enzyme cascade
1. Cascade means single reaction leads to increasing number of chemical reactions
2. Enzymes facilitate chemical reactions
3. Dark Adaptation
1. Moving from photopic to scotopic vision
2. Test both rods and cones 
1. by having you fixate we can test adaptation of cones
2. periphery starts to get at rods but not quite exclusively
1. There is not a way to get at just rods for normally developing people
2. However, there are rod monochromats that you could test (they lack all 3 types of cones)
3. Photopic
1. daylight vision
4. Scotopic
1. nighttime vision
5. Dark adaptation curve
1. Sensitivity increases in 2 stages
4. Sacod
1. Our eyes constantly move so our photoreceptors don't get tired

370: Chapter 2 Flashcards

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375: Research Methods

1. Methods
1. Recollection & Familiarity
1. Recognizing who someone is vs knowing you know them but not being able to remember who they are specifically
2. Controlled Laboratory Experiments
1. Internal Validity = good
2. Ecological Validity = depends but usually not quite as good
3. Reliability = depends
3. Self-Reports
1. Internal Validity = probably poor but tough to really say
2. Ecological Validity = okay, gave example of camera on the neck experiment which had really good ecological validity
3. Reliability = poor
4. Case Studies
1. Internal Validity = good
2. Ecological Validity = very good
3. Reliability = in theory it would be good if you could produce the same damage but often, as is the case with phineus gage, you wouldn't find the exact condition
5. Naturalistic Observations
1. Internal Validity = poor, too many confounding factors
2. Ecological Validity = great
3. Reliability = poor
6. Computer Simulations & Artificial Intelligence (AI)
1. Internal Validity = poor
2. Ecological Validity = 
3. Reliability =
7. Psychobiological Approaches
1. Electroencephalogram (EEG)
1. Measures electrical activity on the scalp (brain waves)
2. Great for its temporal resolution which means it is good at timing
3. Horrible for figuring out where these changes are occuring, poor spacial resolution
2. Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
1. Measurement of Blood Flow
1. As neurons become active, metabolism increases which increases blood flow so they put a radioactive tracer into the blood and track it.
1. As the tracer decays it emits a positron and they can image the positron
2. Problems
1. The tracer is radioactive: can't do this to the same person very often (once or twice a year)
2. Decays rapidly so you have to generate these positrons on site
1. Means it is very expensive
3. Better spacial resolution than EEG but it has poor temporal resolution
3. Functional Magnetic Radiance Imaging (fMRI)
1. Expensive
2. Becoming very popular as people recognize the many advantages

375: Historical Approach Pt2

1. Introspection and Structuralism are pretty much the same thing
1. Response to Structuralism was Behaviorism
2. Behaviorism 
1. John Watson
1. Instead of breaking the mind down into its different parts behaviorists decide to break behavior down into its different parts
2. Classical Conditioning (allows you to quantify behavior)
1. Breakdown
1. Unconditioned Stimulus (US)
1. "Beer Babe"
2. Unconditioned Response (UR)
1. Your natural reaction to the US
3. Conditioned Stimulus (CS)
1. Beer
4. Conditioned Response (CR)
1. UR each time you see the CS
2. Invention of Classical Conditioning
1. Aristotle was the inventor
2. Pavlov brought it to behaviorism
3. B. F. Skinner
1. Believed that all behavior could be explained by operant conditioning
2. Operant Conditioning
1. Difference is that you have to do something in order to get the reward where in classical conditioning you don't have to do something
1. Example
1. Parenting: you need to be 100% consistent in your reward/punishment system
3. Skinner Box
1. reward through a little portal, response with lever, can give rewards through foot shocks, etc.
2. Designed a crib sized skinner box for his kid (probably just a myth)
4. Felt his most valuable contribution to psychology was figuring out how you reward behavior (reward ratio)
1. What is the best ratio to have?
1. Unpredictable and variable reward system
4. Overview of Changes
1. Inability to account for all animal behavior indicated something might be wrong
1. Can't condition something like sickness to sound.  It can only be conditioned to tastes.
2. Work from Ethology
1. Father of Modern Ethology = Konrad Lorenz
3. Critical Period: a time when the animal is able to learn a particular information rapidly and with little exposure; if the time window is missed, the animal has either difficulty picking it up or it is imposible
1. Example: accuracy on grammar test correlated with age of arrival for subjects who arrived before puberty but not after puberty
1. This indicated a sensitive period that begins to shut down in the early teens
2. Inability to go from animal models to human behavior indicated it was incomplete
3. Posing abstract constructs suggested as the what was needed to solve these problems
4. Inspiration from other fields to use abstract constructs
5. Chomsky 1959
1. Behaviorist account of language is wrong
2. Language is generative, meaning that virutally everything you say and hear is novel.  It can't be the case that you understand it b/c of reinforcement in the past, b/c you've never heard it before
3. E.g.: "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"
1. This is a sentence that Chomsky was never rewarded for but is still able to use
6. Abstract Constructs
1. A theoretical set of processes and representations (e.g., a rule for language, or a strategy in memory)
1. Why do people forget phone numbers after 30 seconds?
1. STM?
2. STM has representation and processes.   It's like a mini-theory
3. This idea drove behaviorist nuts, because it violated one of their tenets.  Which one?
1. They deal only with observables (can't see STM)
7. What Could Replace Behaviorism?
1. Cognitive Approach
3. The Cognitive Approach
1. We are going to take both observable input and observable output but we are also going to talk about the processing that happens between input and output

