Disease and the Brain
Why are we interested in the brain? Why is there a whole major on this?
Diseases List 'Off the top of My Head'
- Diseases of NT Systems
- Schizophrenia
- Depression
- Diseases of Neural Degeneration
- Alzheimer's
- Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type
- Diagnosed as memory loss with inability to complete activities of daily living
- A "discovered" disease due to an aging population
- Macroanatomy: Degeneration of higher cortices
- Microanatomy: Amyloid plaques and tangles
- About 50% of those with early AD have been found to have mutations in the amyloid precursor protein
- Lou Gehrig/ALS
- Alzheimer's
- Diseases of the Basal Ganglia
- Huntington's
- Parkinson's
Plasticity and Disease
- Diseases of Deafferentation
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Phantom pain/central pain
- Diseases of Vasculature
- Stroke
- High blood pressure? (Something to think about)
- Migraine
- Diseases and Neural Dynamics
- Language Specific Learning Deficit
- Epilepsy-Dostoyevsky to Neil Young; Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus; hyper-excitability leading to spreading waves of excitation in the brain.
Association of Structure and Function
- "Cerebellar Patient"
- Motor
- Stumbling gate
- Psychiatric disorders
- Pitch discrimination
- Language ability
- Tactile perception
Deficits are not Trivially Localizationist
Deficits of NT systems (depression, schizophrenia)