A comprehensive guide to brain maps compiled by a space shuttle guidance system engineer, detailing the brain's advanced circuitry and its comparisons to sophisticated technology.
The article discusses various regions of the brain, highlighting their functional roles in vision, balance, navigation, and computational processing.
1. **Lateral Occipital Complex (LOC)**:
- Role in object recognition.
- High accuracy and speed in recognizing visually presented objects.
2. **Cerebral Cortex**:
- A 6-layer circuit board with processing power surpassing 34,500 Intel i7 quad-core processors.
- Processes live vision to extract shapes and edges.
- Forwards information to regions detecting faces, facial expressions, objects, and body parts.
- Sends data to emotional and reward centers in the orbital and prefrontal cortex.
3. **Vestibule**:
- Similar to a 3-axis gyro and accelerometer used in military guidance and navigation systems.
- Measures linear and rotational acceleration in three dimensions.
- Provides navigational data, controls balance, stabilizes vision, and helps keep eyes on a target.
- Connected to the cerebellum and other regions for inertial navigation and movement tracking.
4. **Retina**:
- Contains over 125 million rod photoreceptors processing motion and visual reflexes.
- More computational power than five iPhone 6 processors.
- Controls muscles directly to avoid objects and preserve life.
- Computes specific visual scene information using various ganglion cell types.
5. **Thalamus (Medial Dorsal Nucleus, Parvocellular Nucleus)**:
- Over 6.3 million different connections.
- Plays a role in visual processing and relaying sensory information to the cerebral cortex.
6. **Inferior Parietal Sulcus (IPS)**:
- Involved in complex hand use, reaching, grasping, and programming intentional hand movements.
- Matches visual and body-centered frames of reference.
7. **Brainstem and Cerebellum**:
- Controls visual reflexes using the vestibulocerebellum.
- Inertial navigation system calculating movement through space.
8. **Visual Cortex**:
- Sequential computations from low-level to high-level properties of visual stimuli.
- Processes shapes, edges, and global object shapes.
9. **Prefrontal Cortex**:
- Involved in decision-making, emotional regulation, and reward processing.
10. **Occipital Lobe**:
- Key in visual processing and recognizing objects.