Examine the Interaction between Cognition and Physiology in terms of Behaviour

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Cognition refers to the mental processes involved in attaining knowledge and comprehension through experience, thought, and the bodily senses; whereas physiology is the internal, fundamental biological mechanisms and functions of living organisms. Amnesia is regarded as the inability to retrieve or create memories from experience, and because of this, it is classified into two classes – retrograde and anterograde – respectively. Amnesia has multiple causes, of which include brain damage and degenerative diseases, impairing areas of the brain such as the temporal lobe or hippocampus. Because amnesia is of biological, physiological origins and deters cognitive processes such as memory creation, it implies an interaction between the two bodily processes in amnesia. This applies inversely to extensive memory usage, namely spatial memory, or the cognitive model, the memory for recording information regarding the environment and surroundings, which has shown to influence the physiology of the brain if strengthened and trained. This essay will hence attempt at examining the assumptions and interrelationships between cognition and physiology in terms of amnesia and spatial memory.

The account and studies of Henry Molaison, or simply H.M first conducted by Milner & Scoville (1957) is one of the more prominent and pioneering studies concerning amnesia and the demonstration of interactions between cognition and physiology due to the relationship discovered regarding brain and memory-related processes. H.M, began suffering from epileptic seizures at age 10, faulted to his unfortunate cycling accident at age seven, which resulted in severely damaging blows being dealt to his brain. The seizures started to escalate at age 16, and even drugs f...

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...oth the cases of amnesia and spatial memory, where either the physiology affects the cognitive processes, or vice versa. It can therefore be stated that a bidirectional, or two-way relationship is shared between cognition and physiology, as both H.M and Clive Wearing (Sacks 2007) show that the changes in certain areas of the brain physiology be it through damage or virus, has led to different forms of memory impairment experienced by the individual, namely anterograde and retrograde amnesia. With Maguire et al’s (2000) study, this is once again proven by the difference between the taxi drivers and the control group, furthered by the direct proportionality shared between time and the size. It is therefore safe to conclude with the backing of the studies that there is an interaction between cognition and physiology in terms of behaviour, no matter the source of cause.

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