The cerebral cortex is the outermost layer of the brain, composed of folded gray matter. It plays a crucial role in various complex cognitive processes including thought, perception, language, memory, attention, consciousness, and advanced motor functions.| Simply Psychology
In psychology, the hippocampus is a crucial structure within the brain's medial temporal lobe. It plays a vital role in forming and retrieving memories, spatial navigation, and emotional responses. Damage to the hippocampus can lead to memory impairments and difficulty forming new memories, highlighting its importance in learning and cognition.| Simply Psychology
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of talking therapy that can be used to treat people with a wide range of mental health problems, including anxiety disorders (e.g., generalized anxiety, social anxiety) or depression.| Simply Psychology
The limbic system is a complex set of brain structures involved in emotion, motivation, memory, and behavior regulation. Key components include the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, hypothalamus, basal ganglia, and cingulate gyrus. It's central to emotional processing, memory formation, and various autonomic functions, bridging higher cognitive processes and primal emotions.| Simply Psychology
Classical conditioning is a learning process in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a reflex-eliciting unconditioned stimulus, such that the neutral stimulus eventually elicits the same innate reflex response that the unconditioned stimulus does. For example, pairing a bell sound (neutral stimulus) with the presentation of food (unconditioned stimulus) can cause an organism to salivate (unconditioned response) when the bell rings, even without the food.| Simply Psychology
The brain's reward system is a network of structures responsible for pleasure, motivation, and reinforcement learning. Central to this system are the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) and the Nucleus Accumbens (NAc). When a rewarding stimulus is perceived, dopamine is released from the VTA, acting on the NAc, leading to feelings of pleasure. Dysfunctions in this pathway can underlie addiction and other behavioral disorders.| Simply Psychology
The fight or flight response is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival. It prepares your body to either confront or flee from the threat by triggering changes like increased heart rate, quickened breathing, and heightened alertness.| Simply Psychology