AQA A-LEVEL: Biopsychology - Researching the Brain
RESEARCHING THE BRAIN POST MORTEM A person's body + brain is examined after death. Done to see where the damage had occurred in the brain and to see if behaviour done by individual prior to death can be explained. The brain can be sliced into thin sections and studied under a microscope to detect abnormalities. DETAILED EXAMINATION You can see anatomical aspects which can't be seen w/ non-invasive techniques, we can look at deeper regions of the brain RESEARCH SUPPORT - Harrison 2000 This method was important for our understanding of schiz. He suggested structural and neurochemical abnormalities linked to schiz were first identified using post-mortem METHOD IS RETROSPECTIVE The problem with comparing function to before death is that there is little info about how the individual functioned before they died. Researchers cannot follow up on potential brain abnormalities and cog function BRAIN CHANGES after death Because of this, the fi...