The Brain & Nervous System Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the psychiatric treatment, much refined since its rough beginnings in the 1930s, in which a brief electric current is passed through the brain of a patient under anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant to bring on a short controlled seizure, still among the most effective options for severe, drug-resistant depression?

Question 2

Which neurotransmitter makes skeletal muscle contract where a nerve meets it, and in the brain supports attention and the laying down of memories, so that its severe loss is an early feature of Alzheimer's disease; the arrow poison curare and military nerve agents both act on its system?

Question 3

What is the name for the rapid, whole-body surge of arousal, described by the physiologist Walter Cannon, that prepares an animal to face a threat head-on or to run from it, driven by the sympathetic nerves and a flood of adrenaline from the adrenal glands?

Question 4

What is the name for the hormone released by the pineal gland as light fades, which tells the body that night has come and promotes sleep, and which is taken as a supplement to ease jet lag and the sleep problems of shift work and blindness?

Question 5

What is the name for the condition, usually following damage to the right parietal lobe, in which a person acts as though the entire left side of space does not exist: eating only the right of the plate, drawing only the right of a clock face, and often denying anything is wrong?

Question 6

What is the name for the long-standing idea that the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia involve overactive dopamine signalling in certain brain pathways, an idea propped up by the facts that dopamine-blocking drugs ease those symptoms and dopamine-raising drugs can produce them?

Question 7

What is the name used for Henry Molaison, the man who in 1953 had the inner parts of both temporal lobes, including the hippocampus, removed to stop severe epilepsy, and who from then on could not form any new lasting memory of facts or events, though his older memories, his intelligence and his ability to learn new motor skills were untouched?

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About The Brain & Nervous System

This quiz is about the brain and the rest of the nervous system, on the side of behaviour and the mind rather than gross body anatomy: how nerve cells signal, what the brain's regions do, how the two halves divide the work, what famous cases of brain damage revealed, how the living brain is measured and altered, and the chemistry, sleep states and disorders behind it all. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing a cell, a structure, a term, a case, a method or a disorder and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz.

The first pack is the neuron and how signals travel: the parts of a nerve cell, the myelin sheath, the action and resting potentials, the all-or-none rule, the synapse and the neurotransmitter, reuptake, and the roles of dopamine, serotonin, GABA, glutamate, acetylcholine and the endorphins, plus synaptic strengthening, the glial cells, the blood-brain barrier and the reflex arc.

The second pack is the geography of the brain: the cortex and its four lobes, the movement and sensation strips and the distorted body map, the cerebellum and brainstem and medulla, the thalamus and hypothalamus, the limbic system with the amygdala and hippocampus, the basal ganglia, the corpus callosum, the arousal system and the fluid that cushions the brain.

The third pack is lateralisation, language, plasticity and famous cases: the lopsided hemispheres and crossed control, Broca's and Wernicke's areas and aphasia, the split-brain studies, Phineas Gage and patient H.M., the brain's ability to rewire and to grow new neurons, the phantom limb, neglect, face blindness, the impostor delusion, blindsight, synaptic pruning, Hebb's rule, the resting-state network, the reward pathway and mirror neurons.

The fourth pack is measuring and changing the brain and the wider nervous system: EEG, PET and magnetic stimulation, deep brain stimulation, optogenetics, single-neuron recording, electroconvulsive therapy and the lobotomy, the central and peripheral divisions, the automatic nervous system and its fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest branches, the vagus and enteric nerves, the spinal cord, grey and white matter, the nerve-muscle junction and the ion gradient.

The fifth pack is chemistry, states, disorders and big ideas: the ion pump, drugs that switch receptors on or off, the SSRIs and L-DOPA, the substantia nigra and the dopamine theory of schizophrenia, Alzheimer's and stroke and multiple sclerosis and epilepsy, dream sleep and the body clock and its master nucleus and melatonin, the tangle of Alzheimer's, the cranial nerves, the localisation of function, discredited phrenology, and the wiring diagram called the connectome.

The wrong answers are always other cells, structures, terms, cases, methods or disorders of the same kind. About forty of the hundred questions carry a photograph of a neutral object, a model brain, an electrode cap, a scanner or a microscope, chosen because every option is the same sort of thing and the picture cannot point to any of them. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.