Cortex

The cerebral cortex is the extensive outer layer of “gray matter” of the cerebral hemispheres. The cortex is responsible for many higher-order functions, including language, information processing and memory, and is importantly involved in sensation and voluntary muscle movement. There are four primary parts, or “lobes,” of the cortex:

Frontal lobe
Function: This lobe is divided into three different areas and is responsible for cognition, memory and emotional intelligence.

Prefrontal Area – This area is responsible for planning, complex ideas, behaviors,  concentration and the ability to focus. This area is also responsible for emotional traits, judgment and inhibition.

Motor – The rear-most portion of the frontal lobe, this area is responsible for voluntary motor activity.

Premotor –This area is involved with volitional movement (storage of motor patterns) and motor activity to the opposite side of the body. In other words, the right side of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body.

Injury to this area, or a lack of accurate sensory information from the lower levels of the brain, causes among other things: inability to retrieve recent memories, inattentiveness, lack of focus, difficulty learning new information, lack of inhibition, and inappropriate sexual and social behavior.

Temporal Lobe
This lobe is responsible for receiving auditory information and recognizing words; it is thus central to the process of learning and understanding language. It is also an important structure for emotions, for making new memories, and for short-term memory. Other parts of this lobe appear to integrate memories of taste, sound, sight, and touch.

Injury to the temporal lobe, or a lack of accurate sensory information from the lower levels of the brain, impairs the ability to process auditory information accurately, as well as other hearing impairments. Injury to this area can also cause a person to become overly agitated or irritable, and to exhibit childish behavior.

Parietal Lobe
This lobe is responsible for processing sensory input and sensory discrimination. It is also called the ‘association area’.  It is responsible to receive and utilize from the lower levels of the brain, information about: temperature, taste, touch, and movement from the rest of the body – such as distance and position of objects.  It is also responsible for reading and arithmetic.

Injury to this area, or lack of accurate sensory information from the lower levels of the brain, create an inability to discriminate between different stimuli, locate and recognize parts of the body, inability to write and disorientation in environmental space.

Occipital Lobe
This is the primary visual center of the brain. It processes information from the eyes, and links that information with images stored in memory. In other words, this area helps you determine what you are looking at.

The most common effect of injury to the occipital lobe is visual impairment; severe injury to this lobe can cause blindness. Along with visual impairment, injury to the occipital lobe can cause hallucinations, can cause objects to appear larger or smaller than they are, and can cause colors to appear abnormal.

To see a larger diagram of the Cortex, click here.