Function: controls personality, emotions, intelligence, attention, concentration, judgement, problem solving, and speech .

Fun Fact I: the average age that the frontal lobe is fully developed is 25 years old.

Fun Fact II: the Frontal Lobe is also known as the “control panel” of the body.

Location: frontal part of the brain

Function: processes and interprets sensory information, interprets language.

Fun Fact I: the parietal lobe develops at about 5 years of age.

Fun Fact II: a recent study has shown that over time the surface area of the parietal lobe in females decreases.

Location: behind the frontal lobe

Function: vision

Fun Fact I: damage to one side of the occipital lobe causes homonomous loss of vision in both eyes.

Fun Fact II: vision is one of the least developed senses by birth. All newborns are near sighted and can only see about 8-15 inches away.

Location: back of the head

Function: understanding language, memory, hearing, and organization.

Fun Fact I: hearing is the first fully developed sense in newborns.

Fun Fact II: it has been proven that medial temporal lobe epilepsy occurs more often in males than females.

Location: in front of the occipital and below the frontal and parietal.

Function: processes visual information from senses; allows us to recognize faces and objects.

Fun Fact I: the visual cortex is very thin; between 1.5 and 2 millimeters thick.

Fun Fact II: The primary visual cortex is the best studied visual area in the brain.

Location: back portion of the occipital lobe.

Function: processes auditory information.

Fun Fact I: there are two auditory cortexes in the human brain. The right and left auditory cortexes.

Fun Fact II: infants find it difficult to differentiate between low and high sounds.

Location: small area within the temporal lobe.

Function: controls voluntary movement; the left side controls the right side of the body and vice versa.

Fun Fact I: the layer referred to as layer IV is recognizable in newborns but gradually disappears in the first postnatal months.

Fun Fact II: if someone suffers a stroke it causes damage to the primary motor cortex on one side of the brain.

Location: the back of the frontal lobe.

Function: receives and processes information for the senses.

Fun Fact I: if damage occurs to the somatosensory cortex a person can lose the sense of touch, vibration, and temperature.

Fun Fact II: it is a narrow band of cortex tissue that extends from one side of the cortex near the ear and over the top of the brain to the other side.

Location: front part of the parietal lobe.

Function: it obtains information from your surroundings and/or body and then sends that information to a specific part of the cerebrum.

Fun Fact I: the left hemisphere is associated with analytic thought, logic, language, science, and math.

Fun Fact II: the right hemisphere is associated with holistic thought, intuition, creativity, art, and music.

Location: The cerebrum is divided into four sections, called lobes: the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe.

Function: coordinates muscle movement, maintains posture, and balance.

Fun Fact I: the cerebellum makes up approximately one-tenth of the volume of the human brain.

Fun Fact II: the function of the cerebellum, movement, was discovered by a seventeenth century physician, Thomas Willis in 1664.

Location: pair of baseball-sized structures that lie at the rear of the Brain.

Function: processes motor functions and sensory functions for different parts of the body.

Fun Fact I: many amputees say they can still feel the presence and even intense pain in the missing limb. This is because the pathways between the brain and the limb are separated but don’t disappear entirely and neither does the representation of the limb in the brain.

Fun Fact II: homunculus means “little man” in Latin.

Function: speech production

Fun Fact I: damage to the Broca’s area causes the victim to lose the ability to speak.

Fun Fact II: the trajectory of gray matter development in Broca’s area is abnormal in people who stutter.

Function: responsible for comprehension of speech.

Fun Fact I: it was named after German neurologist Carl Wernicke who first described the area and its function in 1874.

Fun Fact II: people with damage to Wernicke’s area can understand language but their speech does not make sense and they cannot repeat words.

Function: relay station for almost all information that comes and goes to the cortex.

Fun Fact I: Ninety-eight percent of all sensory input is being relayed by the thalamus.

Fun Fact II: the thalamus is divided into two bulb shaped masses around 5.7 cm in length and positioned symmetrically on each side of the third ventricle.

Location: pair of egg shaped structures that sit atop the brain stem.

Function: it forms the connection between the brain and the spinal cord, maintains vital control of the heart and lungs, and coordinates many important reflexes.

Fun Fact I: a tube shaped mass of nervous tissue that is a little over 3 inches long.

Fun Fact II: three major regions, the medulla oblongata, the pons, and the midbrain, make up the brainstem.

Function: controls life support functions like breathing and heartbeat.

Fun Fact I: very similar to the spinal cord structurally but it is wider and contains several masses of gray matter internally.

Fun Fact II: connects the brain to the spinal cord.

Location: slightly swelled region at the top of the spinal cord.

Function: coordinates movement

Fun Fact I: pons are small; approximately 2.5cm long.

Fun Fact II: pons are associates with the control of sleep cycles and your circadian rhythm.

Location: bulge that sits on top of the medulla.

Function: involved in the functions of vision, hearing, eye and body movement.

Fun Fact I: also known as the mesencephalon, meaning “middle brain.”

Fun Fact II: damage to the midbrain can result in movement disorders, vision and hearing difficulty, and memory trouble.

Location: top of the brainstem.

Function: responsible for fear, anger, aggression, and survival instincts.

Fun Fact I: the function of the Amygdala was unclear until the 1980’s when they began fear conditioning experiments on rats using electrical shock.

Fun Fact II: the amygdala instinctively reacts to potential hazards before the frontal lobe can weigh in.

Location: pair of Lima bean sized clusters of neurons in the midbrain.

Function: regulates hunger, thirst, sleep, body temperature, blood pressure, emotions, secretion of hormones.

Fun Fact I: the word comes from the Greek language meaning “under chamber.”

Fun Fact II: in humans, the hypothalamus is about the size of an almond.

Location: small structure just below the thalamus.

Function: helps regulate the body’s internal clock and circadian rhythm by secreting melatonin.

Fun Fact I: the word pineal comes from the French word “pine’al” meaning “like a pinecone” and the Latin word for pinecone “pinea.”

Fun Fact II: connects the endocrine and nervous systems by translating nerve signals from the symphatic nervous system into hormone signals.

Location: small kernel of corn on the back of the thalamus.

Function: allows information to pass from left to right and vice versa.

Fun Fact I: means “tough body” in Latin.

Fun Fact II: the corpus callosum develops in the early prenatal stages.

Location: connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres.

Fun Fact I: The average adult human brain weighs three pounds, has a texture like firm jelly and is made up of 75 percent water.

Fun Fact II: Every time your heart beats, your arteries carry 20 to 25 percent of your blood to the brain. The harder you think, the more oxygen and fuel your brain will use from your blood – up to 50 percent.

Fun Fact III: Size doesn’t matter in the brain. There is no evidence that a larger brain is smarter than a smaller brain.

Fun Fact IV: There are 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the brain. The distance around the world at the equator is 24,900 miles.

Fun Fact V: Relying on GPS to navigate destroys your innate sense of direction, a skill that took our ancestors thousands of years to develop and hone. When areas of the brain involved in navigation are no longer used, those neural connections fade away via a process known as synaptic pruning.

Fun Fact VI: Attention spans are getting shorter. In 2000, the average attention span was 12 seconds. Now, it’s 8 seconds. That’s shorter than the 9-second attention span of the average goldfish.