375: Historical Approach

1. History of the Cognitive Approach
1. Epistemology
1. Greek Views
1. How you acquire knowledge (perception)
2. How you maintain know knowledge (memory)
3. Whether knowledge is innate or learned (learning theory)
2. Plato
1. Rationalist (A Priori)
1. Nature
2. Thought that knowledge was innate
3. Aristotle
1. Empiricist (Tabula Rasa)
2. Nurture
3. Thought that knowledge is acquired through experience
4. Dark Ages
1. Decline of intellectualism, rise of spiritualism up until the Renaissance
5. Renaissance
1. Rediscovery of Greek thought
2. Rene Descartes
1. “I think therefore, I am”
2. Matter is divisible and doubtable, but you cannot doubt that you are thinking
3. Cartesian Dualism
1. 2 Kinds of Substance
1. res cogitans
1. The mind
2. res extensa
1. The body
2. The penial gland
1. a gland that sits in the middle of the brain where res cogitans and res extensa come together
2. This is the only thing that, to the naked eye, does not have bilateral symmetry (however, it is bilateral under the microscope)
3. Therefore it was where the soul resided
3. The Mind-Body problem
1. The major alternative to dualism is materialism
1. The position that physical material is all there is
2. Problems with both
1. how does the physical interact with the mental
1. or, in other words, how does a lump of gray matter give us this
2. Rationalism 
1. A Priori
1. knowledge is before experience
2. All knowledge can be found through reasoning
3. Empiricism
1. Locke, Hume, Berkley
1. Knowledge is a posteriori
1. All knowledge is gained through experience
2. Tabula Rasa (blank slate)
4. Psychology = science of the mind
1. Can we apply the scientific method to the mind?
1. How do we observe a thought?
1. Start with one's own thoughts
2. Structuralism
1. Thought we needed to get to basic structure of thought
2. Wundt 
1. Came up with a method to break the mind down into its different parts
2. 3 Elementary States
1. Sensations
2. Images
3. Affections
3. Problems with introspection
1. Are my sensations the same as your sensations?  Probably not, for example, on a cold day people from california are probably colder than people from alaska
2. Observing a thought changes that thought
3. Poor between subjects reliability
4. Imageless thought debate (cannot be answered with introspection method)
1. Titchener: thoughts always have images
2. Kulpe: thought is possible w/o images
1. Dr. Kirwan feels very strongly that thoughts without images are absolutely possible
5. Behaviorism
1. Lets ignore what happens in the middle and just focus on what we can observe
1. Focus on Input TO Processing TO Output
2. John Watson
1. Observable only 
2. Theory must be parsimonious
3. Break behavior down into irreducible concepts
4. Experiments with little Albert
1. Conditioned the kid to be afraid of white mice

370: Chapter 1 Flashcards

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370: Introduction

1. Perception is deceptively hard
1. Perception’s job is to take in input through receptors and determine what is out there in the world
1. We perceive things effortlessly but if one were to attempt to reproduce what we do it is extremely complex
2. 50-60% of the brain is devoted to seeing
3. Eyes just measure light
2. Perceptual problems are usually ill-posed
1. ill-posed
1. not enough info to determine answer
2. Example
1. World is 3D
2. We perceive it’s 3D structure correctly 
3. But the input is 2D
3. Perception is (unconscious) inference
1. Information in sensory input does not uniquely specify structure of the world
2. Brain has to make it’s best guess
4. “Illusions” illustrate perceptual mechanisms at work and can help us study them
1. Illusions tell us where the system breaks down which tells us where our brain takes short cuts
5. Quantitative Methods in Perception
1. Our eye can detect a minimum of one photon (although it takes 7 to get that one photon to the eye)
6. A Detection Experiment
1. determine whether or not an ‘X’ is present
7. Different Sources of Noise
1. Internal noise
2. External noise

375: Chapter 1 Flashcards

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375: The Cognitive Approach

1. The Cognitive Approach
1. “The mind is what the brain does”
1. Computational view of the mind & brain relationship
2. Mental Modules
1. organs
2. programmed by genes, shaped by evolution
3. The mind is organized into these modules
4. The Point
1. You think in stages of information processing
2. Stages
1. First: Speech Interpretation
2. Second: Interpretation of the Question
3. Third: Find the Answer in Memory
4. Fourth: Make Decision to Answer or Not
5. Fifth: Phrase the Answer
6. Sixth: Create Motor Commands to lips, tongue, etc.
3. Each Module/Stage is independent of the others
1. Stages communicate with one another, but one stage doesn’t know what the other is doing

370: Color Perception Pt2

1. Why Three Cones
1. ROYGBIV
1. R - 700 nm
2. O -
3. Y -
4. G -
5. B -
6. I -
7. V - 400 nm
2. One receptor type produces no color vision
3. Two cones produces some color but it is incomplete
4. More cones produce more colors
1. Many animals have 4+ cones
5. All you brain knows is the firing rate of action potentials.  So if a receptor just transmitted 100 units of electrical activity can you tell anything about the wavelength of the photons just absorbed?
1. We can't get color vision from this.
2. Principle of Univariance
1. Example
1. Say we have one pigment of medium wavelength that is maximally sensitive to wavelengths of 550 nm.  If you have 1000 photons at 550 or 590 you will have the best response at 550 but you will also respond at 590 even though it is slightly off and not your preferred wavelength
2. If however you have 2000 photons hit 590 instead of 1000 then the firing rate at 590 will be at the same amount as 550 where it was only half of the rate of 550 in the first example with only 1000 photons hitting it.
3. Color Deficiency
1. Monochromat
1. A person with only rods (or occasionally they may have one cone type)
2. Needs only one lambda to match any color. Truly "color blind"
3. If you are a monochromat then you will only see in black and white
4. Why would a monochromat like to hang out in the dark?
1. Because they see better
2. Dichromat
1. A person with two cone types.  Need only two lambda to match any color.  Poor color differentiation
3. Anomalous Trichromat
1. Needs three lambda in different proportions than normal trichromat.  Good color vision, just a bit different
2. How do we find a person like this?  They would technically see something different but it would be labelled the same so they would be extremely difficult to identify.
1. You can find them behaviorally based on the color matching experiment.  Most people will be the same but an anomalous trichromat will color match slightly differently.
3. A possible reason for this could be diet
4. Unilateral Dichromat
1. Trichromatic vision in one eye and dichromatic in the other.  Very rare.  Useful for figuring out subjective color experiences of dichromats
2. This is very interesting because the same person can explain how the world looks for both trichromatic and dichromatic vision
4. Monochromacy
1. Rod Monochromacy
1. Typical or complete achromatopsia, total color blindness, day blindness
2. Blue cone Monochromacy
3. Cone Monochromacy
1. Normal visual acuity and complete ability to see color.  May or may not exist
4. Cerebral Achromatopsia
1. Disorder where you use to be able to see color but after damage, from a stroke for example, you can no longer see color.  Atypical achromatopsia.
5. Definition of Monochromacy:
1. This is a very rare hereditary condition where you have only rods and no cones and you are sensitive to bright lights because of your reliance on rods.
5. Dichromatic
1. Three Types

