Stephen Pollina
PSY – 101
Paper 1
The Brain’s Structures and Regions
The brain is responsible for everything you do in your life, from deciding when you are hungry, to moving your limbs, to learning and remembering the various facts and events you encounter every day. The brain is an extremely powerful machine that has very specialized areas. With all of its sections and subsections, the brain is the most advanced organ in the known universe.
The cerebral cortex is responsible for controlling the higher functions of your brain, such as learning, thinking, and consciousness. When you have to learn new information, you are using your cerebral cortex. When you have to consider and think about those concepts or principles that you have learned, you are using your cerebral cortex. Even just thinking about applying new ideas to the way you think of yourself involves your consciousness, yet another function controlled by the cerebral cortex. However, this doesn’t all happen on its own. The cerebral cortex, like all regions of the brain, interacts with and relies on others. If the cerebral cortex is responsible for learning and applying knowledge, the hippocampus is responsible for creating and storing that knowledge and all of the experiences that we encounter throughout our lives as memories. Think back to your first day of school, the first book you ever read, or even just the name of the food you had for breakfast this morning and your brain is drawing those memories from your hippocampus. If you didn’t have a hippocampus or even if it just wasn’t functioning, you would not be able to store or retrieve memories. This raises an important question though, which parts of the brain are responsible for creating and interpreting the various senses that you experience every day? Inside the cerebral cortex are the occipital and temporal lobes which are both responsible for processing and responding to visual stimuli, and processing language, hearing, and memory respectively. The cerebral cortex also contains the frontal lobes which control your voluntary muscles, as well as your fundamental personality and your information processing center for conscious thinking. But what other parts of the brain influence your conscious thought processes? Those would be the regions that mainly affect subconscious processes. The hypothalamus is responsible for controlling your levels of hunger, thirst, and sex drive, as well as playing a major role in controlling emotion and stress levels. The medulla controls your subconscious breathing as well as your reflexes to events that happen around you. The cerebellum is responsible for motor coordination and the amygdala is responsible for subconsciously