YouTube Transcript:
Introduction to the Brain

Skip watching entire videos - get the full transcript, search for keywords, and copy with one click.

Video Transcript

Available languages:

View:

we got to talk about the brain when i

first started studying this

i thought this is what i wanted to

specialize in that's how much i liked it

i just think it's fascinating i mean the

brain is just so creepy cool like it's just

just

it doesn't make any sense how cool it is

and so it just fascinates me

this is a picture of how you typically

see the brain when you're studying it

but this isn't what the brain looks like

this is after it's been soaked in all

those chemicals whatever it is it gets

hard it gets rubbery it turns kind of brown

brown

but this isn't what the brain looks like

in your head a lot of people picture this

this

this is sliced um but this isn't what it

looks like

let me show y'all what it really looks

like if anybody gets easily grossed out

i'm going to show you a picture of the

brain like immediately after it's

removed from the skull just don't look

i don't want anybody throwing up um it

doesn't really look good up there on but

on here it looks like bright the people

online oh hi steven

uh it looks bright here it looks bloody

i posted a bit or i'm going to post a

video of the unfixed brain

and basically she's showing you this in

the video this is a screenshot from that

and she's showing you how it's it's soft

it's like a jello substance it's not

hard it's not rubbery

you can easily make indent indentions

it's very delicate

it's very moldable if you were to just

put this brain upside down flat on a

table it would end up kind of like

squishing and getting deformed

let me see do we have more pictures

there's the underside of the brain

you can see the cerebellum back there it

means the little brain

it looks like a little brain or i think

like cauliflower in the back of the head

um and so we're going to go through all

the different parts

of the brain but i want you all to see

that it really is like alive

it's got blood you know pumping through

it and i had a student because i kept

talking about it being alive they're

like does it move last semester

and i was like i don't know i don't

think so but then i looked it up

and yeah it has a pulse so it moves the

tiniest little bit

but they're using i know i've never

thought about it but it does have a pulse

pulse

and so um they're using this new

technology to kind of record that pulse

but then also to enhance it to kind of

show us how how it works uh not to make

it actually pulse harder but the

recording to cancel the recording so we

can see it

i can post a video of that for you guys

if you want to look at it but it makes

it look like the head is almost like

or the brain is kind of like nodding

because you have the

uh blood and cerebral spinal fluid

rushing up through

uh the underside of it so it kind of

looks it looks cool

i'll post it for you guys if you want to

see um but yeah it's like a live and

it's soft

and it's intense and it's crazy um it

has no sense organs so they do

brain surgery with a personal weight how

do some of us know this

because of grey's anatomy right any fans

out there

like dreamy he's so charming he's such a

jerk but all he has to do is smile and

then you're like okay

you're wonderful i just think he's

incredible but anyway

the dreamies they're operating and

they're having the patient talk right

and if the patient starts screwing up

their sentences their words and they

know they've done something wrong that's legit

legit

like how actual brain surgery works

they're able to get feedback from the person

person

because they do the surgery while the

person is awake because your brain

doesn't have sense organs

um it's so wild now i think that this is

the most

alien thing that we have on our planet i

don't know if i included in the biopsych

lectures uh

i always talk about these deep sea

animals that are like they look like aliens

aliens

from another planet like the guy the

little fish that has its own little

lantern hanging in front of his head

like how wild is that i think that looks

like an alien

you watch animal planet and you see all

these creepy animals out in the world

you're like these are like aliens

but if those are like aliens then this

is like an alien thing

i mean this thing is so complex it's got

to be the most complex thing on our planet

planet

it's so complex it can't understand itself

itself

it's just wild it's a lump of meat

it's a lump of tissue that gives rise to consciousness

consciousness

everything we're doing right now is

because of a lump of meat

in your head it makes no sense

you know you look at computers and it's

like made of metal and all this stuff

that's good at

processing and transmitting fast

information tissue is not supposed to do that

that

tissue is not like a good conductor it

makes no sense

so when we're studying this i want to

have humility

i want to recognize there is so much we

don't know

that it just doesn't make sense to us

yes there's so much that science doesn't

know about the brain and they're still

trying to discover

but there's also way more to all of this

than i'm going to give you guys right now

now

i want you to recognize that everything

i'm saying is an oversimplification of

the brain

this is an introduction to the brain in

an introductory psychology course

so just know there's always more i'm

going to try to simplify this

to a way that we can easily learn it and

memorize it but there's always more to it

okay i want to well let me show you this

before i go to the whiteboard

so we have all this cool imaging

technology now that we can see the brain

and study the brain in all kinds of ways

and riley you've mentioned some before

um and it helps us understand what's

going on but way back in the day they

