MODULE III – FUNCTIONS OF

THE CEREBRUM
Shivani Vaze
 LATERALIZATION OF THE BRAIN
 Superficially, we appear to be physically symmetrical. We have two arms, legs, eyes, ears,
nostrils, hands, thumbs and nipples. This symmetry is reflected in internal anatomy: we have
two lungs and two kidneys. Women have two ovaries; men have two testicles. We have two
cerebral hemispheres. Yet this appearance features some subtle, genuine physical and
neuroanatomical asymmetries
Physical asymmetry
 One example of physical asymmetry is the face. The left and right sides of the face are not
mirror images of each other. In fact, they are quite different. Furthermore, there is some
evidence that the face is asymmetrically expressive, with a more intense expression found on
the left side.
 Studies in which individuals have rated the attractiveness of both sides of a woman’s face have
shown that the right side is significantly more attractive than the left although the evidence for
the idea that asymmetrical faces are less attractive than symmetrical ones is mixed.
 Recent evidence suggests that a symmetrical face is associated with greater health but this
notion is even more controversial.
 The conventional view of hemispheric function is that the left hemisphere is rational, verbal,
linear and analytic, whereas the right hemisphere is emotional, spatial, holistic and intuitive.
The left and right hemispheres have even been characterized as representing ‘Western’ and
‘Eastern’ styles of thinking, respectively.
 Underlying this dichotomy is the suggestion that the two hemispheres are qualitatively and
quantitatively different. Arthur Wigan in his book, ‘ The Duality of Mind,’ had argued that the
two hemispheres were independent entities that required efficient coordination in order to
function adequately.
 This notion of the independence of the hemispheres was given a more vivid spin following
reports of split-brain patients, who, because the fibres connecting their cerebral hemispheres
had been severed to block the path of epileptic seizure, appeared to have ‘two brains’.
Information available to one hemisphere did not appear to be available to the other.
 The left hemisphere does appear to be a more effective processor of language; the right
hemisphere does appear to be more involved in aspects of visuospatial ability. However, there
are complications and ambiguities that cloud these apparently straightforward dichotomies.
For example, the right hemisphere is capable of undertaking rudimentary or compensatory
language processing, and the left hemisphere is capable of undertaking some spatial
processing.
 Individual differences such as sex and handedness further complicate the pattern and
development of functional hemispheric asymmetry.
 Language
 Invasive and non-invasive studies have shown left hemisphere dominance for speech and various
language processes. Various categories of language task have been studied: written word
recognition/reading, spoken word recognition, written and spoken word comprehension and speech
production. Case studies of the nineteenth century were the first to provide some relatively systematic
evidence that the left hemisphere was specialized for specific language functions such as speech
production. These studies led to what has become known as the Wernicke–Broca–Lichtheim model of
language: that auditory representation of words was localized in the posterior temporal regions and that
motor representation of words was localized in the frontal region.
 However, this model was challenged by work published in the 1970s and 1980s. Famously, Caramazza
and Zurif (1976) published research based on a group of Broca’s aphasia patients, which found that
although these patients had generally good comprehension, they showed poor comprehension when
understanding depended on having an awareness of the syntactic information in a sentence. For example,
they were unable to match a picture to the sentence ‘the dog was chased by the cat’ when the picture
featured a cat chasing a dog.
 Regions of the left hemisphere have been found to be more actively recruited during word-processing
tasks such as spoken word recognition and spoken word production. These findings have emerged from
case studies and from neuroimaging studies of healthy individuals. Such studies have measured language
ability and performance in very specific ways. For example, studies have investigated the representation of
semantic knowledge and have found that the left middle and inferior temporal lobe is implicated in
patients and in healthy individuals.
 Others have found dissociations between the production and understanding of word class, with some patients
being unable to understand or read function words but able to read content words without a problem. Models
of reading have been proposed based on such work.
