Do you enjoy moving your body? What about eating sushi, or choosing what to wear in the morning before school? If so, then you may want to tip your hat to the 1.4 kilograms of porridge sack in your head called the brain. The brain safeguards all these functions for us, keeping us both alive and conscious. The brain does this by dividing up the workload between sections of the brain, which is noticeable through a few tricks of neuroscience. One way to discover how parts of the brain operate is to find patients with parts of their brains missing, and compare those subjects with people that have fully functional brains. For example, people with damaged temporal lobes are deaf, because the auditory cortex which processes neural information received from the ears is in the temporal lobe. Another way of deciphering meaning from parts are scans from machines like EEGs, which place electrical nodes on the scalp of the patient, which detect which parts of the brain fire off neurons, or brain cells. The parts where neurons fire signify which parts are working. An experiment that requires subjects to listen to music found that music stimulates the auditory cortex, cerebrum, cerebellum, and the limbic system. EEG are also currently being tested as lie detector tests, because psychologists theorize that lying and telling the truth stimulate different parts of the brain. So dividing up the brain into parts with specific functions is a way to help both medical, physical, and psychiatric psychologists, and there are a few general ways to separate the brain.
The Left and Right Distinction
The easiest way to separate the brain is by dividing up the brain into two halves; left and right. The lateralization of the brain theory suggests that each side of the brain has tasks that it can do better than the other side of the brain, based on the work of Roger Sperry. Sperry found a way to sever the connection between the hemispheres, and conducted visual and somatic tests and concluded that while our brains work together, and accomplish more when connected, when severed, the hemispheres of the brain tended to outperform each other on certain tasks. The left side of the brain is better at language, logic, critical thinking, etc. The right hemisphere is better at music, colors, facial recognition, and creativity.
For a more precise distinction, consider the four lobes of the brain. The frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital. The frontal lobe is in the front of our brain and is responsible for critical thinking. The parietal lobe is responsible for somatic senses and sense of body in the universe, and is found behind the frontal lobe. The temporal lobe is on the sides of the brain, and is responsible for hearing. The occipital lobe is in the back of the brain and is responsible for sight.