Overview
This activity is structured in the form of a guided research exercise, offering students the opportunity to explore seminal case studies in Neuroscience.
Learning goals
- Become familiar with seminal findings in functional neuroanatomy through famous case studies.
Materials
- Students should have access to computers/phones with internet access.
Procedure
- Divide students into groups.
- Each group will be assigned a prompt for one of several famous case studies or disorders in Neuroscience.
- Patient H.M
- Phineas Gage
- Patient S.M.
- Split-Brain Syndrome.
- Blindsight
- Wernicke and Broca’s Aphasia. (You can split this into two groups as well, depending on the number you have).
- Together, groups will research on this topic in a variety of online sources to structure a few bullet points of this case study. Such as:
- What are the symptoms evidenced in the case?
- What structure is thought to be affected?
- How does the structure affected relate to the clinical presentation? What functions are being disrupted? What functions persist?
- Afterwards, students will present their findings to the other groups, trying to digest the information in the different bullet points into accessible language to their peers.
Debrief & discussion questions
- Much of modern neuroscience has been built on clinical case studies.
- Many of the cases they examined, told us a lot about how the brain works. Can they elaborate a bit on what they learned through their research?
Expected outcomes (what you’ll likely observe)
- Some groups of students may have an easier time than others putting together a nice “narrative”. A singular case such as patient H.M. naturally lends itself better to a short exposition compared to a more abstract topic such as ” blindsight” or “aphasia”. Be prepared to offer additional support to these groups while they are conducting their research.
- Students will find a great variety of sources on these topics, it is important to encourage them to check where the information in these sources is coming from, as well as to check if it consistent across them.
Variations
- This is a simple prompt which can be adapted to many different contexts or topics.
- Different prompts of research can also be chosen, as well as more or less dedicated time to the class-wide sharing of their findings.
- It is an activity that also lends itself well to be used as “homework”, with an actual seminar-style presentation on their findings on an upcoming class.
Tips and Troubleshooting
- Be prepared and willing to walk around the class to see how groups are moving along with their research. This is an activity that can be quite demanding with a lot of dense jargon, and depending on the level of experience of students, some additional guidance not only in interpreting what they find but how to find it in the first place may be necessary.
References
- I designed this activity as part of an “introduction to neuroscience” lab for first year Psychology students at Western University.
Personal Notes
- I have not yet had the chance to run this activity myself, as I was working as Head TA when designing it without any previous experience with anything like it in the past. The feedback from other TAs who ran the activity, and from students was very positive, so I am happy with the results observed so far.