• Question: what is your favorite part of the brain?

    Asked by anon-188136 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 2 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 2 Nov 2018:

      I absolutely love this question!
      I think my favourite part would have to be the prefrontal cortex – the entire front of our brain!!!
      This part of our brain is responsible for so much that makes us who we are: personality, decision making, free will and planning.
      It’s most popular for being responsible for executive functioning which is stuff like telling the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, same and different, and how to complete a task or goal, predicting stuff from a situation and guessing future consequences and controlling how we behave in social situations.

    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 2 Nov 2018:

      Probably the hippocampus. It is tiny, in the middle of your head and kind of shaped like a little seahorse (it’s name comes from the greek words hippos, meaning “horse,” and kampos, meaning “sea monster”). I like this area for lots of reasons, but it mostly because it plays an important role in converting short term memories into long term memories, especially during sleep, which is what I look at in my research.

    • Photo: Warren Mansell

      Warren Mansell answered on 2 Nov 2018:

      I could say that the whole brain is my favourite part because it only works as a whole. Research studies often focus on one region to describe its function, but increasingly researchers are finding out that distributed networks of the brain are involved in most tasks. In fact, we even use our body and our environment for some of our most, and complex important activities.

      That said, I like the brain stem because it is an incredibly sophisticated life support machine that, unlike most of the rest of the brain, works without requiring any memory!

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      Hi,

      Haha, what a great question this is ! I am very much interested in how well the way we pay attention to things enables us to 1) simply see, but also to 2) learn information in real environments. This function(s) – of focusing, and refocusing, and shifting attention to a location in space where important information seemed to have been presented is supported by a network involving frontal cortex and parietal cortex. So I always bear those two (large) areas in my mind! 🙂

Comments