One thing to remember about all studies of lesion or surgical patients is that the ability to generalize to the population during these studies may be questionable.

Doing this kept the electrical activity that was causing the epileptic seizures confined to one hemisphere and helped get the epilepsy under control.

Lesion studies can allow for very specific conclusions to be made about very specific brain areas.

fMRI is an excellent tool for comparing brain activation in different tasks and/or populations.

MRIs have found a thicker frontal cortex (Carper & Courchesne, 2005) and a thinner temporal cortex (Hardan et al., 2006) in patients with ASD.

Although, as we will discuss, we still learn about the brain from accidents and other traumatic brain events, we have a variety of other techniques that we can use now to study the brain in healthy individuals.

he surgeon Burkhardt in 1894 performed a series of surgeries in which he selectively destroyed the frontal lobes of several patients in whom he sought to control psychotic symptoms, being the modern prototype of what was later known through Antonio Egas Moniz as psychosurgery.

This chemical was later identified as a neurotransmitter

With case studies such as Phineas Gage and invention of methods such as the electroencephalogram (EEG) and computed tomography (CT or CAT) scans, scientists began to link the brain to specific behavior and cognition as biopsychology as a discipline began to emerge.

since we do not have control over many of the factors in our environment, our genes, and our evolution as a species, our brain function and thus our behavior is actually controlled by causes outside of our control.

If everything in the universe is physical, then applied to psychology, including biopsychology, this means that the mind, our mental processes and subjective mental experiences, must also be entirely physical processes in an entirely material brain.