January 8, 2009

Brain Functions Distribution

By 19th century, from the studies of people with brain injury, that the different areas of brain are responsible for performing different kind of tasks. For example, the “language center” resided in the left hemisphere of the brain. The people with brain injuries who were found to have lesions in certain areas of brain lost their faculty of speech. But, Doctor Roger Sperry, was confirm and demarcate different area functions of the brain in left and right hemisphere. He arrived at this conclusion based on experiments on split brain people. People suffering from epilepsy in 1960 have no cure except… Read More »Brain Functions Distribution

Pavlovian Conditioning

Sometimes, a discovery seems too simple to believe its applications. This is the case with Pavlovian conditioning named after the doctor Ivan Pavlov. He was a doctor and besides his research  on the secrets of digestive system, he was interested in knowing what signals triggered the related phenomena such as secretion of saliva. We know that saliva is secreted whenever food is presented before animals. This is called drooling. In us humans, an enzyme called Amylase is present in the saliva which breaks down the starch we eat into lower sugars which are sources of energy for sustaining our bodies.… Read More »Pavlovian Conditioning