The lobes of the cerebral cortex

The frontal lobe

-High-order thinking/ complex mental functions (personality, planning)

-motor control

-speech production

Broca’s area

Found in the LEFT frontal lobe, and is responsible for the production of speech. Damage to Broca's area means that your speech will be coherent (make sense) but will be broken or stuttering. This is called Broca's Aphasia.

The primary cortex

Sits in a band/strip at the back of the frontal lobe. Each part of the primary cortex links/maps to a specific part of the body. The more space our cortex has for that body part, the more control we have.

Parietal lobe

-Touch

-Temperature

-Pressure and temperature from sensory receptors in the skin

-Information about muscle movement

Somatosensory cortex

The Somatosensory cortex is responsible for sensation in the body.

-Like the primary motor cortex, it is somatosensorily mapped:  the parts of the body that are more sensitive have a larger brain area.

Occipital Lobe

-Located at the back of your head
-Is almost exclusively devoted to the sense of vision (Other three lobes also have important visual function)
-Damage to occipital lobe can produce blindness, even if the eye and their neural connections to the brain are normal.
-The key part of this lobe involved in sight is the primary visual cortex located at the very back of the brain (the eyes and the optic nerve link directly to this cortex).
-The visual Association Area plays a role in vision and work with the other lobes by integrating visual information and other information such memory, language and sounds.

-This enables visual information to be interpreted in a meaningful way.

Temporal lobe

-The primary auditory cortex: receives and processes sounds.

-Primarily involved with auditory perception, but plays an important role in: Memory, aspects of visual perception (recognise objects and faces), emotional responses to sensory information and memories.

-Primary auditory cortex: Receives and processes sounds from both ears.

-Specialised areas receive and process different features of sound: Frequency, Amplitude or intensity.

Also specialised to process different types of sound.

Generally: Verbal sounds are mostly processed in left hemisphere, Non-verbal sounds are mostly processed in the right hemisphere.

Wernicke’s area

Located in the left temporal lobe. It is connected to Broca's area by a bundle of nerves. Wernicke's area has a crucial role in the comprehension of speech.

-Interpreting the sounds of human sound.

-Allows you to understand what is being said.