Unit 3: Biological Bases of Behavior

AP students in psychology should be able to do the following:

• Identify basic processes and systems in the biological bases of behavior, including parts of the neuron and the process of transmission of a signal between neurons
• Discuss the influence of drugs on neurotransmitters (e.g., reuptake mechanisms, agonists, antagonists)
• Discuss the effect of the endocrine system on behavior
• Describe the nervous system and its subdivisions and functions: — central and peripheral nervous systems;
  • — major brain regions, lobes, and cortical areas;
  • — brain lateralization and hemispheric specialization
• Discuss the role of neuroplasticity in traumatic brain injury
• Recount historic and contemporary research strategies and technologies that support research (e.g., case studies, split-brain research, imaging techniques)
• Discuss psychology’s abiding interest in how heredity, environment, and evolution work together to shape behavior
• Predict how traits and behavior can be selected for their adaptive value

Introduction

Imagine that just moments before your death, someone removed your brain from your body and kept it alive by floating it in a tank of fluid while feeding it enriched blood. Would you still be in there? Further imagine that your still-living brain was transplanted into the body of a person whose own brain had been severely damaged. To whose home should the recovered patient return? If you say the patient should return to your home, you illustrate what most of us believe-that we reside in our head. An acquaintance of mine received a new heart from a woman who had received a heart-lung transplant. When the two chanced to meet in their hospital ward, she introduced herself: "I think you have my heart." But only her heart; her self, she assumed, still resided inside her skull. We rightly presume that our brain enables our mind. Indeed, no principle is more central to today's psychology, or to this book, than this: Everything psychological is simultaneously biological.