Medicine and Surgery

Contents: The somatosensory system. Somatic sensitivity. Cortical areas involved in somatic sensitivity. Psychophysics of pain. Peripheral and central nervous mechanisms of pain. Analgesia. The Retina visual system. The visual field. Visual pathways. Parvo and magno cells. Primary visual cortex and the extrastriate areas. The stereopsis. The perception of colors. The "where" and "what" pathways in vision. Visual psychophysics. The Cochlea hearing system. Central acoustic pathways. Auditory areas of the cerebral cortex. Perception and localization of sounds. Taste receptors, central structures. Olfactory receptors, central structures. General organization of motor systems. Muscles and motor units. Voluntary movements and reflexes. Motor control and internal models. Spinal reflexes. Muscle tone. The vestibular system and vestibular reflexes. Otolith organs. Vestibular-ocular reflex. Vestibulospinal reflexes. Posture control. Postural tone. Control of the orientation of the head, of the body and maintenance of balance. The cortical control of voluntary movement. Premotor and motor areas of the cerebral cortex. Motor descending pathways. The posterior parietal cortex. Basal ganglia. The cerebellum. The cerebellum and motor learning. Locomotion. Biomechanics of locomotion. Neural control of locomotion. Eye movements. Saccadic eye movements, vergence movements, slow pursuit movements. Vestibulo-ocular reflex, opto-kinetic reflex, nystagmus. The associative areas of the cerebral cortex. Prefrontal, temporal and parietal areas. Sleep-wake cycle. The neurophysiological and neurochemical mechanisms underlying the sleep-wake cycle. The electroencephalogram. Consciousness and its states. Hemispheric dominance. Language and other higher functions. Memory and learning. Elements of the history of neurophysiology.

Requirements: For the final exam, the student must have passed the final exam in Biology and Genetics. Moreover, the knowledge related to the teaching of Histology and Embryology, Biochemistry and Anatomy is requested in relation to the topics in the current program.

There isn’t one prescribed textbook for this course as the lecture content will not follow or match any particular textbook. As a reference: Kandel et al: Principles of Neural Science. McGraw Hill Education. ISBN-13: 978-0071390118. Bear et al.: Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain. Wolters Kluwer. ISBN-13: 978-0781778176 Selected published papers for more details are available to specific request or sometime suggested during classes.

Threshold of 66% for the full period of 3 semesters (Physiology 1, 2, and 3)

oral exam