 In a pioneering PET study of single-word processing, an increased activation in the left posterior temporal
cortex during passive listening to words was reported. When subjects had to decide whether pairs of spoken
syllables ended in a consonant or not, an increase in blood flow to Broca’s area was observed. Similar left-
sided increases have been found during word-association tasks, even in left-handers.
 Greater activity in the left inferior and middle frontal cortices during a lexical decision task, whereas
increases in the left middle and superior temporal regions were found during reading aloud and silently. Left-
sided activity during a word-recognition task was reported. Specifically, silent viewing of words and pseudo-
words activated the left medial cortex, but silent viewing of consonant strings did not. It raised the argument
that this brain region was associated with visual word recognition and not phonological processing.
 Later studies extended research beyond single-word processing to the study of sentence and discourse
comprehension. The temporal poles and middle and superior frontal regions of the right hemisphere appear to
be important here. These are activated during sentence comprehension – the right hemisphere also appears to
be activated when a sentence or a story is coherent.
 The right hemisphere might also play a role in the appreciation of irony and metaphors. Sentence
comprehension was associated with the typical increased activation in left hemisphere regions such as the
prefrontal and basal frontal cortex and the middle and inferior temporal gyri, but metaphor understanding
activated various parts of the right hemisphere, including the right prefrontal cortex and the middle temporal
gyrus.
 Visuospatial ability appears to be more reliant on the performance of the right than the left hemisphere, although
not all visuospatial tasks tap the same visuospatial function. A division has been suggested between tests of
mental rotation ability, which do appear to elicit reliable hemispheric asymmetries, and tests involving spatial
relations, such as the organization of elements.
 Distinction between spatial tasks that involve assigning spatial relations to a category such as ‘outside of’ or
‘above’ (left) and those that involve making decisions about metric distances between spatial relations (right)
has been studied.
 One of the common tasks of visuospatial ability involves spatial transformation such as mental rotation. There
are several types of mental rotation task, but the most widely used is that of Shepard This task involves
imagining the rotation of a series of cubes, letters, digits so that their position and orientation match the position
and orientation of another set of rotated or unrotated target figures.
 Evidence from a number of sources suggests that mental rotation is largely a function of the right hemisphere,
although this is not clear-cut. Right posterior brain damage is associated with mental rotation deficit, whereas a
left visual field advantage is found for mental rotation in healthy individuals.
 Neuroimaging studies have suggested involvement of the back of the brain (the posterior parietal cortex) when
rotating images ‘in the mind’, the roles of the left and right parietal cortex in the task are unclear. Participants’
ability to decide whether alphanumeric stimuli at different were mirror-reversed or not was examined.
 Individuals took longer to make a decision the more the stimuli were rotated from their normal upright position.
When brain activity was analysed, it was seen only one area that was active during the task, and this was the
right posterior parietal lobe. This parietal cortex, when damaged, results in various perceptual disorders,
suggests that the right side, is responsible for the spatial transformations necessary for mental rotation.
 Spatial processing is not limited exclusively to the right hemisphere, studies have found that
left hemisphere lesions were associated with impaired performance on a task in which
individuals had to indicate which, of ten lines, spaced at equal angles up to 180 degrees, were
at the same angle as two lines presented in isolation. These subjects also showed deficits on
two shape rotation tasks.
 Medical measures for study include neuroimaging, psychological measures included response
times, and other measurements included handedness and hand skill. In general, a right
hemisphere advantage was found for spatial skill across all types of measure.
 However, studies in which spatial ability was examined by looking at how well each hand
performed at a task showed no right hemisphere advantage. There is a large body of
neuroimaging data concerning spatial skill, and these are consistent in their findings.
 More intriguingly, those people described as having high spatial ability showed no hemisphere
preference, but people with poor ability were more likely to show right hemisphere advantage.
This conclusion is based on very small sample sizes, however.
 Simple spatial visualization did not produce a right hemisphere advantage, but tests in which
orientation or manipulation of images was expected did. Finally, men showed a greater right
hemisphere advantage than women, who showed no hemisphere preference.
