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Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life

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The University of Chicago

Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life

773 ratings

Learn how the nervous system produces behavior, how we use our brain every day, and how neuroscience can explain the common problems afflicting people today. We will study functional human neuroanatomy and neuronal communication, and then use this information to understand how we perceive the outside world, move our bodies voluntarily, stay alive, and play well with others.

From the lesson

Abstract Function

You've now learned an incredible amount about the way the brain functions to perceive and act upon the world we live in. You've gained an understanding of neurobiology on a cellular level, and how many diseases and disorders of the nervous system can affect our bodies and minds. In our final module, we will journey into the realms of emotion, attention, memory, and language. By the end of this module, you will have a greater understanding of the more abstract cognitive functions the brain.

Memory Types7:38

Semantic Memories3:12

Episodic Memories5:59

Meet the Instructors

Peggy Mason
Professor
Neurobiology

[MUSIC]

Before we talking about declarative memories, let's take a detour into

an emotional type of memory that really has, is a problem for many people.

And that's the emotional memories of a traumatic event.

So, many people suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

And in that situation there are triggers bat that remind and individual of an

initial traumatic event, that then, evoke a

a whole emotional reaction that can become overwhelming and actually debilitating.

So what we're going to talk about in this segment is why traumatic events are

particularly memorable, and what we can do to try and make them less memorable.

Or less evocative of an emotional reaction.

So, if you look at a neutral situation and a, a very highly charged situation,

emotionally charged situation, which one will you remember,

which one are you more likely to remember.

Well your more likely to remember the emotionally charged situation.

If I show you a photograph of a car that's intact, and if i

show you a photograph of a car that's been in a horrific car accident.

You're going to remember details about the car and the scenery

in the emotional photograph, far more than you will in the neutral photograph.

And that's because emotion is going to facilitate memory formation.

And that is a great thing, because we don't want to fill up

our memory banks with all sorts of boring details about stuff that we

don't really care about; we want to remember things that we have a

lot ofâthat are impactful to our lives, that make a difference to us.

And those are emotional events.

So we remember the moment that we saw the person

that we're going to spend the rest of our lives with.

We remember the birth of a child; we remember

the death of a friend, or of a parent.

These things are impactful; they're going to make a difference, and

they are preferentially remembered over more mundane and everyday events.

So, in this situation of witnessing or being the victim of a trauma,

the, there are a lot of details about the sensory

environment that are associated with that trauma, and then re-exposure to those

details can trigger the same emotional

reaction that the original trauma triggered.

That is essentially what happens with post-traumatic stress disorder.

What a person is triggered by seeing something that reminds them of the

initial trauma or hearing something or

smelling something, something in the sensory environment

reminds them of that emo, of that original trauma and now they get transported,

their body gets transported and once again they're in that same emotional place.

And that can be both that can be very debilitating.

So what can we do about that?

What we can do about that, what people are starting to

do about that, is to take the emotion out of it.

And so essentially what, if you recall from

our discussion of emotion, emotion has a brain

component and a body component, and it really

works best when those two are working together.

But let's take out the body component.

Let's give a person beta blockers.

Beta blockers are drugs that oppose the effects of the sympathetic nervous system.

This, the nervous, the part of our autonomic nervous

system that gets us very aroused and excited and

afraid and and, and gives us a lot of energy to fight or to flee or to react.

And if we give somebody beta blockers and we expose them to the triggers of the

event, the trauma that they experienced, now they are triggered,

but now they experience it without the full emotion.

In fact with very blunted or muted or no emotion.

So now they can remake, they can make a new memory.

They can consolidate that, they can with beta

blockers on board, they can consolidate that memory.

They can remake that memory without all the emotions.

And then the next time they're exposed to the trigger, hopefully,

they'll remember the experience that they had with the beta blockers on board.

So they'll remember the non-emotional experience.

So if you expose them time and time again to the trigger with beta

blockers on board, the hope is that you can unlearn the initial association

between the trigger and the, the

emotional arousal and emotional reaction, and relearn

the fact that this trigger does not, in fact, elicit a big emotional response.

And this is a, a treatment that I think has a lot of promise for a lot of people.

Un, unfortunately there's a lot of trauma in this world

and a lot of people suffer after experiencing those traumas.

Okay so we'll go on to declarative memories.

[MUSIC]

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