Your body wakes itself up in the morning, and you immediately know to brush your teeth, shower, eat breakfast, and prepare yourself for the day. On average, the human brain makes more than 35,000 decisions and processes around 74GB of information in a day. This extraordinary organ can be broken down into four sections: the frontal lobe, the temporal lobe, the occipital lobe, and the parietal lobe.
The brain weighs three pounds on average and is responsible for a human's intelligence, senses, behavior, body movements, and so much more. It is a major part of your nervous system and controls both involuntary and voluntary movement through the motor cortex. The brain is a complex organ with endless characteristics and functions. However, to understand stuff like that, gaining knowledge about the basic anatomy of the human brain will pave the way for higher learning. It is also important to know what could happen if serious brain damage occurred and what disorders could result from this brain damage. This blog will brush over some of the functions of the four lobes, and a associating disorder for each one.
The frontal lobe is the largest of the four lobes in the brain and is behind the nasal cavity and extends to the ears. This part of the brain is responsible for controlling movement, thinking, planning, organizing, problem-solving, short-term memory, and movement. If you experience damage to the frontal lobe, you could risk a loss of personality and social skills, loss of coordination, and or memory issues. Many disorders can be developed from damage to the frontal lobe, and some of those disorders are ventromedial orbitofrontal cortex syndromes. It sounds complicated, but a simple way to put it is that these syndromes cause people to act impulsively and without judgment. People with these syndromes disregard emotional outcomes and have little response to emotional stimuli.
The parietal lobe is located between the frontal lobe and the occipital lobe and just above the temporal lobe. This lobe plays a major role in the body’s senses and movement coordination. This lobe has two main functional areas, sensation, and perception. If this lobe experiences traumatic damage, one could experience a lack of coordination, disorientation, and difficulty reading and writing as well as impairments in speaking aka Gerstmann's syndrome. Gerstmann syndrome is a syndrome caused by damage to the left parietal lobe in the brain.
Contrary to the frontal lobe, the occipital lobe is the smallest in the human brain. This part of the brain lies on top of the occipital bone; its main function is visual processing. Specifically, it is associated with distance and depth perception, visuospatial processing, color determination, object and face recognition, and memory formation. This lobe can be damaged by trauma, infections, seizures, and other things. A condition that can be developed through damage to this lobe is Riddoch syndrome. Riddoch syndrome is the ability to perceive objects that are in motion and the inability to perceive objects that are not in motion.
The temporal lobe is located between the ears and is the second-largest lobe. This lobe works with authority processing and information as well as encoding memory. In addition to this, this lobe is involved in learning and remembering non-verbal information. Damage to this lobe can cause lots of things, such as difficulty understanding words, disturbances with selective attention, difficulty identifying objects, learning disorders, damaged long-term memory, and a disorder called prosopagnosia. Prosopagnosia is the inability of one to recognize faces. This can be as minor as not being able to discriminate between unknown faces or as severe as the inability to discriminate faces from objects.
The brain is a complicated organ, each lobe has very different functions. Each person has their own unique brain chemistry which makes them who they are. But serious damage to the brain can cause lobe-specific disorders such as Prosopagnosia, Riddoch syndrome, Gerstmann syndrome, ventromedial orbitofrontal cortex syndromes and so much more!
** As always, If you find yourself self harming or have friends/family struggling and are talking about possible suicide reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) or call 911 to get them or you immediate help.
References
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