CEREBRUM
 The cerebrum is the largest part of your brain and handles conscious thoughts and actions.

 Different areas within your cerebrum also have different responsibilities like language, behavior, sensory
processing and more.
 Areas of the brain also commonly work together on the same tasks, help in understanding what’s happening in
the world around us.
 It manages and processes everything your senses take in. That includes sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

 Language: Various parts of your cerebrum control your ability to read, write and speak.

 Working memory: This is a type of short-term memory. An example of working memory is when you remind
yourself to pick up something from the grocery store.
 Behavior and personality: Part of your cerebrum is your frontal lobe, which manages your personality and
behavior. It's the part of your brain that acts as a filter to stop you from doing or saying things you might later
regret.
 Movement: Certain areas of your cerebrum send signals that tell your muscles what to do when you need to use
them.
 Learning, logic and reasoning: Different areas of your cerebrum work together when you need to learn a new
skill, make a plan of action or puzzle out a problem.
 The outer surface of the cerebrum i.e., the cerebral cortex, is mostly smooth but has many
wrinkles, making it look something like a walnut without its shell. It’s divided lengthwise into
two halves, the left and right hemisphere, by a deep groove. The two hemispheres connect using
a structure called the corpus callosum, a collection of nerve tissue that transmits signals from one
side of your brain to the other.
 The two hemispheres of your brain also have four main lobes each:
 Frontal (at the front of your head). This lobe handles things like attention, behavior control (your
sense of what’s appropriate and what’s not), the ability to speak and certain types of muscle
movements.
 Parietal (at the top of your head). This area handles touch, temperature and pain signals. It also
helps with how you see the world around you, especially judging distance from and the size of
objects. It also plays a role in processing sound, languages you speak, your ability to use
numbers and count, and how you organize information and make decisions.
 Temporal (at the side of your head). This area helps you understand language when other people
are speaking. It also helps you recognize people and objects. This part also helps you connect
emotions with memories.
 Occipital (at the back of your head). This lobe manages much of your eyes’ sensory input,
including the ability to see movement and colors.
 The fissures and sulci appear to divide the brain into geographically distinct regions. These
regions are called lobes and there are four of them: frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital.
 However, there is no real underlying logic to the description of these lobes because it is not
based on the lobe’s actual functional characteristics although it is true that one lobe may be
more responsible for a certain function than another.
 The occipital lobes contain the primary visual cortex; the superior temporal gyrus of the
temporal lobe contains the primary auditory cortex, which receives impulses from the ear, or
more specifically, the cochlea. These areas are thus described as the auditory cortex, the visual
cortex, the motor cortex.
 In addition to these cortices, there are areas known as association cortex areas, which lie
outside the primary motor or sensory area but which have reciprocal connections with these
regions.
 FRONTAL LOBE
 The frontal lobes have been regarded as the cortical locus of ‘higher learning’.
 The specific portion of the frontal lobes responsible for maintaining this cognitive behaviour is
known as the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is essential for planning, making goals,
and regulating and verifying behaviour – processes collectively known as executive functions
such as - divided attention, sustained attention, processing speed, sequencing, cognitive
flexibility and planning.
Planning/strategy formation
 The card-sorting tasks, on frontal lobe tests are tasks that involve the patient engaging in
planning or forming strategies.
 Although the WCST is thought to tap into the individual’s ability to form strategies, there are
other tests that tap similar qualities. Maze tests, such as the Porteus Maze Test, are thought to
measure the individual’s forward planning capacity. Other studies had found that posterior and
superior lesions produced more consistent deficits than did lesions at other sites.
 Significant blood flow increases was found in healthy subjects’ frontal regions during
performance of the WCST.
 Right frontal lobe damage, especially, is associated with poor performance on finger- and
stylus-maze tests. If a subject enters a wrong alley on this test, a bell rings, which indicates
that an error has been made. Controls commit about 100 of these errors, yet even when told of
their errors, frontal lobe patients make the same errors again. Right but not left frontal lobe
patients may make up to 350 errors with no further success.
