2.5 The Cerebral Cortex

Question 1

cerebral cortex

Answer 1

the outermost tissue of the cerebrum. The cerebral cortex sits over the top of the core structures

Question 2

The folds of the human cortex serve two important functions

Answer 2

1. They enable more cortical surface to be packed into the skull, if the human cortex were smoothed out to resemble that of a rat, humans would need to have very large heads.
2. Having a highly folded cortex brings neurons that are located at some distance from each other along the cortical sheet into closer three-dimensional relationships. The axons that make the long-distance corticocortical connections run under the cortex through the white matter and do not follow the foldings of the cortical surface in their paths, so they project directly tot he neurons brought closer together because of the folding.

Question 3

Cytoarchitectionics

Answer 3

uses the microanatomy of cells and their organizations to subdivide the cortex. The cortex can now be divided in almost 200 defined areas. We use the Brodmann system to number the system and anatomical names for the cerebral cortex. This often seems very unsystematic, but the numbering has more to do with the order in which Brodmann sampled a region than with any meaningful relations between areas that may or may not exist.

Question 4

somatotopy

Answer 4

Mapping of specific parts of the body to specific areas of the somatosensory cortex

Question 5

paralimbic areas

Answer 5

form a belt around the basal ganglia and medial aspects of the cerebral hemispheres and don’t reside in a single lobe. Processing in these areas provides critical information about the relevance of a stimulus for behavior, rather than just its physical characteristics, which are provided by the sensory areas.