What is a person's "brain"?
One part of the brain is not the same as another part. We tend to think of the frontal lobes, which is the front of the brain, as being involved with behaviour and emotion. It's not exclusively the only area that's involved in that but that's primarily what it's about. It also has input into the autonomic nervous system. So, if you stimulate the bottom of the frontal lobes you can influence heart rate, things of that sort, and breathing, and so forth. That's a very important. A little further back from the frontal lobes are the motor strips. The motor strips are very oriented to a particular area. That area might have the legs and the bladder function. Then, you'll find that along the motor strip, each area has a specific series of neurons. So, if I stimulate one, the area that has the largest motor neurons is the thumb; the thumb is where there's the largest number of what we call pyramidal neurons; the thumb is big in humans. Now, you go on a little further back into the next hemisphere, which is the parietal lobe; the parietal lobe is a sensory organ. Now, the motor area, the frontal lobe, also has an area in it for speech. However, it's motor speech; how you say words, how you form words, etcetera, etcetera. Now, if you go into the parietal lobe you have the same thing but in a sensory way. So, if I stimulate your foot, there's an area of the brain that gets stimulated. As I go up your anatomy, wherever there's an area of sensory input and there's something coming, it eventually gets sent to the parietal lobe. It's also where the speech is; where the speech is sensory. In other words, if I talk to you and you don't understand what I'm talking about but you can still speak, that would be the parietal lobe. So, that's what we call the Wernicke's Area; that's the cognitive communicative area for input. If you don't understand what is being said to you, then that's in the parietal lobe. Frontal lobe is the speech area, so speech is both a motor function and an input function; you have to have both. The temporal lobes are where there's also a considerable amount of emotion, it makes up part of the limbic system, and it's also where the memory is; where the memory is critical for learning, etcetera, etcetera. The occipital area is visual, and obviously that's very important, the visual area. The hearing parts are also in the temporal lobe. So, temporal lobe has hearing, it has some speech components, and it has memory. The occipital lobe has visual, and it's not just seeing, but also interpreting, visual memory and all these other things.
