Word: cortex
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...among neurons, the nerve cells that serve as the brain's basic building blocks. When information-the image of a new acquaintance's face, for example-enters the brain, it arrives in the form of electric impulses streaming from the retina, up the optic nerve and into the cerebral cortex, the so-called gray matter that houses the brain's higher functions...
...patients treated by Damasio, including Elliot, the businessman who started behaving irrationally after surgery to remove a brain tumor. Elliot cannot behave rationally, even though his intelligence was not affected by his tumor. The part of the brain destroyed by invading tissue was in a region of the prefrontal cortex (see diagram) essential to decision making. But what Elliot lost, psychological testing revealed, was the ability to experience emotion. While the amygdala does process fear, his doctors argue from the example of Elliot and the other patients that other parts of the brain are also critical to regulating emotion...
...hundreds of patients, and she and her husband have identified regions they think may serve as convergence zones in the brain's left hemisphere. An area in the temporal lobe pulls together information about the names of objects, animals and people, for instance, while another area in the frontal cortex appears to act as the nexus for verbs. Yet a third oversees the task of assembling nouns and verbs into sentences...
CREATING THE SELF The Damasios suspect that convergence zones-thousands of them, spread through the cortex-do more than just process language. They may also coordinate every other sort of information the brain needs-perception, memory, emotion-to be fully functional. And if that's true, the convergence zones, merging disparate pieces of information into a semblance of a whole, could be responsible for that most elusive of brain phenomena: consciousness, the sense of being in the here...
...brain. The chemicals' only target was supposed to be a tiny structure called the hypothalamus, buried deep in the brain, which is the seat for sexual drive and other urges, such as appetite and aggression. Recent research, however, has shown that the entire brain, including the thought-processing cortex, is awash in sex hormones, even before birth. The larger amounts of testosterone produced by males may predispose men's brains toward greater specialization of the two hemispheres...