#parietal lobe

Informational diagram: How sensory information is processed by the brain

Sensory information is taken in by the occipital lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, and/or the olfactory lobe.

The lobes send the sensory information to the somatosensory cortex.

The somatosensory cortex sends the information to the thalamus, which connects to the limbic system.

The information is sent to the amygdala, which gives initial/primal reactions to the stimuli.

The amygdala's reactions (including fight or flight response) are sent to the hippocampus, hypothalamus, and the frontal cortex.

The pituitary gland receives signals from the hypothalamus, then sends signals for the endocrine system to excrete hormones throughout the body. The frontal cortex sends rationalized information to the motor cortex, which controls voluntary actions.

Source linked below: "Meet Your Master - Getting to Know Your Brain: Crash Course Psychology #4" by Hank Green's Crash Course - February 24th, 2014

sum brain lobes

info down here

Lateralised Thinking

While different brain areas are responsible for processing different things, like what we see or feel, they don’t operate independently. The complex cognitive processes that go on in our heads rely on brain regions being interconnected. The inferior parietal lobe (IPL, outlined here in black) is where many such networks converge and plays a crucial role in both low-level processes like attention and high-level processes like emotion and language. By asking volunteers to perform a series of low and high-level tasks while in an MRI scanner, a team of scientists were able to show increases in brain activity (in red-orange) in the left and right side of the IPL depending on whether it was being used in an attention task (top) or to process language (bottom). This shows us how each side of the IPL has specialised roles, and that they work together to coordinate our complex mental capacities.

Written by Gaëlle Coullon

Image from work by Ole Numssen, Danilo Bzdok and Gesa Hartwigse

Lise Meitner Research Group Cognition and Plasticity, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig, Germany and the Dept of Biomedical Engineering, McConnell Brain Imaging Centre, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Canada

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in eLife, March 2021

How to understand the brain, part 1: the lobes. 

Behold! Your parietal lobe! You can thank this lobe for your ability to slap yourself in the face! You’re welcome!

Because it allows you to know where in space your hand is, where in space your face is, and where they are in relation to each other. Congratulations! If you have parietal lobe issues, you might have issues slapping yourself in the face... among other issues but those are probably not relevant.

More specifically, the parietal lobe is split up into the above sections. First you have the somatosensory cortex

(This post was brought to you by me, figuring out how to “remove background” on an image and abusing this newfound power). So with the hand slapping thing, you will feel both your hand making contact with your face, and your face being slapped, thanks to this doohickey!

The superior and supramarginal cortices are visual, so it guides your movement to, say, pick up a water bottle. And slap yourself in the face, although you can do that with your eyes closed (go ahead, try it). That’s thanks to the posterior cingulate gyrus but we will get there later because it is a LOT. For now we have the friendly, simple

Angular Gyrus, which does what it says. So thinking about your place in space, where you want to go, where you’ve been, which way is north, which way is your house. Boom. Angular Gyrus. The Angular Gyrus and the Supramarginal Gyrus together make up the inferior parietal lobule (sub-lobe)

Now on the OTHER side of the parietal cortex (cut your brain in half, saggitally, to expose this part) (don’t cut, like, YOUR brain in half... couldn’t learn much then, could you) (actually) (we won’t go there). Episodic memory retrieval=who, what, when, where, and emotions of memories.Makes sense this is with visuo-spatial imagery. When you imagine up these memories, you envision the location of these memories and where these memories took place. Self-consciousness is also related to this area (but not exclusively located here. It’s pretty well understood that’s not located in one area but processed throughout the brain. NOW for the REAL doosy

Phew. Look at that. And such a small area. It is primarily known for its role in the Dorsal Stream in visual processing. A lot of its other roles kind of relate to this, as it is also known as the “where” stream. So spacial awareness, movements in space, mental rotation (that skill on IQ tests where they give you the shape and ask you to ID the shape from another angle), mental imagery, manipulation of visual imagery. So your understanding and manipulation of space. Interestingly (possibly connected) math and reading abilities are also highly related to this area. Spatial and non-spatial working memory (temporary memory holding, decision making), response inhibition, and task switching are all related to this area. Which is interesting because they are also all related to the medial prefrontal cortex. Pathway?? (Probably, I haven’t looked into it)

Not labeled here:

Medial Parietal-Pain processing and meditation

Intraparietal Sulcus-Saccadic eye movements, attention, reaching, grasping, tactile manipulation of objects, observing hand movements, passive tool use, object matching and object size and orientation discrimination. (aka REALLY relevant for slapping yourself)