375: Attention Pt3, Sensory & Primary Memory

1. Filter Theories
1. Now we are saying that late filter theory is probably more correct than early filter theory.  
2. Say there is a bottleneck
2. Capacity Theory
1. You have a fixed attention capacity
2. You can choose to filter on either stimulus qualities (early) or semantic information (late)
3. Late filtering takes more cognitive resources, so you're worse at secondary tasks
4. Predictions
1. We have different capacities for different modalities
1. We can do a visual task and an auditory task and they won't conflict
2. When they are in the same modality then processing will be severely limited
3. Binding Problem
1. Different parts of the brain analyze color and shape so the visual system has to take all the different parts and break it all apart.  So how do these things get put back together?  How does the brain bind them all back together?
2. Solution
1. One idea is that attention is the solution to the binding problem.  Except the parallel search happens pre-attentively so that isn't quite a solution.
2. Maybe serial attention would still work to solve the problem
4. Memory
1. Define
1. a change in your behavior as a result of some experience
2. Modal Model
1. Input TO sensory memory TO short-term memory (rehearsal) TO long-term memory
1. sensory memory lasts about 1 second
2. STM lasts about 30 sec.
3. LTM can last a lifetime
3. Research
1. Early span of apprehension 
1. How much can you remember in a scene?  Does photographic memory actually work?
2. Jevon
1. Threw beans on a card and tested his memory of how many there were.
2. Estimated that 100% accuracy with 5 beans or less and 50% accuracy w/ 9 beans
3. Span estimates across studies would always show the same thing.  People could keep track of up to 4-5 stimuli.  However subjects did report seeing more just not remembering detail
3. Sperling
1. Found that if you are shown 3 rows of letters and asked what you remember you will only remember a few letters.  However, if you are immediately told to recall a specific row then you will be able to remember the letters on that row.  If you wait longer than 1 second though then this memory still fades
1. This is called iconic memory
2. Iconic Memory

382: Exam 1 - In Class Review

1. Lecture 1
1. Causes of death
1. 1900 vs 2000
2. Reasons
2. Integrative Medicine
1. Biological Model
1. Biological and social well being all play a role in health
2. Integration
1. MDs came up with this
2. Today we face chronic health issues
3. Defining Stress
1. Selye
1. Came up with definition from physics
2. Distress
1. Bad stress
3. Eustress
1. Good stress
2. Perception
1. Stress is really a function of the person.  
1. Example, some may be happy to jump out of an airplane while others would not enjoy it
2. Lecture 2
1. Allostasis
1. 5 questions on the exam on allostasis
2. Homeostasis is independent systems where allostasis is interdependent
3. "Stability through change"
2. Perception
1. We have the ability to change our bodies function through thoughts, emotions, and ...
3. Epigenetic's
1. Jirtle with the fat mice
1. only diff between fat and skinny babies was the diet of the mother; either soy or fatty diet.  Soy diet had methyl marks that suppress a piece of the genetic code.  Histone modification is a bigger piece is suppressed.  Methyl mark is a specific piece that is suppressed.
2. Study with the twins
3. Meadey study on the effect of nurturing from the mother rats on the babies
4. Define: Not the genes themselves but how they are expressed
1. Our faces are an example of epigenetics
4. Crisis (stress response)
1. Get energy now
1. cortisol
2. Move energy to needed areas
3. Shut down long term projects
4. Blunted pain perception
5. Increase cognitive functioning
5. Stress and Health
1. Acute = good, Chronic = bad
2. Does stress cause disease?  
1. No but it does create the conditions for it to happen
3. Lecture 3
1. Key Figures
1. Watson & Crick
1. Crick
1. Central Dogma
1. Buck stops with the genes
2. Darwin and Lamark
1. Lamark was right that acquired characteristics are passed on.  But it's not the genome itself that is changing which is what Darwin said
2. Epigenetics
1. We see that it is not just the genes
2. Determined by environment, social, etc.
3. Video Clip 
1. Meaney
1. Cross Fostering
1. You take babies from a good mother and give them to a bad mother.  You also do vice versa.  You see that stress is a result of mothering during the early months of the babies.  
1. Babies switched stress response
2. They showed that it didn't matter who your mother was but how much care that they received.
2. Jirtle
1. Agouti mice
3. Fraga
1. Twins
1. By 60 you do see epigenetic differences
4. Brigham Young Quotes
4. Lecture 4
1. Adaptive Brain
1. Triune Brain
1. Reptilian brain TO Mammalian TO Neo Mammalian
2. Brain is Master Gland
2. Integrative Brain
1. Limbic System
1. amygdala
1. negative emotion
2. hypocampus
1. Memory consolidation
2. STM
3. Cingulate Cortex
4. Insulate Cortex
1. Related to your sense of internal well being
2. Related to homeostasis and allostasis
3. Balancing Brain
1. Allostasis
1. Glutamate
1. Too much glutamate kills brain cells
2. Too little is related to schizophrenia
2. Cortisol
1. Too much kills brain cells in hyppocampus
2. Too little inhibits learning
5. Lecture 5
1. ANS
1. SNS
1. Fight or flight
2. PNS
1. Slows down
3. Need some tone or balance between these but our society emphasizes the SNS
2. Neuronal need for Speed
3. Fast stress response system
1. Response patterns
1. "Fight or flight"
2. "Tend and Befriend" and defend
2. SAM system
1. Sympathetic Adrenal Medullary
6. Lecture 6
1. Chemical Messengers
1. Norepinephrine is a neurotransmitter till in the blood stream then it is a hormone
2. Similarities
1. Neurotransmitter in cleft
2. There is a slide that goes over all the similarities of Neuro's and hormones so look that up
2. Delayed Stress Response
1. HPA
2. Stands for...
3. Know the biological process
3. Emotion (emotions are good)
1. Adaptation
1. Emotions are adaptive
1. They are learned and not genetic predisposition
2. They work together with the limbic system and the cortex
1. Band between limbic system and cortex is the...?
2. Awareness
1. Emotions provide information about our internal states
3. Communication
4. Know the two pictures (the brain picture on the spine and the boy afraid of spider picture)
5. James-Lange Theory
1. Stimulus TO perception TO specific patter of autonomic arousal TO ...
6. Eckman faces 
7. Neuroscience of Emotion
1. Brain does not have a single emotion center
2. Can't overcome fear at the cognitive level because it is learned in the limbic system.  So you have to overcome it in the limbic System (systematic desensitization)
7. Lecture 7
1. Sensation
1. Adaption
1. Transduction: we have physical stimuli coming in, it's the information as it is turned into an electrical impulse
2. Different senses impact different brain systems
2. Function
2. Video
1. We perceive the world how it was useful to perceive it in the past
2. "We perceive the world as we are"
3. Perception
1. Gestalt Theory
1. born with
2. Learning Theory 
1. learn things
3. Stress
8. Lecture 8
1. Memory and Learning
1. How we learn
1. declarative vs episodic
2. How we store
2. Neurophysiology of Memory
1. Memory is neuronal remodeling
2. Synaptic change
3. Cool study example
1. Rats with enhanced cage vs normal cage vs solitary confinement cage
3. Remembering and Imagining
1. Reconsolidation 
1. "A memory remembered is a memory modified"
2. Prospective Brain
1. We see the future in the context of how we saw the past
9. This is not done because he went super fast in class but I will get it fully updated as soon as I can.

