Cerebral Cortex

Frontal Lobe

The frontal lobe is the largest of the cerebral cortex and contains neurons that assist with a wide array of functions:

• Executive Functions: planning and organizing, memory and concentration, judgement and decision making
• Motor Control: voluntary movements of skeletal muscles
• Language: speech generation, comprehension of text
• Emotional Regulation: personality, deciphering emotions from others, controling impulses

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24501-frontal-lobe

Parietal Lobe

The parietal lobe is posterior to the frontal lobe, and superior to the temporal lobe. Its functions include:

• Sensory Integration: processes pain, touch, temperature, and pressure sensations
• Spatial Awareness: where body parts are in relation to each other, spatial orientation
• Motor Functions: movement and positions of body and object manipulation
• Langauage: processing language and abstract thought
• Math: Calculations

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24628-parietal-lobe

Temporal Lobe

The temporal lobe is posterior and inferior to the frontal and parietal lobes. Its functions include:

• Auditory Processing: sound interpretation
• Olfactory Processing: awareness of smell and smell differentiation
• Memory: storing long-term memories
• Language: comprehension of spoken words
• Emotion: processing emotions and using them to influence behavior
• Visual Recognition: recognizing faces and objects

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/16799-temporal-lobe

Occipital Lobe

The occipital lobe is the most posterior lobe of the cerebral cortex. Its functions include:

• Visual Processing: interprets visual impulses
• Depth/ Distance Perception: determining positions of objects in space and distance between them
• Object Recognition: identification and categorization of objects

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24498-occipital-lobe

Insula Lobe

The insula lobe is located deep to the other lobes of the cerebral cortex. It has a complex range of functions:

• Sensory Integration: internal and external sensory information processing
• Body Awareness: conscious sense of homeostatic needs such as hunger, thirst, pain, or fatigue
• Decision Making: integration of emotion and sensory information, risk and reward processing
• Motor Control: hand-eye coordination and swallowing
• Language: complex sentence formation

https://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/scsnl/documents/insular_cortex_2024_menon.pdf