Cortical Surface Reconstruction and Visualization

loss of cortical gray matter.

like digestion, heart rate and sexual arousal.

We want high arousal. We feel excited then.

It's all about cortical processing and forebrain specialization.

Arousal is still good because you are over challenged there.

So physiological arousal predicted, in this study, attitudes toward gay marriage.

PTSD patients often avoid expressing their emotions, experience persistent fear and hyper arousal.

You can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass,

If you try to suppress an emotion, your limbic system stays at the same level of arousal or gets worse, and that level of arousal takes away resources from your cognitive functions.

Now this cortical folding presents a significant challenge for interpreting surface electrical impulses.

Now actually we've looked in several different cortical areas in the monkey learning this task.

There are 15 or 20 cortical areas that are changed specifically when you learn a simple skill like this.

So for example we can look to the cortical area that represents input that's controlling the posture of the monkey.

We look in cortical areas that control specific movements, and the sequences of movements that are required in the behavior, and so forth.

In other words there is still a single, simple representation of the fingertips in this most organized of cortical areas of the surface of the skin of the body.

So, arousal is the area where most people learn from, because that's where they're pushed beyond their comfort zone and to enter that going back to flow then they develop higher skills.

That says to me, at least in rats and I think they have the same neurotransmitters that we do and a similar cortical architecture that play may be pretty important for our survival.

In the 1950s, they decided, okay, we're going to figure out the entire human sexual response cycle, from arousal, all the way through orgasm, in men and women everything that happens in the human body.

And it's important, if you try to model this, you can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass, loss of cortical gray matter, and what's happening in schizophrenia is that you overshoot that mark, and at some point, when you overshoot, you cross a threshold, and it's that threshold where we say, this is a person who has this disease, because they have the behavioral symptoms of hallucinations and delusions.

Traumatized people also easily lose control symptoms are hyper arousal and memory flashbacks so people are in a constant fear that those horrible feelings of that traumatic event might come back unexpectedly, suddenly, and they cannot control it.

And what was interesting was that in this one region, the 50 year old meditators had the same amount of cortex as the 25 year olds, suggesting that meditation practice may actually slow down or prevent the natural age related decline in cortical structure.

And if we take a slice of cortical tissue with one month of age and we simply look at those neurons, those are those black bodies that you see there, and the little processes that issue from them, they look like spiders, those are the dendrites that connect to other neurons.