382: Stress and Cognitive Ability

1. Key Terms
1. Attention: the process of selecting or focusing on one or more stimuli
2. Arousal: The global level of alertness in an individual
3. Overt Attention (explicit): Occurs when the focus coincides with the sensory orientation
4. Covert Attention (implicit): Focus is independent of sensory orientation
5. Cocktail Party Effect: Selectively enhanced attention to filter out other stimuli
6. Dichotic Presentation: Simultaneous delivery of different stimuli to both ears at the same time
7. Shadowing: A task requiring focusing attention on one ear and repeating what is heard, while receiving stimuli in both ears.  Subjects can report little about the stimuli heard in the unattended ear
8. Attentional Spotlight: Shifts around the environment, highlighting stimuli for processing
1. Dr. Steffen talked about this as though it were true but I have only heard about attention as a spotlight from a negative point of view.  That is, I have heard many arguments against it.  Any thoughts on this?
9. Attentional Bottleneck: Works as a filter to select only the most important stimuli for processing, however, some unattended stimuli are processed and may even capture attention
10. Late-selection Models: sugest the bottleneck occurs later, after some processing has occurred
1. Two parts to our memory, one is more limbic and the other is more frontal cortex
1. Before sensory information goes to the cortex it has some meaning attached to it from the limbic system
11. Top-down Processing: Previous experience or thoughts have to do with information coming in
12. Bottom-up Processing: Low order sensory systems trigger processing by higher-order systems
2. Other Notes at the Beginning of Class
1. During stress, have more exogenous, reflexive attention, involuntary reorientation
2. Attention and awareness do not necessarily mean consciousness
3. fMRI maps suggest reliance on the medial frontal cortex and cingulate
4. Hard problem of consciousness
1. it is very subjective so how do you measure it?
2. Qualia
1. purely subjective experiences of perceptions and impossible to communicate to others
3. Conscious experiences of intention may be much later than the activity of making a decision, as seen in fMRI
1. What are the implications of this on free will?  Do we still have it?
1. Perhaps it means that reactions are first processed in the limbic system, emotionally, and then it reaches the cortex 
3. Prefrontal Cortex
1. Most anterior portion of the cortex
2. Phineus Gage
1. Pre-prefrontal damage vs Post
1. His executive function was impaired
2. His inhibition went way down
1. inhibition is a key function of the prefrontal cortex
3. Preseverate
4. Neuroeconomics
1. studies brain mechanisms active during economic decision making
2. 2 Main Systems
1. Valuation system
1. Rank choices on worth and reward
2. Choice system
1. Considering alternatives
3. Research confirms that prefrontal cortex inhibits impulsive decisions, enforcing loss aversion.  Also activated when faced with uncertainty, or, with the amygdala, when feeling regret for a costly decision.

382: Biopsychology of Psychiatric Disorders

Biopsychology: Chapter 18

1. Psychiatric Disorders
1. 2 Main difficulties in diagnosing
1. Patients suffering the same disorder often display different symptoms
2. Patients suffering from different disorders often display many of the same symptoms
2. Schizophrenia
1. Means "the splitting of psychic functions"
2. Demographics
1. Occurs in about 1% of individuals
2. Begins in adolescence or early adulthood
3. Symptoms
1. Positive
1. Delusions of control, persecution, and grandeur
2. Hallucinations: voices telling the person what to do
3. Inappropriate affect
4. Incoherent speech or thought
5. Odd behavior
2. Negative
1. Affective flattening
2. Alogia: Reduction or absence of speech 
3. Avolition: Reduction or absence of motivation 
4. Anhedonia: Inability to experience pleasure
4. Causal Factors
1. Schizophrenia seems to be very hereditary but the fact that occurrence in twins is substantially less than 100% suggests that there are strong environmental factors as well
3. I decided to stop taking notes on this chapter because I went through the slides for today and they seem to be completely unrelated to the chapter.  Last time this happened he basically said to disregard the reading.  So... yeah.

210: Reductionism

1. Material Reductionism
1. Reduces everything to matter or non-matter where non matter is not important
2. Democritus & Leucippus
1. Atomism
1. Stuff
1. Matter
2. Non-stuf
1. Void
2. This side isn't study-able
2. Anything non material is not study-able 
1. So have any of you ever studied the space between you and the person next to you?
3. There is an implication that the brain is what produces the mind.  The mind is secondary to the brain.  This implies that we are determined.
1. So if free will is gone and we are determined what happens to meaning?
1. Is it meaningful if Dr. Reber goes to get his wife flowers after class tonight?  Or is that just something that is being forced by biological factors?
4. Hard Sciences use this type of material reductionism
5. Argument from Deficit
1. We use brain damage to a specific area as evidence that whatever behavioral deficit is present means that that specific area of the brain must have controlled the now absent behavioral
2. He used the example of slices someones achilles tendons and making it so they are unable to walk.  Does that mean that walking is synonymous with the achilles tendon?  No.  It means that the achilles is a part of it but not the whole thing.
2. Mechanistic Reductionism
1. A combination of metaphysical reductionism acting upon material reductionism
2. Deism (Newton)
1. God created everything then put it together.  He started it running, like a clock, and then just let it tick by itself.  Got put everything in motion but is no longer needed.
2. Following this was a long discussion about theology that ended with most people feeling happy inside
3. Any time in psychology where we talk about some body part that are acting we usually are talking about a mechanistic way of thinking.  Most psychology is mechanistic.
3. Temporal Reductionism
1. Reduce the idea of time to just "the past"
2. Newton
1. Time = a linear timeline
2. Problem
1. Present
1. There is no such thing as the present on a timeline because it immediately becomes the past
1. So what kind of psychology would we have if we were to study the present?  It would be irrelevant with this view of time.
2. Future
1. We don't now what is in the future so we cannot study it.
3. Past
1. This means that you only have the past as something that is accessible to study.  
2. Psychology, because it has adopted this view of time, really only studies the past.
3. Because you cannot change your past that means that you are determined by your past.
3. Alternative to the Timeline Point of View
1. Here and Now Psychology
1. All you really have is the present.  The present is a sort of amorphous field and in that field are a bunch of memories, which are the past, and your goals, which represent your future.
1. With this view, your past and future can be both changed and adapted
4. Evolutionary Reductionism
1. Combination of metaphysical reductionism, because it believes there is a law that governs all organisms (natural selection), it is material reductionistic, because of the focus on our genes, and it is temporal reductionistic, in that it focuses on ancestry.
1. Could also say that it is mechanistic and temporal but is best understood in three parts: metaphysical, material, and temporal.
2. Primary Component of Evolutionary Reductionism
1. Mate Selection
1. Everything is driven by genetic proliferation which we are naturally drawn to do
2. There are specific characteristics of both men and women that are sought after in a partner
2. After Sex
1. Effect on the Female
1. She is pregnant for 9 months and then the child needs a parent to raise it for a certain amount of time
2. Effect on Men
1. There is about a 15 minute refractory period
3. Because of these differences the idea is that men and women develop different attitudes towards potential sexual partners
1. Women need to find a monogamous partner who will stay with them for an extended period of time.  Men are evolutionarily designed to reproduce with as many women as possible.
3. What is the effect of evolutionary psychology on free will?
1. It reduces choices to raw sex that is determined by evolution 
5. Linguistic Reductionism
1. We can't help but reduce.  It is an inescapable process.  Don't fight reducing but instead fight against reification
1. Reification
1. When we use a word to capture a whole set of abilities that are really more than just a word
2. Examples: gravity, intelligence, self-esteem, the Id, etc.
3. Examples from other types of reductionism
1. Metaphysical: the Id
2. Mechanistic: the brain is like a computer
3. Temporal: the past
4. Evolutionary: the law of natural selection
4. Perhaps the most dangerous reification in psychology is disorders
1. For example, labeling something as depressed.  A person doesn't have depression but instead they have a series of symptoms that we have chosen to reify as depression.
2. Instead recognize that you have to use words and labels but you don't have to think of them as "real"
3. There is free will in linguistic reduction
1. You can change your interpretation, and in fact you should be open to change, so that you can adjust as you receive new information

