Hello again. We are going to start talking about the parts of the brain out here in the outer most evolutionary recent part of our brains. And probably the one that's the most interesting for us is going to be the frontal lobe. And part of the reason is that with the frontal lobe, with the frontal lobe, This is associated with a lot of our planning ability and our impulse control. This is kind of a big takeaway.
When you talk about severe forms of impulse control disorders, you may talk about obsessive compulsive disorder, for instance. They can't stop thinking about things. People who have eating disorders, they can't stop themselves when they get stressed out for something and they go to some kind of coping mechanism that either they eat a lot or they restrict their eating.
People with ADHD, there's some hypothesis that it's related to impulse control. This is something, this particular behavioral thing we call impulse control, takes about 25 years to reach maturity. So for those of you who are under 25 years of age, it's actually pretty common for people to struggle with controlling their impulses. Certainly, if you're 22, as a random number, you're, you know, you're much more able to control your impulses than, say, somebody who's two.
I have a toddler, and, you know, he's in the process of learning how to control those, you know, impulses. He's getting better at it, and he's making strides. Every week, you see something new.
But we know, and here's kind of the epistemological question I want to pose to you, we know that impulse control behavior is highly regulated by the frontal lobe. Well, you might be wondering, well, how do we know that? And if you are, that's a good place to be because it speaks to this attitude about questioning what we know. So I want to share with you a different image. And again, not this one, this one.
I haven't actually picked one out. Let's pick a big one out. We'll do this one. So this particular image is of a person. It's a historical case.
of a guy by the name of Phineas Gage. A lot of our original knowledge about how our brains work came from case studies. And a lot of times they're very crazy, bizarre kinds of cases. And this is absolutely not an exception.
Phineas Gage, it's a pretty macabre, ugly picture here, right? You're looking at a skull with a bar shoved up between up his cheek, behind his left eye and out of his head. He was a railroad worker.
And back in the, I think it was like the 18, I want to say around the 1850s, this would have been when Abraham Lincoln about was president. We were doing massive expansions for trains across the country. And so he was a foreman on a rail line and they were blowing up rocks and boulders to make room for train tracks.
Now, what happened for this guy, he was helping the system. blowing up these rocks and and and what what that means is and i'm gonna stop the share here for a second what that means is is that they um they would drill a hole into a rock okay and and what they would do is they would drill this hole um and then put explosives down into that hole and then they would take a tapping iron that that's the big iron bar that guy's holding and they would compress the explosive the thing is If you're going to do that, you have to put a protective fabric over top of the explosives, because what happens if you take iron and strike it against a rock? It'll make sparks.
So you're supposed to put in the explosive first, put in the explosive, and then you put this fabric over top of it, and then you take the tapping iron and compress it. Well, Phineas Gage was in a rush, and he grabbed this tapping iron and started compressing the explosive before they put this protective fabric. It's called a wad. Um, and if you're right-handed, I'll try to demonstrate this. The, the bar is actually kind of a sharp point at it, I think to account for different sizes of people's hands and he pushed it down.
It created a spark and created basically a missile that went right up into his cheek. It exited his head. Um, and as a consequence in that story, um, Let's see if I can get back to the share.
It didn't kill him right away. I think he died of his injuries a few years later. maybe of an infection actually, but it blew out his frontal lobe. And so when I go back to this page, basically it completely like took out the frontal part of his frontal lobe.
And as a consequence, as a consequence, this particular story ended up leaving Phineas Gage with the inability to control his impulses. He had no ability to do that. He lost his job. He was much more rude and impatient.
And He was not just traumatized, but he was given a massive deficit in functioning. So this is the kind of thing that we look to historically to see how our brains work. To just kind of round out some other very general things about these lobes, the parietal lobe is related to sort of a synthesis.
It takes information from all the other lobes and kind of paints a picture for us. For instance, the ability to recognize faces is something that takes place on the right side of our brain in the parietal lobe. The occipital lobe, on the other hand, is where we do our primary visual processing. Believe it or not, our eyes are way up here, just kind of tucked up underneath the frontal lobe.
But the actual personal awareness that I see something is being processed back here in the occipital lobe. The temporal lobe has a lot to do with a little bit with language, but also with hearing there's, there's a lot that I'm being, I'm skipping over because there's so many things we can do and it's not just the frontal lobe. I have a question. Yeah. The front lobe.
Yeah. Is that the part that gives you like to rest syndrome and narcolepsy and schizophrenia and stuff like that? Well, no, those disorders are. really complicated. And so this is a warning, I guess, in general about all of our knowledge is that when you look at a complex thing like schizophrenia, Tourette's, they're incredibly complicated in that we won't have one little thing that explains it.
Even ADHD is not explained by the frontal lobe being over or under active. It's massively more complicated. Yeah.
It's a good question though. Let me just say this, what we're going to do next is we're going to go back to this slide that I hinted at a video ago, sort of in the deeper area of the brain, because what I want to focus on next is what's called the limbic system. And the limbic system is located kind of in this kind of area where the arrows are pointing at. So I'll stop the video now and I'll see you soon.