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Human Brain Functional Map
Major brain regions and the cognitive functions they support, organized by lobe and system.
A simplified functional map of the human brain. Real neural function is distributed and overlapping - these are dominant associations, not exclusive ones.
Frontal lobe
Prefrontal cortex
Executive function, planning, working memory, inhibition.
Motor cortex
Voluntary movement; primary target of BCI decoding.
Broca's area
Speech production and grammatical processing.
Parietal lobe
Somatosensory cortex
Touch, proprioception, body schema.
Intraparietal sulcus
Number, attention, visuospatial reasoning.
Temporal lobe
Hippocampus
Episodic memory, spatial navigation, relational binding.
Amygdala
Salience, emotional learning, threat detection.
Wernicke's area
Language comprehension.
Occipital lobe
Primary visual cortex (V1)
Edge, orientation, and motion processing.
Subcortical structures
Thalamus
Sensory relay and cortical gating.
Basal ganglia
Action selection, habit learning, reward modulation.
Cerebellum
Motor coordination, timing, predictive modeling.
Key takeaways
- Cognition is implemented by distributed networks, not isolated regions.
- Subcortical structures are essential - cortex alone does not produce behavior.
- Functional maps are probabilistic and individually variable.
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