304: Correlation and Regression

1. Floor Effects
1. This is where a test is so hard that everyone scores low and it does not differentiate between scores on the low end
1. Everyone would get an E despite some people putting in much less effort than others
2. Ceiling Effects
1. This is where a test is so easy that everyone scores high so it does not differentiate on the high end
1. So everyone would get an A even though some people may have worked much harder than others
2. Advil Experiment
1. Although the graph in this experiment goes down this is still a ceiling effect because the drug is measuring pain relief. 
3. Lets Get Luke Into Law School
1. What are the factors of getting Luke into Law School
1. Acceptance = (4.3)LSAT + (2.7)Letters of Recommendation + (2.2)GPA + (1.1)Experience + (3.1)Interview + (.7)Writing Sample - (5.6)Criminal Record - (.4)Demographic Information
1. This is a regression equation of all the factors for luke getting into law school.  The coefficients are to represent the different importance that the law school puts on different factors.
2. The question is...
1. When do you say I know enough and adding more items is just creating busy work?
4. Bivariate Regression
1. Regression refers specifically to prediction
2. Simple bivariate regression uses;
1. X - one predictor variable
2. Y - one dependent (criterion) variable
3. Equation: Y' = a + bX
5. Multiple Regression
1. Predicts one continuous dependent variable using a linear combination of two or more predictor variables
2. Equation: Y' = a +b1X1 + b2X2
6. Residuals in Prediction
1. A regression equation generates a predicted value of Y (Y') for each value of X
2. Residual
1. difference between the actual and the predicted value
7. Validity Shrinkage
1. When a regression equation is calculated using one group of subjects and used to predict performance in another group of subjects there is error in the second group

370: Color Perception

1.  Pink Does Not Exist
1. True in that there is not one wavelength that corresponds to pink
2. False in that we perceive it.  
3. Color
1. Color does not exist in the physical world it only exists in perception of waves of light.  In other words it only exists in our head.
1. So if it only exists in our head then because we perceive pink it exists
2. Color Perception
1. Carrots
1. Carrots are orange in honor of William of Orange :)
2. Functions of Color
1. They help us classify and identify objects
1. Segmentation
1. With color we are able to identify objects where it is hard to dissociate objects in grayscale
3. How Can We Organize Color Experience?
1. Color Circle
1. Shows the perceptual relationship between different colors
2. HSV
1. Hue (red vs blue)
2. Saturation (red vs pink)
3. Value (red vs brown)
3. Color Wheel
1. Complimentary colors are on opposite sides of the wheel
3. Color Perception
1. Colors are determined by wavelengths
2. objects reflect a broad range of wavelengths
4. How Is Light Reflected
1. It can be absorbed (black) 
2. Specular
3. Lambertian
4. Transmission
5. Refraction
6. Scatter
5. Theories of Color Vision
1. Trichromatic Theory
1. there are three color mechanisms
1. From those three you can make all different colors (red, yellow, blue)
2. Behavioral Evidence
1. Young & Helmholtz
1. Suggested 3 receptors
2. Color Matching Experiment
1. Participants had to mix colors to match a test field color
1.  Always needed at least 3 colors
2. Unless a person was color blind (dichromats with only two cones)
1. Color blind people could do this task with only 2 colors
3. Physiological Evidence
1. Measured absorption spectra of cone visual pigments in receptors
2. Color-opponent Theory
1. There are four color mechanisms
1. Four colors make all different colors (red, green, blue, yellow)
2. Proposed by Hering
1. When you stare at an x between red and green or blue and yellow then when the colors disappear the colors still are perceived but in opposite positions
3. Physiological Evidence
1. Researchers performing single-cell recordings found color-opponent neurons...He changes slides too fast!
3. Theories Combined
1. Both theories are correct as each describes physiological mechanisms in the visual system:
1. Trichromatic theory explains the responses of the cones in the retina
2. Color-opponent theory explains neural response for cels connected to the cones further in the brain
6. Color Mixing
1. Additive 
1. Mixing different wavelengths of light
2. All wavelengths are available for the observer to see
3. Superimposing blue and yellow lights leads to white.  Why?
1. Because yellow is a mixture of red and greed so adding red and green to blue results in white.  When you mix more colors you get white.
2. Subtractive color mixing
1. Mixing paints with deff pigments
1. Blue and Yellow will result in green.
7. Why Three Cones
1. One receptor type produces no color vision
2. Two cones produces some color but it is incomplete
3. More cones produce more colors
1. Many animals have 4+ cones
4. All you brain knows is the firing rate of action potentials.  So if a receptor just transmitted 100 units of electrical activity can you tell anything about the wavelength of the photons just absorbed?
1. We can't get color vision from this.

