• Question: What does the front, back, right, left and centre parts of the brain do?

    Asked by kibo to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Hi @kibo
      Great question – there are different areas of the brain that do different things. If we start at the front.
      The prefrontal cortex at the front is involved with your personality. Then if we work our way down the side of the brain we have the sensory and motor cortices (the plural of cortex) which store a representation of our bodies, the sensory cortex relates to what we feel on our bodies in different places, and the motor cortex relates to moving the different parts of our bodies.

      Right at the back of the head is the visual cortex, which takes the input from our retinas in our eyes and turns it in to the meaningful way we see the world.

      Then it starts to get a little bit more complicated (!) There are various structures on the inside of our brain involved with memory, language, emotion, and the more unconscious jobs our brain does like keeping us breathing, controlling our body temperature, releasing hormones, that sort of thing.

      Hope this answers your question a bit, hopefully someone else will come and expand on what I’ve written, but let me know if you want to know any more!

Comments