Some random bits I learned from the DK Brain Training book

• The occipital lobe handles much of your visual sensing.
• The temporal lobes behind each ear are involved in the organization of speech, sound, memory and emotional response.
• The parietal lobes at the top of the brain handles sensations like temperature, pain, pressure. They also assist in spatial awareness.
• Behind the forehead are the frontal lobes which is the home of the personality. That's where we solve problems, retrieve memories and control impulses. It is not surprising then that that area is more developed in humans than in any other animal.
• The limbic system is made up of the amygdala, hypothalamus, thalamu and hippocampus. 
• The amygdala activates emotional responses from fear to euphoria.
• The hypothalamus is the control region for communication between brain and body, such as the rising of blood pressure.
• The thalamus receives auditory and visual information and relays them to the cerebral cortex, where information is processed.
• The cerebellum, at the back of the brain, controls movement and balance and was the first part of the brain to evolve. It controls involuntary muscle actions.
• The hippocampus is responsible for spatial reasoning. Reading maps can increase its size-its been shown to be larger in cab drivers.

Even more about synesthesia

I heard the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran on The Leonard Lopate Show talking about his new book, The Tell-Tale Brain. Which sounds like a must read. The subject of synesthesia came up, as did mirror neurons and phantom limbs and some other stuff.

Color blindness is a condition affecting the retina. They have done research on people who are color blind and have synesthesia and find they can provoke images of colors they have never seen by showing them numbers.

As I had written before, synesthesia originates because of unusual wiring in the fusiform gyrus region of the temporal lobe. The most common form is grapheme-color synesthesia, the kind where numbers and letters get associated with colors. The fusiform gyrus is also associated with determining shapes so this makes sense. A friend of mine has this form of synesthesia, although he says he didn't realize until he got married that this wasn't the way everyone saw numbers.

Although only about 1 in 50 people exhibit this trait, about 1 in 8 artists and novelists have it. It brings up interesting ideas about how art evolved so early in our species (when leisure time wasn't plentiful.)

They also still don't know how exactly a clump of neurons became the human brain and all that that entails. Ramachandran said it's a mystery (the kind that makes scientists giddy.) He also talked about Chomsky's theories of the brain, which I only know in relation to language. That is, Chomsky believes the brain is born innately wired for language (the way pidgin evolves into creole is cited as one proof of this.) I guess I need to read to book to see what he was talking about but he did say that perhaps when a billion neurons are compressed into a small space, unpredictable things-like making a brain-will happen. That's a cool idea.