didn't have any of these

imaging resources so they were really

just trying to guess

what's going on they'd wait sometimes

for someone to die and then they try to study

study

the body you know what was going wrong

kind of thing um but

otherwise they're just guessing and so

there's this guy franz josef gaul that thought

thought

hey maybe it all has to do with like the

lumps on your head

like it's going to mean stuff so like if

you have a lump up here it means

something about you and so he created

this chart

that has to do with the different lumps

and divots kind of thing

i went to the history of psychology

museum in ohio and they had the devices

that they would actually use to measure

people's heads to kind of tell them

about about themselves uh because of the

different just

uh surface of their skulls so like i have

have

behind both of my ears they creep me out

although the doctor says it's okay

yeah i feel like some of them are

swollen lymph nodes but they're always like

i love how everyone's checking anyway if

you have the lumps that i have

that means you're combative i am not combative

combative

we know right away versus total bs um

but uh there's other areas like belief

in god

it's somewhere spirituality is like

there somewhere

hope is there this cracked me up

yesterday i've noticed it says parental love

love

and i felt the back of my head where it

says red eleven i have a hole

oh my god i'm not loved

and then right above that is friendship

it's like another whole lot

so it's all just baloney now he got

really lucky he got one theme right

localization of function he divided

these different areas and he said

different areas have to do with

different things that's very true about

the brain

we can look at a real chart of

localization of function

here you all can see yeah of course the

occipital lobes are in the back of the

head so that's what i have to do with vision

vision

down there that purple part is a

cerebellum it has to do with muscle uh with

with

balance and coordination uh you can see

there's different parts for hearing and emotion

emotion

memory processing decision making uh

planning attention oh that's the frontal lobe

lobe

uh so movement and touch you know this

uh somatosensory cortex and then the

motor cortex

uh so there's all these different areas

that have to do with different things he

got that right

okay let's go ahead and put that on our

okay phrenology is uh that chart that

the lumps

that mean different things about you

that's called phrenology

or the phrenological head chronology

and franz joseph gall was the guy who

it's bs i don't know if i can write that

on the board it's baloney is what i put

on the

thing it's just junk

um complete randomness but they got one

what this means is certain brain

structures are specialized to perform

certain brain structures

okay there's two more things we need to

study before we go into the details on

the brain

do you all know well don't know what

they do for people that have seizures

yeah ellie you want to say something

about that i remember like

when my aunt gets them okay um

i remember that they for her they have

her like on a few

different medicines okay i know like the

one she's taking right now

is actually the one that they used to prescribe

prescribe

in like the 70s and 80s

okay but she's been taking it for so

long they can't take her off it anymore

okay but that's really so they haven't

done any type of surgery they're more

using medication

treatment and keeping them in check does

she have seizures still or

yeah but they're not as frequent or as violent

violent

okay so they don't interfere as much

with her ability to live a

functioning healthy life last time i

remember like a really bad one was like

a few years ago when she fell

and broke her head oh gosh yeah

that was a while ago okay thank you for

sharing so that's absolutely

hopefully they can treat people through

medication anybody else what do they do

surgically what i'm thinking about here

is the extreme surgeries they do to

treat seizures

because the problem is sometimes people

have seizures like every couple seconds

and if you're having a seizure every

couple seconds you can't live life

i mean it's completely debilitating and

so hopefully they slow them down make

them more

less frequent and less intensive like

they did with i think you said your grandmother

grandmother

your aunt okay um but if they can't do

that they're gonna need to do some type

of surgery and what they can do is

actually remove

in a child typically remove an entire

half of the brain

this is so cool the remaining half

takes over the responsibilities of an

entire brain and the person functions

like a normal functioning human person

human human being it's incredible what

kind of

healing and rewriting and reorganizing

and restructuring the brain can do

that's neuroplasticity the brain's ability

ability

fuel the brain can reorganize now it's

within limits

so the surgery that i just mentioned

with seizures typically it's done on children

children

children have more potential for healing

potential because they're still growing

so the brain has an easier time

rewriting itself

this you can't really do that surgery in

adulthood and have the same kind of results

results

as you have more potential for healing

when you're young than when you're older

another thing that they do is they sever

the corpus callosum

that's that thick band of neural fibers

connecting the two hemispheres

we all need to memorize um it allows the

two hemispheres to communicate with each other

other

they sever that they can't communicate

so maybe they isolate the seizures

make them less intensive uh destructive

um and so what you end up with is split

brain people

if anybody studied this it's fascinating

because the two hemispheres aren't

