Teenage Brain

Parents do not understand their teenager sons or daughters, and they do not understand their parents. This is because the teenagers are having drastic changes on their body as in their brains, which brings to emotional problems. In the video I really learned that every thing that a teenager goes through, his change in mood, and their way of dealing with things are all the cause of the devolpement they are having on their brain because the brain is what mainly controls our emotions and actions. Another important characteristic that a teenager brain has is the way of thinking that they can do anything they want to and that it does not make any change if its very dangerous and could kill them. A teenager´s brain, is very different from what it was before as a kid and different but close to be how it is going to be as an adult just the same way it goes with puberty. A very important part of the brain being developed through our teenage years is the frontal lobe. A very important thing that helps us the teenagers to have a good development of our brains is too have good sleep but the problem is that all the activities,school work and any other important stuff does not allow a teenager to get the amount of sleep required every day(8 hours the least) so that makes things worst making the teenager have a more slow and uneasy way to learn new stuff for a good development of their brain.

http://neuroanthropology.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/leslie-cober-gentry-on-teen-brain-in-harvard-magazine-oct-08.png

How our brain works

The hempisheres in our brain  are the division of the cerebral cortex, the left and right sides of our brain which work together but have different areas of speciality; also known as brain lateralization. The differences between these two sides of our brain are that the left hemisphere specializes in analitical thought such as structures, discipline and rules, mathematics, categorizing, logic and rationalization, knowledge, etc., but controls the right side of our body therefore the right hempishere specializes on softer parts of life such as intuition, sensibility and fellings, emotions, day-dreaming, creativity in arts and music, relationships, etc., but controls the left side of our body.The corpus callosum is a wide, flat bundle of neural fibers beneath the cortex in the eutherian brain at the longitudinal fissure. It connects the left and right hemispheres and facilitates interhemispheric communication. It is the largest matter structure in the brain.

The Broca's area is a region of the "hominid" brain with its function is related to speech production.
The production of language  has been related to the Broca’s area since Pierre Paul Broca reported impairments in two patients. They had lost the ability to speak after injury to the posterior "inferior frontal gyrus" of the brain. Since then, this region he identified has become known as Broca’s area.

Wernicke's area named after Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist and psychiatrist,  is one of the two parts of the cerebral cortex related to speech as the Broca´s area. It is involved in the understanding of written and spoken language. It is traditionally considered to consist of the posterior section of the "superior frontal gyrus" in the dominant cerebral hemisphere which is the left hemisphere in most of the people.

Roger Sperry was who, by the results of his studies, won a noble prize in physiology or medicine in 1981. He recieved this price for his concerning to the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres. With the help of his "split brain" patients he got thorugh some experiments and for he first time in history, accureate studies about the left and right hempisheres of the brain came out. The studies of the "split brain" demonstrated that the left and right hempisheres of the brain were functional in different tasks.
In the cerebral cortex which is the major part of our brain, there are 4 different lobes as there is the left and right hemispheres. These four lobes are the parietal, the frontal, temporal and occipital. The lobe thats responsible for vision and contains the primary visual cortex is the occipital lobe. Another lobe which is responsable for heraing and language is the temporal lobe which also contains the primary auditory cortex. Than, their is the parietal lobe which contains the primary somotosensory cortex and is responsible for performing math calculations as also responsible for information related to the sense of touch. The last lobe is the frontal lobe which contains the primary motor cortex which controls muscle movement and processes judgement, reasoning and impulse control. The left frontal lobe also contains the Broca´s area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca's_area
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area
http://nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/split-brain/background.html

Phineas Gage

Phineas Ggae was an American railroad construction foreman which had a famous accident that could have killed him but survived,  being remembered until today for this tragic accident. He was blasting rocks in Cavendish,Vermont in 1848 when a thirteen pount iron rod blew and traspassed directly through his head leaving him alive but with a hole on his head for the eleven years he had of life after this accident. It seemed like Gage had recovered from his acdicent and everything was going to be the same. He could walk, talk, work but still something in his head changed. His doctor said "Gage was no longer Gage"; before his accident he was well liked and got along well with the people that surrounded him but after this he became mean, rude and impossible to get along with easily. What is taken out from this accident that all of us have learned about is that the their are some parts of our brain that can be serverely damage but that does not mean we are going to die and that also, one of those parts of our brain is the frontal lobe which controls our emotions and personality and that it can be drastically changed if some part of the lobe damages or gets destroyed. The brain has something called localization of function. That means that every part of the brain is different and has different functions live for example vision, control of voluntary movement, language understanding. This might seem obious and logical for someone but also their are some organs, such as liver, that do not eshibit localization of function. Brain lateralization is the same thing as brian localization. It is where both sides of your brain are not identical and have different roles and specialized functions.

http://facstaff.gpc.edu/~bbrown/psyc1501/brain/loclat.htm
http://facstaff.gpc.edu/~bbrown/psyc1501/brain/loclat.htm

http://desdeelmanicomio.blogspot.com/2009/07/phineas-gage-el-hombre-que-cambio-de.html

http://agelessmarketing.typepad.com/ageless_marketing/2006/01/an_aging_societ.html

http://www.psywww.com/intropsych/ch02_human_nervous_system/phineas_gage.html

Intelligence in Nature vs Nurture

The nature vs. nurture debate in psychology is the ideas of how humans intelligence, personality and athletic ability are determined as well as homosexuality or criminal behavior. Intelligence is a very important characteristic of a human individual and their is no complete answer of what the causes of the level of intelligence someone has are as if they are developed because of the environment(nature) or their genetics(nurture). I believe that all of these are caused by both genetics and environment. For example, someone can be intelligent because their parents are too and someone can have a normal level of intelligence as anyone else but being in a great school with a high educational level or also being very intelligence but not having the opportunity to show the world their intelligence or to develop it if they do not receive any good education.


According to the research made, psychologists attribute both nature and nurture to the level of intelligence an individual has. On the genetics side, a great deal of adoptive study has provided evidence of a certain amount of genetic which influence our intelligence. Using studies that involved twins separated at birth, and those separated and adopted, psychologists were now able to get rid with many of the undetermined theories and ideas that had previously caused other studies to fall apart. Studies say that adopted children are more common to have the same or around the same level of intelligence or IQ of his or her biological mother and not of the adoptive mother. This indicates to us that nurture is more involved; this study showed that genes do affect our intelligence and it is not only our environment that measures our level of capacity. Even though studies say to us genes are already a great part of our intelligence, it is still not sure because yet, researchers have not been able to identify which genes are that affect our intelligence; but this also does not mean that they are not their. We can also look to the brain for in relation to our intelligence. Although our intelligence has only a little amount of relation to our brain size, it does affect it. What has been seen also is that certain areas of the brain also influence intelligence. The part of the brain that relates to specific intelligence areas are spatial intelligence or mathematical intelligence, have been shown to affect quite a bit in intelligence. For example in a specific part of Albert Einstein´s brain relating to spatial intelligence was found to be larger and this is attributed to higher intelligence.

In conclusion what it is believed is that both genetics and environment play a roll in an individual´s intelligence, but still we can see from the research made that from what psychologists have found out from the studies made is that genetics is very important in our intelligence but that our environment help us develop that intelligence that we inherit from our parents or any other ancestors of our family tree.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/267545/nature_vs_nurture_and_intelligence.html?cat=25

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/blogphotos/Blog_Adoption_Income.gif

http://scienceaid.co.uk/psychology/approaches/images/twins.png