Damage to those regions impairs those abilities, and researchers have identified mechanisms underlying them in those areas. No one disputes that the visual cortex enables sight, that the auditory cortex enables hearing, or that the hippocampus is essential for memory. But when it comes to relating those to the task the brain might be performing - perception, memory, attention, emotion or action - “things get a lot more dodgy,” said David Poeppel, a neuroscientist at New York University. Neuroscientists generally agree about how the physical tissue of the brain is organized: into particular regions, networks, cell types. A host of recent neurological studies further confirm that these mental categories “are poor guides for understanding how brains are structured or how they work.” “Scientists for over 100 years have searched fruitlessly for brain boundaries between thinking, feeling, deciding, remembering, moving and other everyday experiences,” Barrett said. “They parse the brain in terms of what they’re interested in psychologically or mentally or behaviorally,” and then they assign the functions to different networks of neurons “as if they’re Lego blocks, as if there are firm boundaries there.”īut a brain map with neat borders is not just oversimplified - it’s misleading. Not only do researchers often depict the brain and its functions much as mapmakers might draw nations on continents, but they do so “the way old-fashioned mapmakers” did, according to Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University. Above them, the somatosensory cortex behind them, the visual cortex. To the sides: the temporal lobes, crucial for memory and the processing of emotion. Behind it lies the motor cortex, responsible for planning and coordinating movement. Toward the front of the brain, just behind the forehead, is the prefrontal cortex, celebrated as the seat of judgment. Neuroscientists are the cartographers of the brain’s diverse domains and territories - the features and activities that define them, the roads and highways that connect them, and the boundaries that delineate them.
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