Region Atlas

The brain, room by room.

Twenty regions, written carefully. Each page holds the anatomy, the function as the literature currently tells it, the cell types underneath, the connections that route the signal, the clinical context, the history of who first noticed, and the thread of meaning the depth-psychological reading wants nearby.

All 20 of 20 region pages have complete prose.

Frontoparietal Control

Cognitive control; flexible task representation.

Inferior frontal gyrus, BA 44/45 (left)

Broca's region (L)

Involved in syntactic processing and articulation. Damage here disrupts speech production while comprehension can remain partly intact.

Open Inferior frontal gyrus (right)

IFG (R)

Involved in prosody, semantic integration of figurative speech, and inhibitory control of language.

Open Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex

dmPFC

Implicated in mentalizing — modeling the mental states of others — and in self-reflection.

Open

Auditory

Primary hearing through to musical and prosodic processing.

Posterior superior temporal gyrus (left)

Posterior STG (L)

Implicated in phonological and lexical processing. Sometimes referred to (contestedly) as 'Wernicke's area.'

Open Posterior superior temporal gyrus (right)

Posterior STG (R)

Implicated in tonal and prosodic processing, including melody perception and the affective side of speech.

Open Heschl's gyrus / primary auditory cortex (left)

Heschl's Gyrus (L)

Primary auditory cortex: receives the first cortical signal from the ear. Tonotopically organized.

Open Heschl's gyrus / primary auditory cortex (right)

Heschl's Gyrus (R)

Primary auditory cortex (right). More fine-grained spectral processing than its left counterpart.

Open

Default Mode

Self-referential thought; mind-wandering; rest.

Middle temporal gyrus (left)

Middle Temporal (L)

Involved in lexical semantics and word retrieval. Activity here scales with sentence meaning, not just sound.

Open Middle temporal gyrus (right)

Middle Temporal (R)

Implicated in figurative meaning, narrative comprehension, and biological-motion perception.

Open Anterior temporal lobe (left)

Anterior Temporal (L)

A semantic hub: involved in integrating multimodal conceptual knowledge into meaning.

Open Anterior temporal lobe (right)

Anterior Temporal (R)

Implicated in person-knowledge, social semantics, and the meanings carried by faces.

Open Angular gyrus (left)

Angular Gyrus (L)

A heteromodal hub: involved in semantic integration, metaphor, and the default-mode network.

Open Angular gyrus (right)

Angular Gyrus (R)

Implicated in numeracy, spatial cognition, and the default-mode network's right component.

Open Ventromedial prefrontal cortex

vmPFC

Involved in valuation, self-referential thought, and the default-mode network. Not a 'self center' — a node.

Open Posterior cingulate cortex

PCC

A core node of the default-mode network. Active in memory, mind-wandering, and self-related thought.

Open Precuneus

Precuneus

Implicated in autobiographical memory, mental imagery, and visual-spatial integration.

Open

Limbic

Affect, memory, motivational valuation.

Amygdala (left)

Amygdala (L)

Involved in salience and emotional learning — including positive emotions. Not a 'fear center.'

Open Amygdala (right)

Amygdala (R)

Involved in salience and emotional learning. Activates during reward as well as threat.

Open Hippocampus (left)

Hippocampus (L)

Involved in episodic memory encoding and the construction of spatial cognitive maps.

Open Hippocampus (right)

Hippocampus (R)

Involved in spatial memory and the imagining of possible futures, as well as the recall of past scenes.

Open