talking to each other and remember the

left hemisphere

controls the right side about the body

the right hemisphere the left side of

the body

so what you see in split brain

individuals is you can show them a

picture in their left

visual field but they can't so the

information is going to go to the right

side of the brain

the right side is really non-verbal

language is really in the left side of

the brain

so they see the picture it goes to the

right side the right side can't

verbalize what they're seeing so even

though they're seeing the picture they

can't say what it is

but if you ask them to draw it they can

draw it

and then when they see their own drawing

the left hemisphere gets that

information they then can say

what it is so it's wild yeah how they

can get people to connect this stuff

and how the brain works whenever it's

not connected itself

so split brain is fascinating to study

now another thing that shows us neuroplasticity

neuroplasticity

has anybody had a family member that had

a stroke and all of a sudden they have

weird symptoms like they can't balance anymore

anymore

they can't talk uh like they used to yes mary

there are stroke patients yeah

and it's really hard for them like they

can't really speak

what they used to do or one of their

hand is just like

yeah and it's incredibly frustrating

um for them now they can go through

different kinds of

therapy physical therapy occupational

therapy all kinds of things

to reteach them kind of how to do things

and the brain does heal it takes time

but it does recover its abilities so

my basically father-in-law had a stroke

last year

and it was very frightening so i don't

want it to come across like i just think

it's cool but it was also very interesting

interesting

um because it's like all of a sudden

there's holes in his vision

like like people just like disappear in

the room

and where he was seeing stuff uh he

couldn't balance anymore

um he was struggling to copy over

words i went to the hospital to visit

him and he's showing me like

look i did my homework kind of thing

where they have like cat dog

rug all these simple uh three-letter

words and he's supposed to copy them over

over

and instead of cat he writes bat instead of

rogue he writes doug like and so he's like

he thinks he did it all right and he's

showing me and like some of them are

right but then there's random ones and

i'm just like

this is fascinating and then he was

struggling to do puzzles and i'm not

talking like two thousand piece tiny

piece puzzles

like five piece puzzles and it's

exhausting for him

to try to do that but he's slowly uh

recovering his abilities

the brain does heal the big thing about

this neuroplasticity

is they used to not think this was

possible they used to think the brain

just was what it was

once one part was damaged it couldn't

heal um and there's just nothing we can

do about it but now we see that it's

living it's changing kind of thing

and your brain is changing as well

through experience

so just think about neural pathways if

they're they're neural pathways it's

like okay they have all the did y'all

see the lecture where i did this

yes yes i hope next week everyone puts

their den rights up

so you think about the little neurons

and then you think all the neurons

connect to each other right to

form a nerve and so you know you look at

a child's brain and it's like

there's tons tons of neurons

there's like this blooming an incredible amount

amount

so what that child's brain screams is

possibility and potential

then over time they start doing certain

things using certain neural pathways

and some get solidified and the adult brain

brain

is not going to look like a mess anymore

it's going to have big neurons

with established neural pathways

and so it's efficient it no longer has a

lot of potential

but it's really efficient kind of thing

so what you do

you strengthen what you don't use gets

pruned away

so of course whatever you engage in is

going to change the wiring of your brain

that's good for if you think about

things like therapy it almost makes me

think about cbt

let's strengthen those positive positive

cognitive pathways

and then eventually those negative ones

will maybe be pruned away kind of thing

so what you do matters what you're

exposed to matters when it comes to the

formation of your brain think about it

like a living thing

that's changing and restructuring

throughout the lifespan

possibility for your strengths for our children

children

and so what age is it like okay well we

could go with the cerebral cortex is not

done developing until 25 is kind of that

hard marker that a lot of people give

um i like to say more like 28 and early

30s because there is

they show that it may be uh still

growing a little past 25. um

so if your brain's not done until maybe 25

28 maybe we see more potential during the

the

growth time period and then afterwards

maybe it's more decline

how do i remember what remember what

neuroplasticity means i think about hot

moldable plastic

think about that it can change um and so

that's the definition neurogenesis is

the next thing we need to look at

neurogenesis you can think about

the beginning of the bible genesis that

or just the beginning

to generate uh so the generation of new

neurons basically

uh this means the process by which new

neurons are generated

you neurons come from generated

stem cells are these rare immature

uh cells that can develop into any type

of cell

so i think about these as like magic the

magic cells they can be whatever they

want they're the special the superstar cells

cells

be whatever they want to be do whatever

they want to do um

my grandmother i think she's so freaking

awesome she's 87

somehow she learned about stem cells and

she's really into meditation and she

wants to live until she's 130.

