Title: The Brain and Concept Development - Cathy Nelson

(Video Description)
This is a clip from "Cathy Nelson 1" that has a couple of small pieces cut out.

CATHY NELSON:
>> Well concepts, to me, are really essential
to how the brain processes and stores
and retrieves information.
The brain is very associative in nature,
it just naturally associates and forms paths based
on those associations.
Concepts are easily separated into groups
and into emotions or actions or things.
They contain all of those things.
It's difficult to have a concept
without having emotional involvement and it's difficult
to have an emotion without an action or a thing
to associate with the emotion.
So if you think about how information enters the brain,
it enters through our sensory organs,
through our ears, through our eyes.
And our brain is continuously processing those signals
that are sent from our eyes and our ears and our nose
and our mouth, joints and the skin.
And then it goes to the various parts of the brain for encoding,
for instance, visual information goes to the occipital lobe
in the back of the brain.
And then it's sent to the thalamus
for consolidation into one experience.
And then it goes to the hippocampus which is
in the LIMBIC system deep within the brain for a decision
as to what's important and what's going to be remembered.
And then we make a decision based on the various parts
of the brain including the prefrontal cortex
as to how we're going to act on that information.
Fortunately as humans, as living organisms,
we're not just passive viewers of a movie.
Information is important when it's acted upon.
And so we formulate emotional responses in the amygdala.
And, again, in the LIMBIC inner part of the brain,
we activate hormonal responses
and the we also activate motor neurons
which get the physical interaction
with whatever the experiences is.
For instance, if you think about we see red licorice.
We see the color, we see the shape, we feel the texture,
we can smell it, we can hear the crackle of the paper around it.
And then we have an emotional reaction based
on our past experience with red licorice.
Is it something that we have liked eating in the past?
Is it something we don't like?
Is it something that was associated
with a certain other experience in our life?
That it's, like, oh I had, like, red licorice
when I was at the movie.
We may have a hormonal reaction, for instance, salivating.
And then our mouth prepared to bite into it
through our motor neurons.
And then the next part of this whole thing,
now that we've taken in the information,
we've decided how we're going to act upon it, is memory.
Our short term memory is stored in the hippocampus.
And those memories are mostly sensory in nature.
But then if the hippocampus decides that it should go
to long term memory, we don't store that information
like a library book on a shelf.
It's stored all over the brain,
it's all in little pieces around the brain.
And they're not sure exactly how that works, but we do know
that the neurons then connect to each other
through the synaptic connections.
And we have paths and every experience is its own little
path in the brain.
And these paths form schema
and repeated experiences prime the neurons,
prime these pathways to fire together.
Every time that we have that same experience,
it's going to fire along that path.
And through repeated exposure,
the pathways are going to be strengthened.
But then also every time there's an alteration
in that experience, we'll form a new little jog in that pathway,
or a new pathway all together.
And, literally, we have trillions
of these synaptic connections in our brain.
But the brain is very plastic and very able
to form new paths and experiences.
And, to me, these all are concepts, they're all part
of our concept development.
When connections are really strong,
one piece of that information alone is enough
to trigger the firing of the whole path.
So they know, for instance, when we--
if we see a picture of that red licorice,
then the vision cortex is obviously going to light up,
but also the temporal cortex and all the different parts
of our brain involved in that experience are also going
to light up.
If we hear the word, licorice,
then all of those things are going to light up and ignite
that whole pathway to begin again.