Lateralised Thinking

While different brain areas are responsible for processing different things, like what we see or feel, they don’t operate independently. The complex cognitive processes that go on in our heads rely on brain regions being interconnected. The inferior parietal lobe (IPL, outlined here in black) is where many such networks converge and plays a crucial role in both low-level processes like attention and high-level processes like emotion and language. By asking volunteers to perform a series of low and high-level tasks while in an MRI scanner, a team of scientists were able to show increases in brain activity (in red-orange) in the left and right side of the IPL depending on whether it was being used in an attention task (top) or to process language (bottom). This shows us how each side of the IPL has specialised roles, and that they work together to coordinate our complex mental capacities.

Written by Gaëlle Coullon

Gaëlle Coullon

Writer

Gaëlle is a consultant and trainer in research communication and commercialisation. As an ex-neuroscientist, she is always looking for new ways to combine her love of writing with everything brain related.

• Image from work by Ole Numssen, Danilo Bzdok and Gesa Hartwigse
• Lise Meitner Research Group Cognition and Plasticity, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig, Germany and the Dept of Biomedical Engineering, McConnell Brain Imaging Centre, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Canada
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, March 2021