Page 22 - Handbook of Electronic Assistive Technology

Chapter 1 • Basic Neurosciences With Relevance to Electronic Assistive Technology 9

Frontal lobe function:

• Personality.
• Behaviour.
• Attention.
• Cognitive tasks and planning.
• Precentral gyrus (back of the frontal lobe) – primary motor cortex.

Parietal lobe function:
• Sensation:
• Sense of space – proprioception.
• Postcentral gyrus – touch, pain and temperature.
• Language.

Temporal lobe function:
• Processing of sensation into memories.
• Language creation and comprehension – Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas.

Occipital lobe function:
• Visual cortex – Brodmann area 17.

Limbic system – frontoparietal, temporal:
• Emotion.

Insular cortex – deep in the fold between temporal, frontal and parietal lobes:
• Consciousness.
• Emotion.
• Perception.
• Cognition.

Specific areas of the cortex are involved in specific functions: speech and hearing areas
and visual, sensory and motor cortex. When you achieve higher functioning, such as lan-
guage, there is a greater degree of complexity and dominance of one hemisphere over the
other.
Sensory input from one side of the body and from half our visual field are projected to
the other side of the brain’s cortex.
Handedness, understanding, speech and appreciation of the world around us are
almost universally dealt with in one half of the brain.
Damage to specific areas leads to an inability to process information coming in, and
a failure to understand writing, speech or sometimes even sensory input (aphasia).
This term is generally used, however, to describe a problem specifically with commu-
nication. As such, speech is generally used as a measure of which half of the brain is
dominant.