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Inside the Thinking Brain: How Lobes Shape Perception and Emotion · Professor Peterson’s Psychology Classroom

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  Welcome to this edition of Psychology Explained by Dr.
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  Curtis Peterson, who is trying to bring psychology alive
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  for us all. So now let's talk about specifically
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  all of these areas, and the thing that I do want to emphasize
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  is these areas aren't independent. They will create
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  the coordinated experience that we have.
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  So while I talk about them in isolation,
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  remember that especially in this peripheral area,
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  everything is getting information from everyone
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  and saying, what is the person experiencing?
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  So the temporal lobe is specifically
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  designated to hearing.
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  And there's 2 kind of, uh, special areas
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  that we need to talk about when it comes to the
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  temporal lobe. One is the Wernicke's
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  area and the other is the Broca's area.
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  The Broca's area is coordinated right here, and you will
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  see its relationship with the
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  frontal lobe. And Wernicke's area is
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  right here, dealing with how our experiences
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  combined and how we're hearing things.
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  Okay, so Broca's area— a
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  person is really— when there's damage
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  to this area They're
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  able to hear information correctly.
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  No, no, correct that. Wrong.
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  They're unable to hear information
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  correctly, but they can
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  give a logical yet unrelated
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  response. So they may
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  hear something about seeing a sailboat
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  in the bay. I'm, I'm thinking of San Diego
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  right now. I don't know why. So they can then, uh,
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  do a painting. They could write down a description
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  of it. But when they're asked to say, what did
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  you just hear, they might say, you know,
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  Uncle Joe likes sailboats.
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  But he was never around the ocean. He lived
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  in Minnesota, which is, I know, the place of many lakes,
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  but he never had a sailboat. But he always talked about
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  how much he enjoyed sailing in sailboats.
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  So they hear it, but their response
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  isn't correct.
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  Wernicke's area, they don't
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  hear the response correctly,
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  so they give an incoherent response as well.
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  So they might hear— again, going with that example,
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  they might have heard a riverboat is
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  going down the river instead of a sailboat
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  But they— and then they'll give more of an irrelevant
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  response, meaning,
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  I wonder what we're going to do today.
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  How are you today? Okay,
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  so both of these areas are very important. This one,
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  morning kiss area, is very important to facial
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  recognition because that is one of human beings'
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  very unique characteristics. As I think
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  I've told you earlier in these lectures, we're roughly
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  able to recognize 100 individual faces
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  and their, uh,
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  spelled an auditory name.
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  And when this area is interrupted,
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  this is when we see deficits in people's
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  ability to do face recognition and vocal recognition.
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  Okay, so this area is very—
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  when it comes to humans, tends to create a
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  lot of chaos. Okay, when we go to the occipital
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  lobe, which in this graph it's a little undersized— if
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  I were to say the total area of the occipital
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  lobe, I'm going to draw it in a different color,
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  I'm going to do it in yellow— the occipital lobe
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  is actually much larger,
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  okay, because it's what has to process this
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  really fuzzy, upside-down, backwards,
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  um, blind spot image into
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  what we see and what we experience
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  and what we expect to experience.
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  Okay, so this area tends to
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  be pretty dynamic. It's a lot larger than what this
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  graph suggests. Um, but it is at the
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  back of that brain. I always say this,
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  uh, your mama always said she had eyes in the back
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  of her head. She wasn't lying, uh, because this
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  is what we see with not our eyeballs. Uh,
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  this is what creates the images. So yes, your mama
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  was right, she does have eyes in the back of her brain.
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  But we all do to an extent, right?
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  Um, the next area is the parietal lobe,
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  and this one has actually became a lot
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  more interesting to scientists lately.
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  Is it does— it processes touch, pain,
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  temperature, but it also gives
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  us our 3D time orientation.
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  Where we're physically oriented in time.
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  Interestingly, it also arises— is the rise
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  of empathy, which for human beings tends
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  to start to develop around 24
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  to 36 weeks of development.
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  Okay, and what
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  this requires And I want you to think of this with
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  physical orientation, and we'll talk
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  very much more detail about this when
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  we get into the development section,
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  is what this area requires is for us
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  to see ourselves in time and space and
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  to recognize other individuals in
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  that time and space. It also
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  requires us to see our own humanity and
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  see that other person sitting in the similar time
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  and space and see that they have their own
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  humanity, and therefore
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  we can empathize and feel that for them
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  Even though they're having a different experience than us.
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  And this is the basic elements of this
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  thing we call empathy. And again, when we
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  get into development, we'll see that this develops around 24 to
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  36 months of age, fitting this trajectory.
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  Okay, um, the other thing that I should note is,
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  uh, in our frontal cortex we have
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  this smaller region, let's say a quarter size of this
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  region, that is developed to logic rules
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  and, and whatnot.
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  And what's interesting When, when we see
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  someone who seems savant, so someone who is
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  very math-oriented,
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  they tend to not use this area of their
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  brain. They actually use the spatial
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  reason of their brain. As many mathematic
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  savants put it, they don't see the math
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  logic doing the rules of algebra.
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  They actually see the numbers combining
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  in time and space to create whatever
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  equation they're trying to solve. We see
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  this with savant musicians who don't look at a
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  music sheet and see the logic, timing, and whatnot.
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  They see it coming together spatially.
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  What sits between the frontal lobe and the
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  parietal lobe in this area right here—
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  let me do a different color— these
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  2 areas right here are
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  the somatic sensory and the somatic motor strips
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  where sensory experience, which is processed in
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  the frontal lobe, and motor response
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  setting in the parietal, occipital, and the
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  auditory lobe combined to determine
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  coordinated movement. Okay,
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  and these strips are not associated
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  with the size of the body, but the amount
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  of space it takes to process and motor control
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  them. So believe it or not, your lips
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  take up a large portion of this because
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  of the number of neurons and neural
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  connection it takes us to frown and
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  smile, there's a larger proportion
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  that use up the lips than,
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  say, our larger muscle groups such as the legs,
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  which takes up a smaller region than even our
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  lips. So the association between the
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  cortical strips is associated with how much
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  sensory information and
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  relay information. It requires
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  for us to, for example, make a facial expression
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  versus walk or stand up.
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  Okay, moving into the frontal lobe,
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  this is where we get the motor region, where we make
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  decisions on, on what motor actions
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  we're going to take. And then when we look at the prefrontal
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  cortex and between the midfrontal cortex
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  is when we're dealing with complex social
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  personality and identity
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  type of things. This area mainly
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  is devoted to our complex social
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  and emotional world and how we respond to
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  it. Only a small portion is
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  dedicated to math, logic,
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  building massive buildings, those kinds of things.
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  Thank you for joining us for this Psychology Explained.
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  I hope you'll join us in later episodes where we can— we'll continue
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  to investigate the human mind and psychology.