 We learn to do things in a certain way in order to make them work, e.g. writing a letter on a
computer entails enacting a sequence of behaviour such as plugging in the computer and switching
on the hard disk and monitor, opening up the word-processing application, opening a folder and file
and starting to write.
 Deficits of this kind were seen clearly in the behaviour of a 51-year old man studied, who had
suffered from a surgically removed frontal lobe tumour.
 Despite having been employed as a senior manager in an international company, two years after
surgery the patient worked from home, was lethargic and had difficulty in making decisions.
 On one occasion, he took two weeks to decide which slides to show at a professional presentation.
He never made the decision in the end. Yet his performance on a variety of frontal and
neuropsychological tests was normal or above average. In order to determine the effect of the brain
damage on the patient’s everyday organizational behaviour, Shallice and Burgess’s Six Elements
Test and Multiple Errands Task was administered on him.
 In comparison with Shallice and Burgess’s control group, the patient performed badly. For
example, he would have to return to a shop to buy additional items; he would misinterpret
instructions such as placing the stamp on the wrong card and would not complete tasks. He made
these mistakes despite being able to explain his errors and recite the rules of the test. This disregard
of instructions or task requirements despite having full knowledge and understanding of them has
been termed goal neglect.
 In an explicit study of multitasking, it was seen that right prefrontal cortex lesions were
associated with the planning component of the tasks, with damage to other regions affecting
recall of task contingencies and rule breaking.
Attention
 A number of the neuropsychological impairments that follow brain injury have been attributed
to a failure in selective attention.
 Attention, requires an individual to perceive and analyse data from one source of information
while excluding other, irrelevant or interfering sources of information.
 Frontal lobe patients appear to have impaired attentional capacity in that they show poor
concentration and are highly distractible.
 However, this evidence is not consistent, studies measured the reaction times of eleven
prefrontal patients in tasks requiring divided or focused attention and found that these patients
showed significantly greater distraction to irrelevant items than did controls.
 A few have suggested that this attentional deficit in frontal lobe patients may be related to
impaired general intelligence.
 As the frontal lobe is considered as the area of general intelligence as it is the area of higher
order functions.
Memory
 Memory is a concept so vague and broad that no behaviour can be said to be uninfluenced by
it. It is essential for thinking, reasoning, even for ‘constructing’ oneself.
 A person with no memory of his or her past relinquishes the criteria that make him or her
unique. We have seen that frontal lobe patients are sometimes poor at sequencing, ordering,
planning and verbal fluency, all of which involve some memorial component.
 These patients also exhibit memory deficits on tasks of free recall, interference and working
memory. Working memory describes the online supervision of information that has yet to be
stored, and the concept is closely related to short-term memory.
 Neuroimaging with healthy individuals has also highlighted the frontal cortex as being
important for encoding and retrieval of material.
 One of the important roles that the frontal lobes appear to undertake is the acquisition and
retrieval of information.
 The frontal lobe appears to be especially important for explicit memory.
 The ability to encode personally meaningful information – memory for personally meaningful
events, people and objects – appears to recruit the prefrontal and medial-temporal cortex and
the cerebellum.
 Left-sided activation has been found during the encoding of verbal material, whereas the
encoding of non-verbal material has been associated with bilateral activity in the frontal
cortex.
 A large part of the evidence for the role of the prefrontal cortex in working memory has come
from primate studies in which monkeys perform a delayed-response task. These tasks require
the retention of information for later use while simultaneously performing another mental
operation.
 For example, in a fairly standard version of the task, a visual or auditory stimulus is presented
to the monkey. After a delay of a few seconds, the animal is signaled to indicate where the
stimulus had appeared.
Decision making
 Studies of patients with frontal lobe damage suggest that these individuals have great difficulty
in making correct decisions.
 The ability to make decisions leading to positive or potentially harmful consequences depends
on the activation of somatic (that is, bodily) states (the somatic marker hypothesis).
