The Brain
As mentioned elsewhere, neuroscience is the study of the nervous system, the nervous system likewise encompassing the brain. Since the other components are discussed at length in other entries, the present text will omit those details.
Therefore, the brain is located in the cranium, covered by three layers of meninges: the pia mater, arachnoid and dura mater. The brain is further protected by the blood brain barrier (BBB), which may result in occasional problems in medical treatment, since medications must cross the BBB, which can sometimes be tricky.
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| Brain. Image source: www.wpclipart.com |
As can be seen in the picture above, the brain contains four lobes. The frontal lobe (being indeed at the front of the head) is mainly responsible for executive function, or planning, organizing, decision making, impulse inhibition, working memory and so on. The temporal lobe is the seat of memory and hearing, while the parietal lobe is usually credited with most thinking and movement. Finally, the occipital lobe’s main responsibility is vision. Naturally, since extreme modularity in the form of phrenology has been discarded, the explanations of cortical activity patterns are not to be understood simplistically, since most of the cortex is active at any one particular time.
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| Brain structure. Image source: www.wpclipart.com |
Along these lines, brain cells are called neurons and the cell clusters activated by specific kinds of stimuli (e.g. audition of a melody) are called neural correlates or neuronal substrates. Conversely, some structures are directly associated with certain mental processes, such as the hippocampus with memory, the amygdala with emotion and the fusiform gyrus with face recognition (not shown in the diagram above).
Copyright © 2015 Megan. All rights reserved.
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