JITOTM16: Geography of the Brain

It may be responsible for your actions, your ideas, your sensations and even your sense of self... but if you're like most people, you actually have no idea of the basic layout of your own brain, let alone how what the various parts of it do.

Time for a geography lesson. Amygdala, hippocampus, frontal lobe, right and left hemisphere... Jay's got the goods on where they go, and their individual contribution to consciousness as far as we understand it.

Then there's the larger question: how do the bits of the brain relate to one another? There has been lots of discussion -going back over a century- about left vs. right brain, reptile brain vs. neo-cortex, and the like. And that's just in people. Ironically, the discussion gets even more complicated when you bring in the simpler brains of reptiles and birds...

The upshot is still that the brain is a co-op, not a hierarchy: everything is inter-dependent, and nothing works alone. Get your geography lesson in this week's episode of Jay Ingram's Theatre of the Mind, Geography of the Brain.

Behind the Curtain

• Steven Pinker is quite a thinker. Canadian-born, too.
  
  
• Paul McLean originated the "triune brain" concept. That idea is neatly summarized here.
  
  
• Arthur Ladbroke Wigan was one of the first proponents of the idea that the two hemispheres of the brain might be at odds with one another. His ideas helped inspire Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as a whole generation of psychologists. Here's an article that attacks the notion of being 'right-brained' or 'left-brained', tracing the origin of that myth back to Wigan among others.
  
  
• Song of the Week: Reptile Brain by Carol Teal.
  
  As always, we welcome your comments below, or you can email us your thoughts and questions.
  
  Thanks for listening - we're listening too.
  

This audio portion of this episode of Jay Ingram's Theatre of the Mind has now been archived and is no longer available.
You can listen to new episodes as they are published by subscribing to our RSS feed. It's easy and free- just click on the icon below.

Subscribe to Jay Ingram's Theatre of the Mind.