 Because such decisions involve automatic, endocrine and musculo-skeletal routes These routes
mark events as important but appear to be impaired in certain frontal lobe patients.
 For example, patients with damage to a specific area of the prefrontal cortex are unable to
make decisions in real life despite having intact cognitive ability.
 When the decision can have a positive or negative outcome, the degree of physiological
activity commonly seen in healthy individuals when they make such decisions is absent in
these patients.
Reasoning
 If the frontal lobes are important for reasoning, then we could predict activation in these areas
when healthy individuals perform a reasoning task during neuroimaging. It was reported, two
experiments in which they sought to test this hypothesis. In one experiment, they asked ten
participants to undertake inductive and deductive reasoning tasks. These involved syllogistic
reasoning tasks such as deciding whether the following logic was correct:
 All carpenters are young.
 All woodworkers are carpenters.
 All woodworkers are young.

and
 George was a woolly mammoth.
 George ate pine cones.
 All woolly mammoths ate pine cones.
 The experimenters found that the frontal lobes were involved: significant increases in
activation were reported in the left inferior and middle frontal gyri.
 But reasoning appears to be dissociable in that the type of content in a reasoning task affects
how well people reason. When given a task where the content is familiar (e.g. all apples are
red fruit; all red fruit are sweet; therefore, all apples are sweet), people perform such
syllogisms better than if the content is not familiar and more formal (e.g. all A are B; all B are
C; therefore, all A are C).
 The former example seems to be associated with increased left frontal activity, whereas the
latter is associated with increased bilateral parietal activity with some evidence of prefrontal
activation.
Broca’s Area
 A region of the brain that contains neurons involved in speech function. This area, located in
the frontal part of the left hemisphere of the brain, serves a vital role in the generation of
articulate speech.
 Broca’s area is also involved in language comprehension, motor-related activities associated
with hand movements, and sensorimotor learning and integration.
 PARIETAL LOBE
 The parietal lobes contain the primary and association cortices for somato-sensation.
 Damage to the parietal cortex has been found to produce deficits in behaviour such as tactile
(haptic) perception and touch discrimination.
 At the behavioural level, the parietal cortex is also important for mediating attentional processes
such as directing an organism towards information that is relevant. In monkeys, the specific
region responsible is the inferior parietal lobe. In humans, there is a homologous region in the
superior parietal lobe.
 Neurons in the IPL selectively fire when a monkey performs a motor act, but this activation
differs according to the context in which an identical motor act occurs. For example, the same
motor act may be involved in eating or placing, but it activates the IPL differently depending on
the context.
 Neurons here also fire during the observation of a motor act and before the beginning of
subsequent acts that define the precise action.
 Together with attention and motor movement, activation in this region is also reported during
auditory and haptic attention, motion processing, stereo vision, spatial and non spatial working
memory, mental imagery, and arithmetical calculation.
 As the parietal lobe also contains the motor cortex, damage to the motor area can result in
impairments in gross limb movement.
 Finally, parietal cortex damage is often associated with deficits in spatial representation such
as spatial neglect, where the patient is unable to ‘see’ objects in one half of the visual field, or
sensorimotor coordination problems, as seen in constructional apraxia, the inability to copy a
drawing in the absence of a neurological motor impairment.
 Because of the wide range of relatively task-non-specific, process-general functions
implicating activation of the parietal lobe, one notion of its role sees it as an association cortex
– an area where various functions converge.
 Alternatively, it may be a region that is simply a general cortical mediation centre. These
observations have been based on data from neuroimaging studies, although, the lobes may be
more functionally specialized than crude imaging methods suggest.
 Given that most tasks in neuroimaging studies involve attention, orientation, motor plan
generation and eye movement directing, controlling for these factors would be critical before
ascribing any specific function to this region
 TEMPORAL LOBE
 The temporal lobes are the brain regions primarily responsible for audition, language
comprehension, memory and learning and, possibly, olfactory perception, detection and
identification. These lobes are particularly important for hearing, because they contain both the
primary auditory cortex and the auditory association areas.
