The Brain & Nervous System Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the branch of the automatic nervous system that governs 'rest and digest', slowing the heart, narrowing the pupils, and promoting digestion and the storing of energy once a threat has passed?

Question 2

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 3

What is the name for the ability of some people with damage to the primary visual cortex to react correctly to things in their blind area, for instance pointing to a light or catching a ball, while sincerely reporting that they see nothing there at all?

Question 4

What is the name for the treatment in which fine electrodes are surgically implanted into a chosen target deep in the brain and wired to a battery unit under the skin of the chest, most established for controlling the tremor and stiffness of Parkinson's disease?

Question 5

What is the name for the fact that the brain's two halves are not equal partners: in most people the left is dominant for language, logic and detail, while the right leads for spatial relations, faces, music and grasping the overall gist?

Question 6

What is the name for the brief, self-propagating electrical spike that sweeps down an axon when the neuron's charge crosses a trigger point, driven by a rush of sodium ions into the cell and then a rush of potassium ions out?

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.