Hey all, it's Professor McCurdy going over some nervous system anatomy. I'm going to primarily focus on the brain in this video. So here is sort of a lateral view of the brain and the four major areas that you can see include the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the brainstem. You know, the cerebrum, you may remember, is divided up into The lobes, right?
So right here, right, you can see the temporal lobe, right? Temporal lobe separated from the frontal and parietal lobes by the lateral cerebral sulcus or lateral cerebral fissure. So we've got our frontal lobe.
We've got our parietal lobe, and you can see right here the central sulcus dividing parietal from frontal lobes. And then in the back, we have the occipital lobe. Here you can see the cerebellum. Cerebellum separated from the cerebrum by the...
The transverse fissure and finally the two cerebral hemispheres are separated by the longitudinal fissure. We call these shallow grooves by the way we call those sulci. And we call the ridges, we call those gyri.
That would be sulcus and gyrus, singular. So we want to kind of take the brain and section it, this midsagittal section. Maybe we'll look at the half that does come apart.
See some additional structures. So, you know, we've already talked about a little bit about the cerebellum, the brainstem, and the cerebrum, but we can now see parts of the diencephalon. Specifically, you know, the diencephalon is kind of divided into by the third ventricle.
All this hollow space in here is the third ventricle. This sort of egg-shaped mass right here, that is the thalamus. It is a relay center for sensory information.
The two halves of the thalamus are connected by this piece of material that passes right through the ventricle. right through the third ventricle. That is called the interthalamic adhesion, also known as the intermediate mass.
So because of that, the third ventricle is torus-shaped or donut-shaped for the layman. Just below the thalamus and slightly anterior, you have the hypothalamus, right, which is here kind of next to the optic chiasm. You can see the pituitary connected to the hypothalamus.
It's kind of the interface between nervous and endocrine systems. This little pink bit of material here is part of the epithalamus, but most of the epithalamus is here, the pineal gland, which secretes melatonin. Surrounding the thalamus, you can see some other structures that belong to the cerebrum. You can see two white matter structures, the corpus callosum, which contains commiseral tracts connecting the two hemispheres together. Also, this white matter structure here is the fornix.
The fornix contains association tracts that allows information to go from one gyrus. to another gyrus in the same hemisphere. And in this structure here, this is the septum pellucidum.
It divides the two lateral ventricles from one another. Speaking of ventricles, the lateral ventricles drain into the third ventricle, and then cerebrospinal fluid passes through the aqueduct of the midbrain into the fourth ventricle here. The aqueduct of the midbrain, as you can imagine, is found...
in the midbrain, right, that's this portion of the brain stem here. The front part would be the cerebral peduncles, motor tracts coming down from the cerebrum. The back part would be the corpora quadrimma, four bodies, the two superior bodies called the superior colliculi, the two inferior bodies called the inferior colliculi. The fourth ventricle, which we mentioned, separates the cerebellum from the pons, right, the pons is part of the brain stem, just above the medulla.
which then connects to the spinal cord. Here, you can kind of see one of the cerebellar hemispheres divided into an anterior and posterior lobe, and this bit of material that connects the two hemispheres is easier to see when you put the two halves of the cerebellum together. That is called a vermis. The vermis gets this name because it looks like a worm.
When you cut the cerebellum open, you'll notice there's a very distinct white matter structure on the inside. This white matter we call the arbor vitae, Latin for the tree of life. And the gray matter that surrounds the arbor vitae, that would be the folia. Yeah, so hopefully you learned some things about the brain.
I got a separate video for the nerves. I've seen this shortly.