375: Attention Pt2

1. Change Blindness
1. This was an experiment where one person would give the participant a consent form to sign then duck to put the form in a cabinet and another person would pop back up
2. The idea was to find out if people notice when the person switches
1. 75% of the people did not notice
2. If the person happened to be attending to a specific detail that changed then they would notice
2. Does Attention Enhance Perception?
1. Experiment by Posner et al.
1. Participant had to click a button when the target appeared
2. There was a cue that would tell you what side of the screen the target would appear on
1. Half the time this cue was accurate and the other half it was misleading
3. When the cue was valid then reaction time would decrease (better performance)
4. If you have an invalid cue then the reaction time would increase (slower performance) than both situations of valid cue and no cue
5. Attention as a Spotlight
1. Attention is like the beam of a spotlight
2. Neural basis of the beam
1. 3 separate processes
1. Disengage, move, and engage
3. Problems with the beam metaphor
1. If you have to shift your attention greater distances it doesn't take more time than short shifts
2. Moving attention isn't slowed down by intervening stuff
1. Intervening objects should intervene and slow your attention down if beam metaphor is true but it doesn't
3. Attention selects space
1. He gave us the example of having red words and gray words written in the same space.  If sight was really a beam then we should be able to remember both words but since we were attending to the red most of the class didn't remember what the gray words were.
1. Implies that you are not switching to another location in space but instead to another object or object part
2. What if you are not attending to what you want to pay attention to?
1. Pop Out Effect
1. When the stimulus you are looking forward has a unique feature/single characteristic it sort of pops out at you
2. What if you have multiple characteristics in common?
1. Disjunctive Search
1. Definition
1. Single Characteristic defines your search
2. Process in Parallel 
1. All the stimuli is processed at once
2. Conjunctive Search
1. More than one Characteristic defines your search
2. Process is serial or you process things at different times till you find the stimuli
3. Parietal lobe damage
1. People with this type of brain damage cannot do a conjunctive search
2. Parietal lobe is necessary to perform this task
1. It lights up on fMRI when performing this task
3. Evaluate
1. Attention is selective, so you must always be evaluating other stimuli to see if they are more important than what you're attending to now.
2. Process
1. External stimuli TO processing physical characteristics TO process semantics TO awareness
1. Early filter theory
1. you only process the physical characteristics
2. Late filter theory
1. You process physical and semantics to find out if things are meaningful to you or not
2. Method to Study whether early filter theory or late filter theory is true
1. Early Filter Theory Evidence
1. Put different spoken words in different ears and said only attend to the right
1. Found that...
1. People don't remember words from unshadowed ear
2. People do notice if a tone is played or if there is a gap which is evidence for early filter theory
2. Late Filter Theory Evidence
1. Cocktail Party Effect 
1. Certain words will grab your attention even if you are at a party
2. Works about 1/3 of the time
3. Researchers proposed that all stimuli are evaluated for physical and semantic properties
1. However, it appears that the physical stimuli actually makes people switch attention so Early Filter Theory appears more correct (He went back on this in the next lecture and instead decided that it really depends on the situation.  Sometimes early filter is correct and sometimes late filter is correct.)
2. Really we don't know the exact process of focussing attention yet
4. Summary
1. Sometimes you must switch
2. Sometimes you must search
3. Always you must evaluate

382: Stress, Memory, and Imagination

1. Learning
1. process by which experiences change our nervous system and hence our behavior
2. Memory
1. the ability to store and retrieve information
3. Associative Learning
1. understanding relationship between events
4. Classical Conditioning (Pavlovian conditioning)
1. dogs salivate when they hear the bell after being conditioned by a meal
5. Instrumental Conditioning (Operant Conditioning)
1. Behavior 
2. The consequences of behavior
6. Nonassociative Learning
1. Involves a single stimulus presented once or repeated
2. Three types
1. Habituation
1. a decreased response to repeated presentations of a stimulus
2. Dishabituation
1. restoration of response amplitude after havituation
3. Sensitization
1. prior stong stimulation increases response to most stimuli
2. something had a strong effect so next time you'll have an even stronger response
7. Types of Memory
1. Declarative (explicit)
1. deals with the "what"
2. facts and information
3. Two types
1. S
2. Nondeclarative (implicit)
1. deals with the "how"
2. performance rather than information
8. Temporal Stages of Memory
1. Iconic
1. the briefest and store sensory impressions
2. Short-term memories (STMs)
1. Usualy last only for seconds, or throughout rehearsal
2. aka working memory
1. working memory is a bottleneck
1. There is a ton of sensory information but you can only store about 7 chunks of it in your working memory.  Then the memory stream it broadens again once it becomes long term memory.  Long term memory can store a "ton" of information.
3. Intermediate-term Memory (ITM)
1. Outlasts a STM, but is not permanent
2. For example, you remember where you parked your car after you come out of a movie
4. Long-term Memories (LTMs) 
1. last for days to years
5. Primacy and Recency Effects
1. Recency effects work better
6. Functional Memory incorporates 3 aspects
1. Encoding
1. sensory info is encoded into short-term memory
2. Consolidation
1. Info may be consolidated into long-term storage
3. Retrieval
1. Stored info is retrieved
2. Anxiety is the big memory killer
9. Memory Is Not Perfect Or Complete
1. Only details relevant to the individual (you) are remembered
2. The function of memory is to help us survive
1. so we focus on the helpful and avoid the threatening
3. Shereshevskii
1. photographic memory but had problems writing
1. He had such a large amount of information that other tasks started to be disrupted
10. Biology of the Temporal Stages
1. Consolidation
1. Involves the hippocampus but the hyppocampal system does not store long term memories
2. LTM
1. Occurs in the cortex where the memory was first processed and held in short-term memory
11. Photographic Memory
12. Memory is Neuronal Remodeling
1. We don't have a fixed amount of brain cells.  There are neurons dying and more being born.
2. Neuroplasticity
1. the ability of neurons and neural circuits to be remodeled by experience or environment.  Memory is, in a way, synonymous with neuroplasticity.  That is to say, you cannot not add a new memory or experience without the neural circuits in your brain being altered in some way.
3. Long-term Potentiation
1. a stable and enduring increase in the effectiveness of synapses
4. Tetanus
1. A brief increase of electrical stimulation that triggers thousands of axon potentials
2. "Neurons that fire together wire together"
13. Synaptic Change
1. Process
1. Hippocampal circuits have both NMDA and AMPA receptors
2. Glutamate activates AMPA receptors
3. NMDA receptors do not respond until enough AMPA receptors are stimulated and the neuron is partially depolarized
4. NMDA receptors at rest have a magnesium ion (Mg 2+) block on their calcium (Ca 2+) channels
5. After partial depolarization, the block is removed and the NMDA receptor allows CA 2+ to enter in response to glutamate
6. Strong stimulation of a post synaptic cell release a retrograde messenger that travels across the synapse and alters functions in the presynaptic neuron
7. More glutamate is released and the synapse is strengthened
8. The large Ca 2+ influx...
1. causes more AMPA receptors to be produced
2. Causes more AMPA receptors to be inserted in the postsynaptic membrane
2. Example Experiment
1. Put rats in an impoverished condition, a normal condition, and an enriched condition
1. Enriched Condition
1. heavier thicker cortex
2. altered gene expression
3. enhanced recovery from brain damage
4. etc.
14. Remembering and Imagining
1. Memory Trace
1. record of learning experience, can be affected by other events before or after original event
2. We only remember pieces of the original event that were relevant to us.  However, depending on our current state, our brain will fill in the missing pieces to build the whole picture.  A whole picture that turns out to be very subjective.
3. "A memory recalled is a memory modified"
1. Every time you remember a memory that memory is changed.  
2. Because your state is different for each recollection it will slightly alter the memory
15. The Prospective Brain
1. "...imagining the future depends on much of the same neural machinery that is needed for remembering the past"
2. "crucial function of the brain is to use stored information to imagine, simulate and predict possible future events"
3. So does this mean that if we have had a traumatic past, we are destined to always imagine and predict a traumatic future?
16. APS is better than APA

