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- Glossary
Confabulation
Confabulation refers to a memory or explanation that the person concerned is completely convinced is true, but which is objectively false. There is no conscious intent to deceive behind this. The cause is usually medical, such as damage to the orbitofrontal or other frontal brain areas, amnestic syndrome (e.g., Korsakoff's syndrome), traumatic brain injury, or dementia.
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- Glossary
Consolidation
Consolidation refers to the process by which new information, memories, or learning content is stabilized and stored in the brain for the long term.
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- Glossary
contralateral
Contralateral is a positional term. It means "located on the other side of the body."
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- Glossary
Convergence
Convergence of neurons occurs when several neurons are connected synaptically to a single transmitting neuron. In the eye, for example, information received by up to 130 receptors is transmitted to only one neuron in the retina. The opposite is divergence, when one neuron transmits signals to several other neurons.
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- Glossary
Basket cell
Basket cells are interneurons in the cerebellum and hippocampus. In the cerebellum, they are excited by parallel fibers and in turn inhibit Purkinje cells.
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- Glossary
Granule cell
Relatively small nerve cells found in the cortex (cerebral cortex), hippocampus, olfactory bulb, and cerebellum. In the cortex, they are primarily located in layer IV and are predominantly excitatory. In the cortex of the cerebellum, they constitute 99% of the cells and form the parallel fibers.
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- Glossary
Body schema
The body schema is the dynamic representation of one's own body, which is based on proprioceptive, visual, and tactile information, but goes beyond it. Disorders such as phantom limb sensations after amputations show that the body schema can exist independently of current sensory inputs.
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- Glossary
cranial
A positional term – cranial means "towards the head." In relation to the nervous system, it refers to a direction along the neural axis, i.e., forward. In animals (without upright gait), the designation is simpler, as it always means forward. Due to the upright gait of humans, the brain bends in relation to the spinal cord, where cranial also means "upward."
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- Glossary
Short-term memory
Short-term memory is a type of temporary storage in the brain where information can be retained for a few seconds to a few minutes. Its capacity is very limited, at 7±2 units of information (chunks). These can be numbers, letters, or words, for example. Today, this memory is usually considered within the framework of the working memory model, which also emphasizes the active processing of content.
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- Glossary
Long-term memory
Long-term memory stores information about events, facts, or skills over long periods of time, often for a lifetime. Different types of memory are stored in different areas of the brain. The cellular basis for these learning processes is based, among other things, on improved communication between two cells and is called long-term potentiation.