so during her meditations she tries to

tell her body to create more stem cells

so whenever i'm like oh me you need to

think about like doing the laundry more

she's like i'm busy right now

i'm working on creating stem cells in my

meditation i have enough to do

she's so awesome she's like legitimately

convinced that she's gonna create stem

cells but maybe she is i mean she's

super healthy at 87.

so we want more stem cells they can do

create whatever they want to create

that's why stem cell treatments are so

incredibly expensive

because these are like pure magic which

is awesome

okay uh there's a myth well i just gave

it away

how many people think we only use 10 of

oh okay that's interesting we use even

less than 10 percent

yeah okay okay y'all are thinking that yeah

yeah

so we only use a portion of our brain

it's a myth

it's a myth why do we want to believe

that we use our full brain

when we're doing all anything the whole

brain is like going

we're using it all if we only used a

portion you could take out ninety

percent of your brain and just

i'm good only ten percent my brain but i

can still do everything

that's not how it works we're using our

full brain we need the full brain

but why would we want to believe i mean

people are passionate about this myth i

had a student one time

like argue with me like are you with me

like very angry

that i said this was a myth they wanted

they strongly believed

we only used 10 of our brains scotty

what were you going to say

is it lucy yes yes i think a student

mentioned that yesterday i haven't seen it

but it sounds similar to limitless

so we started yeah we started talking

about this in the other class maybe it's

not so much about using more your brain

maybe it's about changing the processing

and the chemistry of the brain

so that you look at things and

understand things differently

because we start talking about the

effects of drugs on the brain and maybe

it does change things a little bit

but it doesn't enable you to tap into

some kind of unused part of your brain

we're using the entire brain mary

um it's really interesting so what they

do is like they experiment on this

young kids and they make them use their

brain full capacity

so when they get shot it heals so fast

because like their brain is like

working so fast and they use them for a

bad reason though they

want them to be killers okay i'm not a

machine kind of thing okay

i wonder what in which yeah yeah you

should it sounds it sounds interesting

but it

all of these movies speak to why people

want to believe this they want to

believe in human potential

they want to believe we can do all kinds

of things that we can't do and it makes

them have a i don't know a more hopeful

positive perspective

like if we just you know tapped into

this we're going to be able to fly and

read minds and

we're going to be super smart and all

this kind of stuff

it's just uh i don't know i think it's a

desire for more

because like we have like like

subconscious things that we do like we

don't think about it but we do it

like how our hearts is beating yeah say that

that

yeah and keep breathing even though you say

say

okay i need to take a breath here yeah

there's all these automatic things that

are going

all the time and there's also yeah

unconscious things things we're not

aware of

someone had said online would it be

possible that in its forest would it be

possible that even though we use the

whole brain

that we only use a percentage of the

ability of each part of the brain

and in total we are not statistically

using our full potential

so far as like you i was trying to look

at this and see where is the kernel of truth

truth

if i think back to what i just said about

about

blooming and pruning of neural

connections a child has all

those neurons and all those neural

connections immature

neural connections what if we figured

out a way

to not prune away a portion of them

instead to strengthen all of it make the

brain more connected

and therefore more capable i that's the

only thing that i could like look at and

think oh maybe that

could make us uh have i don't know more ability

ability

kind of thing but i don't think that

that's really possible because you only

have so much time

like how are you going to strengthen all

the neural pathways within a child

you know we have to there's all kinds of

limits um but that's maybe a little bit

of an answer to your question forest and

i like the way that you're thinking

um but it is a test question that do we use

use

we only use 10 of our brain false okay

that is the question i don't want y'all

Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video

Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds

One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps

Paste YouTube URL

Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript

Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds

Get Our Chrome Extension

Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.

Add to Chrome — Free

Works with YouTube, Coursera, Udemy and more educational platforms

Get Instant Transcripts: Just Edit the Domain in Your Address Bar!

YouTube

←

→

↻

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

YoutubeToText

←

→

↻

https://youtubetotext.net/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

YouTube Transcript:Introduction to the Brain

Video Transcript

Paste YouTube URL

Transcript Extraction Form

Get Our Chrome Extension

Get Instant Transcripts: Just Edit the Domain in Your Address Bar!

YouTube Transcript:
Introduction to the Brain