382: Glands, Gooseflesh, and Hormones

1. Autonomic Nervous System (ANS)
1. Has 2 systems that control opposing reactions
1. Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS)
1. SNS kicks into action during perceived emergencies
2. Mediate vigilance, arousal, activation, and mobilization.
3. Mediates the four F's of behavior
1. Flight, fight, fright, ans sex
4. The nerve endings release epinephrine and norepinephrine
1. These are the chemical messengers that get things going
2. Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS)
1. Mediates calm, and vegetative activities.  Everything but the four F's.
2. Promotes growth, energy storage, and other optimistic processes.
3. Many safety systems exist so both systems cannot be simultaneously turned on
2. Your Brain: The Real Master Gland
1. Neurotransmitter
1. A hormone that travels from one neuron to another causing the second neuron to do something different (epinephrine)
2. Hormone
1. If a neuron (or any cell) secretes a messenger that instead of just affecting a single neuron it affects a broad amount of things.
3. The Brains Role
1. Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally
1. Found that the brain was secreting hormones that controlled what glands should do
2. The brain is the master gland
3. Hormones of the Stress Response
1. Glucocorticoids
1. Steroid hormone
2. Secreted by the adrenal gland, they often act in ways similar to epinephrine.  Epinephrine acts within seconds; glucocorticoids back this activity up over the course of minutes or hours
3. Glucocorticoids along with epinephrine and norepinephrine are the workhouses of the stress response
2. When something stressful happens...
1. Hypothalamus secretes releasing hormones into the hypothalamic-pituitary circulatory system to get things rolling.  
1. The principle releaser is CRH (corticotropin releasing hormone)
2. CRH triggers the pituitary to release ACTH (aka corticotropin)
3. ACTH enters the blood stream, gets to the adrenal gland and triggers the release of glucocorticoids
3. Glucagon
1. Hormone released by the pancreas
4. These three hormones (glucocorticoids, glucagon, and SNS) are essential for mobilizing energy during stress
4. Complications
1. Shelley Taylor
1. "Tend and Befriend" vs "Fight or Flight"
1. Taylor believes the "tend and befriend" is the female version of "fight or flight" that is underemphasized because of male scientists focusing on male participants
2. There is opposition to her female vs male ideas but what has been accepted widely is that at time stress is "fight or flight" and at other times it can be "tend or befriend" in both men and women

382: Why Don't Zebras Get Ulcers?

1. Stress and Disease
1. Chronic stress doesn't actually give you a sickness.  It specifically increases your risk of disease or lowers your defenses against disease allowing for an already present disease to take over.
2.  This distinction helps to...
1. Explain individual differences
2. Makes it easier to design ways to intervene
3. It helps explain the slippery nature of medical diagnosis
1. For example, doctors will say you feel sick because of "disease X" instead of addressing the underlying cause of the disease which is often stress.

382: Stress and Perception (Some things that will be on Exam 1)

1. Senses
1. All senses transduce stimulus energy into neural impulses
2. All senses are more sensitive to change than to constant stimulation
3. All sense provide us with adaptive information about the world
4. How are senses alike and how are they different?
1. Different
1. Each sense taps a different form of stimulus energy
2. Each sense sends the information it extracts to a different part of the brain
3. Questions from the slides:
1. Different senses give us different sensations mainly because...
1. B (I didn't get the answer written quick enough but it should be on the slides)
2. What do all these forms of sensation have in common: vision, hearing, taste, smell, pain, equilibrium, and body position?
1. C - they all are conveyed to the brain in the form of nerve signals

382: Stress and Epigenetics

1. Epigenetics History
1. James Watson & Francis Crick
1. Discover the structure of DNA (1953)
2. Crick
1. The Central Dogma
1. DNA to Transcription to RNA to Translation to Protein
2. a.k.a. Genetic Determinism
1. Thought that if you understand genes then you basically understand everything
2. Genes
1. Control reproduction and day-by-day function of all cells
2. Genes control cell function
2. Claude Bernard
1. “It is that which we do know which is the greatest hindrance to our learning, not that which we do not know.”
2. Epigenetics
1. Definition
1. Heritable changes in gene expression that do not involve a change in DNA sequence
2. Bridge between genotype and phenotype
1. Genotype
1. genes
2. Phenotype
1. expression
3. Environment, perception, and behavior affect gene expression
1. Genes to Proteins to Structure of Nervous System to Behavior which are all affected by environment, perception and behavior
2. Chromatin
1. Epigenetic material
3. Methylation and Histone Modification
1. DNA Methylation
1. The attachment or substitution of a methyl of a mehtyl group for another compound
2. in genetics, methyl marks are added to certain DNA bases which repress gene activity
3. Think of it as looking at ONE gene and silencing that ONE gene
2. Histone Modification
1. DNA are wrapped around histones in order to save space in the nucleus
2. If histones don’t unwrap then DNA cannot be read
3. This is looking at a bunch of DNA instead of just one.
4. STUDIEs
1. Jirtle
1. Agouti gene: cute fat mice w/ yellow fur
2. Soy contains methyl donors (hypothesized to play a role in asiands having better health)
3. Pregnant agouti moms eating soy diet have skinny kids with dark fur
4. Soy diet silenced the agouti gene
2. Afroga Study
1. Diff between histones and methyl marks
3. Michael Meaney
1. Talk about how he stressed out the rats, rat pups were more susceptible to stress, and epigenomic state of a gene can be established through behavioral programming (stress out the mom) and it is potentially reversible

