Exam 2: The Biological Basis of Behavior

It's midnight and you are alone in your room studying. You hear a loud crash outside your room. Your body instantly reacts to this potential threat as you feel your heart pounding and your senses sharpening. Then you see your lumbering English sheep dog walking around the hallway corner and realize that the crash was undoubtedly from something he knocked over. Recovering from your alarm, your body now relaxes and you return to normal. The body system helping you to return to normal is the ________.

When the electrical charge inside a neuron is negative in relation to the outside, the neuron is said to be in a state of ________.

A nerve is really a(n) ________.

Insulin and glucagon are secreted by the ________.

The fact that language is usually related most closely to the left hemisphere explains why ________.

After an industrial accident in which George fell from a scaffold and hit his head, he has had trouble following directions or completing his normal work tasks. He is also apathetic, although he has periods of boastfulness and silliness. The damaged part of his brain is probably the ________ lobes.

________ techniques are used to obtain an overall picture of activity in particular regions of the brain.

The messages in the nervous system are carried through nerves; the messages in the endocrine system are carried through ________.

Loss of motivation and ability to concentrate is the major outcome of damage to the ________ lobe.

The "all or none law" is the principle stating that ________.

The area of the frontal lobe that is crucial in our ability to talk is ________ area.

A baby is born with an impairment of his left cerebral hemisphere, but it is not discovered until years later, when certain clues are pieced together. Which of the following is most likely to be one of those clues?

The poison of the black widow spider works by causing an outpouring of ________.

The cerebellum ________.

Jessica's mother has blue eyes, with two recessive genes for blue eyes. Her father has brown eyes, with a dominant gene for brown eyes and a recessive gene for blue eyes. What are the chances that Jessica has blue eyes?

In recent research, Rosenweig found that a stimulating environment results in larger neurons with more synaptic connections ________.

Explain what plasticity and neurogenesis are. Briefly summarize the research regarding stem cells and the possibility of growing new neurons in the human brain.

In tests with animals, stem cells transplanted into a brain or spinal cord ________.

A technique in which a tiny quartz or glass pipette (smaller in diameter than a human hair) that is filled with conducting fluid and placed on the surface of a neuron so that scientists can study changes in the electrical conditions of that particular neuron is called ________.

When brain researchers want to map the structures in a living human brain, they use ________.