 Bilateral damage to Heschl’s gyrus might lead to cortical deafness. Unilateral lesions to this
area result in less severe auditory consequences, such as a reduction in the threshold for
auditory sensation.
 Damage to other regions of the auditory cortex can lead to musical deficits such as tone
deafness or poor pitch/melody perception (musical agnosia) or an inability to comprehend
non-verbal sounds (sound agnosia). Language comprehension is most affected by unilateral
lesions to Wernicke’s area, and memory and learning deficits can also result from temporal
lobe damage.
 Inevitably, when memory and learning impairments arise from temporal damage, personality
is changed as a result.
 Finally, damage to the right temporal (and orbitofrontal cortex) has been associated with
deficits in odour recognition memory.
Wernicke’s area
 The region of the brain that contains motor neurons involved in the comprehension of speech.
 The Wernicke area is located in the posterior part temporal lobe of the left hemisphere of the
brain. Thus, it lies close to the auditory cortex.
 This area is uniquely important for the comprehension of speech sounds and is considered to
be the receptive language, or language comprehension centre.
 OCCIPITAL LOBE
 The occipital lobe is the smallest of the four lobes of the cerebral hemisphere.
 The occipital lobe is primarily responsible for visual processing. It contains the primary and
association visual cortex.
 It is associated with visuospatial processing, distance and depth perception, color
determination, object and face recognition, and memory formation.
 The primary visual cortex transmits information through two pathways: the dorsal and ventral
stream. The dorsal stream is associated with object location and carries visual information to
the parietal lobe. The ventral stream has associations with object recognition and transmits
visual information to the temporal lobe.
 Occipital lobe lesions can cause visual hallucinations, colour agnosia, or agraphia.
 A rare syndrome associated with occipital lobe injury is Riddoch syndrome. The person is only
able to see moving objects in the blind field, while non-moving objects are invisible. The
person has motion perception while unable to perceive shape or color.
 BASAL GANGLIA

 Inside the cortex there are a number of small structures that are integral to the functioning of
the human brain and behaviour.
 One such collection is called the basal ganglia, which is involved in certain aspects of
movement. The basal ganglia receives connections from parts of the cortex and send axons to
the motor cortex.
 It has two main parts. The smaller is found anterior to the thalamus, has a long, curved tail and
is called the caudate nucleus. The caudate has a large part (called the caput) and a tail (the
cauda) that points upwards then backwards into the temporal lobe.
 The larger part of the basal ganglia, found laterally to the internal capsule, is called the
lentiform nucleus. The lateral and external part of this is called the putamen. The medial and
internal part is called the globus pallidus.
 It is responsible primarily for motor control, as well as other roles such as motor learning,
executive functions and behaviors, and emotions.
 LIMBIC SYSTEM
 Another collection of structures important for behaviour represents part of the limbic system, a
name given by the neuroanatomist Paul Maclean to a collection of subcortical structures that
includes the hippocampus, the septal nuclei, the amygdala, the cingulate gyrus, the
mammillary bodies and the hypothalamus.
 The limbic system is probably the oldest part of the brain and contains many of the structures
involved in the most primitive behaviour such as feeding, copulating and aggression.
 Originally, this part of the brain was called the rhinencephalon (‘smell brain’) because it was
thought to be heavily involved in the regulation of the olfactory system.
 Broca had earlier coined the term ‘limbic lobe’ to describe these structures before Maclean
dignified them with the status of a system (there is still argument over whether these structures
actually do constitute a system).
 The limbic system is a useful shorthand description of connecting and interconnecting
subcortical brain areas.
 The hypothalamus, for example, has direct connections with most of the other parts of the
limbic system. This structure in particular appears to be involved in the regulation of eating
and drinking via connections with the amygdala. It also appears to be involved in regulating
reproduction and body temperature.
 The amygdala, found in the temporal lobe, has been thought to play a role in a range of
behaviour, including face recognition, emotion and aggression. In laboratory animals whose
amygdala has been destroyed, normal aggressiveness is abolished.