382: Stress Respons Basics

1. Key Concepts
1. Our bodies are built to survive
1. Our body is geared to help us cope with any stressor
2. To handle threat and stress, our bodies
1. body is made to help us cope with any stress
2. We can quickly think through situations
3. We can quickly mobilize energy resources in response to perceived threats
4. It’s all about speed
2. Three concepts to focus on (for first paper)
1. Balance (allostasis)
1. Homeostasis versus Allostasis
1. Homeostasis (term for specific systems in the body)
1. Concept of independent bodily systems using negative feedback loops
2. Maintain internal balance
3. Set point
1. 98.6 in the body
4. Local regulation
1. This isn’t body wide but a specific focus in the body controls that
2. Allostasis (Umbrella term that encompasses Homeostasis) 
1. Disrupted Balance Experiment
1. Selye distressed rats and found...
1. enlarged adrenal cortex
2. shrinking of thymus
3. ulcers
2. Allostasis was a way to describe these three global findings
3. Concept of Multiple Interdependent Systems
1. Balance depends on current needs
2. Multiple set points
3. The whole body is involved in adaptive responses
4. Brain regulated
1. The brain is the master organizer of all of these bodily systems
4. “Stability through change”
5. Example
1. Blood Pressure
1. not an independent system
1. affected by sympathetic nervous system, kidney water retention, hormone levels, etc.
2. No Set Point
1. Blood pressure varies by posture, activity, and mood
6. Allostatic Load
1. How do the different stressors accumulate to be the load that is pressing down on your life
2. McEwen
1. “The cost of chronic exposure to environmental challenges
3. Interaction between the severity of the stressor and the resources of the individual (perception of stressor and perception of resources)
2. Perception (perception is key/very important)
1. Stressor and Stress Response
1. Stressor
1. Anything that disrupts allostatic balance
1. Stress Response
2. Bodies attempt to restore allostasis
2. Reactivity and Recovery
1. Reactivity
1. How much the body responds to stress
2. Recovery
1. How quickly or slowly the body recovers to stress
3. Research is showing that recovery seems to be much more important than reactivity
3. Evolutionary Perspective
1. Stress is needed to survive
4. Acute vs Chronic stress
1. Acute stress is good
1. helps you adapt and survive
2. Chronic stress is bad (months to years)
1. This is when your body starts to wear down
2. Anxiety is the great memory killer
5. Physical vs Psychological stress
1. The body doesn’t distinguish between these.  If you think about a dog biting you then your body will respond the same way as if an actual dog were there
2. Literal Brain
1. Another way of saying our thoughts can activate a positive response or a negative response
3. Epigenetics
1. Development and neuroplasticity (we change over time)
1. Our genetic expression is as much a consequence of environment as other things
2. Genes do Not Dictate
1. Development
1. stress impacts physical and psychological development
2. Neuroplasticity
1. Behavior and experience physically alter the brain
3. Stress Response to a Short-Term Crisis
1. Get Energy Now
1. Cortisol
1. Cortisol is not primarily a stress hormone.  It is primarily metabolic hormone but since metabolic system is so important in the stress response cortisol is stressed in stress
2. Increase...
1. heart rate
2. blood pressure
3. breathing rate
4. Kidneys retain water
1. Not to be confused with liquids in your bladder.  You should empty your bladder but your kidneys will still need to retain water
5. move energy where needed
3. Turn off long term projects
1. Certain processes will stop
1. Growth
2. Digestion
3. Reproduction
2. Long term immune function
4. Blunted Pain perception
1. You need to be able to disregard pain so that you can maintain your fight or flight without interruption
2. Example
1. If you twist your ankle
1. When relaxed you ankle will swell
2. If you are stressed and fleeing a foe then your ankle will not swell during flight
5. Increase Cognitive Function
1. Increased oxygen and glucose to the brain
1. Enhanced learning, memory, and recall
4. Acute vs Chronic Psychological Stress
1. Acute Stress Response                           Potential Impact of Chronic Activation
1. Get energy now                   TO        Diabetes
2. Increase blood pressure        TO       Hypertension
3. Turn off long term projects  TO       Ulcer, stress dwarfism
4. Blunted pain perception       TO       Increased pain sensitivity
5. Increased cognitive function TO      Neurotoxicity/dementia
5. Stress and Health
1. Stress does not cause disease but it does:
1. Make us more susceptible and 
2. make disease processes worse
2. With chronic activation stress response can become more damaging than the stressor itself
6. “We have the ability to change the body’s functioning with thought, with emotion, and with memory”

382: Introduction

1. The Quote
1. “We have the ability to change the body’s functioning with thought, with emotion, and with memory” ~ Robert Sapolsky
2. Perception
1. The Problem
2. Our perception of the world largely determines our health and well being
1. However, our perception of the world is largely habitual and unconscious
3. The Solution
1. Psychotherapy and stress management
1. Brings the habits and unconscious to the conscious
3. Leading Causes of Death
1. 1900’s
1. Biologically based causes (Infectious Diseases)
2. Medicine has helped solve them
2. 2000’s
1. (Heart Disease, Cancer, Stroke, Pulmonary Disease) Largely stress induced
2. Lifestyle & Stress (Chronic Processes)
4. Biopsychosocial Model
1. Used to focus on the biomedical model but now shifting to the biopsychosocial model
5. Integrative Medicine
1. Multidisciplinary care (having a team)
2. Focus on 
1. Prevention
2. Doctor-patient relationship
3. Patient plays a central role
6. Stress
1. Positive and Negative Stress
1. P: Good Stress
2. N: Distress
2. Defining Stress (Hans Selye coined the term for anxiety)
1. Distress
2. A condition or feeling in which perceived situational demands exceed one’s coping capabilities
3. Eustress
1. Good stress, something perceived as enjoyable