Take a deep breath and look at everything around you right now, without haste, the world is full of beauties, small nuances that make up our passionate reality, if most of us are able to perceive every visual stimulus that surrounds us, it is mainly due to the occipital lobe, an area of our brain located in the neck.
It is amazing how this region, the smallest among the other brain lobes, is the one that marks our daily life the most, its main goal may seem simple at first: to receive information through our eyes and then process it and take it to the front. Lobe to issue an answer.
- Now.
- If we look closely at the look we have given around us.
- We will realize that this task is not as easy as it seems.
- When our brain looks at each stimulus.
- It performs a lot of processes.
- Analyzes distances based on our position.
- Movements and sizes.
- And also processes light (color).
This is something we unknowingly do, it implies a high neurological sophistication, absolute precision, where the occipital lobe allows us to move efficiently in our daily lives, it is small, but highly specialized and effective. Let’s look at more information about this.
“The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We’ve learned a lot about other human organs. We know how it pumps the heart and how it does what the kidney does. To some extent, we have already been able to read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each of them has about 10,000 connections ?. -Francis Collins-
The occipital lobe is located in the posterior area of the cerebral cortex, occupies about 12% of neocortex and is linked, in turn, to the primary and associative visual cortex, and to the calcarine groove, a convolution that is located just inside. All these connections constitute a neural center of human vision and visual perception.
We can also say that, as in all our brain lobes, it has a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere, however, each is isolated from the other by the separation of the cerebral fissure, relying, in turn, on the cerebellum and the hard one. -mother.
Our understanding of the world is based almost exclusively on the sense of vision Does the occipital lobe process visual stimuli at all times, analyzing distances, shapes, colors, movements?
Everything that passes through the retina passes through this center of analysis and processing, which then sends the information to the cerebral cortex, however, this transfer of information must first go through a number of areas, are as follows.
Falls, traffic accidents, strokes, infections; There are many conditions that can cause injury or modification of the occipital lobe. These injuries may be permanent, a study conducted at Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan revealed.
Let’s see what the most common effects are
Blind vision or cortical blindness occurs as a result of bilateral damage to the primary visual cortex, patients with this problem see diffuse forms, vague stimuli with which they cannot recognize the shape, color, situation, even whether they move or not.
An injury in this area of our brain can also produce something as impressive as it is shocking: visual hallucinations Can the person see what surrounds him in a distorted way, with strange colors, with deformed sizes, too large or too small?
The Department of Neurology at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven explained through one study the relationship between occipital lobe and epilepsy.
These are cases in which the patient, after exposure to an intense flash of light, may suffer an epileptic seizure by overstimular neurons in this area, so this is another type of epilepsy, related to this particular part of our brain.
In conclusion, it can be said that the occipital lobe may be related to other processes that go beyond vision. Neurologists believe that it is also involved in the memory process, but to this day we still do not have conclusive studies.
In the coming years, and as we discover each of the mysteries of the human brain, we will have more answers and better knowledge.