 The limbic system receives connections from other parts of the brain and receives information
from all the sensory systems via the parahippocampal gyrus.
 It is mostly involved in our behavioural and emotional responses, especially when it comes to
behaviours we need for survival: feeding, reproduction and caring for our young, and fight or
flight responses.
Cingulate Gyrus
 The cingulate gyrus is an arch-shaped convolution situated just above the corpus callosum.
The frontal portion is termed the anterior cingulate gyrus (or cortex). A component of the
limbic system, it is involved in processing emotions and behavior regulation. It also helps to
regulate autonomic motor function.
Thalamus
 The thalamus is the body's information relay station. All information from your body's senses
(except smell) must be processed through your thalamus before being sent to your brain's
cerebral cortex for interpretation. Your thalamus also plays a role in sleep, wakefulness,
consciousness, learning and memory.
Hypothalamus
 The hypothalamus, acts as the body's smart control coordinating center. Its main function is to
keep your body in a stable state called homeostasis. It does its job by directly influencing your
autonomic nervous system or by managing hormones.
Amygdala
 The amygdala in the limbic system plays a key role in how animals assess and respond to
environmental threats and challenges by evaluating the emotional importance of sensory
information and prompting an appropriate response.
 The main job of the amygdala is to regulate emotions, such as fear and aggression.
 The amygdala is also involved in tying emotional meaning to our memories. reward processing,
and decision-making.
 When it is stimulated electrically, animals show aggressive behavior and when it's removed,
they no longer show aggressive behavior.
Hippocampus
 The hippocampus has three primary functions: forming new memories, learning, and
emotions. It is a plastic and vulnerable structure that gets damaged by a variety of stimuli.
 It is susceptible to damage from injury, stress, and disease, including psychiatric and
neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and depression.
GYRI AND SULCI
 The cerebral cortex, or the outer layer of the cerebrum, consists of gyri that are typically
surrounded by one or more sulci.
 Gyri and sulci are the folds and indentations in the brain that give it its wrinkled appearance.
 Folding of the cerebral cortex creates gyri and sulci which separate brain regions and increase
the brain's surface area and cognitive ability.
 Brain gyri and sulci serve two very important functions: They increase the surface area of the
cerebral cortex and they form brain divisions.
 Increasing the surface area of the brain allows more neurons to be packed into the cortex so
that it can process more information. Gyri and sulci form brain divisions by creating
boundaries between the lobes of the brain and dividing the brain into two hemispheres.
Medial Longitudinal Fissure
 A deep furrow located down the center of the brain that separates the left and right brain
hemispheres. The corpus callosum is located within this fissure.
Lateral Sulcus
 This deep grove separates the parietal and temporal lobes.

Central Sulcus
 This sulcus separates the parietal and frontal lobes.

Parieto-occipital Sulcus
 This deep crevice separates the parietal and occipital lobes.

Calcarine Sulcus
 This groove is located in the occipital lobes and divides the visual cortex.

Angular Gyrus
 This fold in the parietal lobe assists in processing auditory and visual stimuli. It is also involved in
language comprehension.
Broca's Gyrus (Broca's Area)
 This area of the brain, located in the left frontal lobe, controls motor functions involved with
speech production.
Cingulate Gyrus
 This arch-shaped fold in the brain is located above the corpus callosum. It is a component of
the limbic system that processes sensory input concerning emotions and regulates aggressive
behavior.
Fusiform Gyrus
 This bulge, located in the temporal and occipital lobes, is thought to play a role in facial and
word recognition.
Hippocampal Gyrus (Parahippocampal Gyrus)
 This fold on the inner surface of the temporal lobe borders the hippocampus and plays an
important role in memory.
Lingual Gyrus
 This coil of the occipital lobe is involved in visual processing. Anteriorly, the lingual gyrus is
continuous with the parahippocampal gyrus and together they form the medial portion of the
fusiform gyrus.