occipital lobe

Now You See It [Show Notes]

 in Brain / Podcasts  tagged blindness / brain / eyes / hallucinations / occipital lobe / seizures by

Occipital Lobe Review

A brain lesion is a place in the brain that doesn’t fire when it should or fires sporadically when it shouldn’t.  Occipital lobe lesions can lead to hallucinations that range from amorphous to extremely detailed.

Field blindness: a lesion causes the occipital lobe to not translate the information from one or more spots of the visual map (your whole view).  Blind spots (round) or visual cuts (lines).

Photosensitivity seizures: seizures triggered by visual overstimulation.  Even though stereotypical in different forms of entertainment, these only accounts for about 10% of seizure triggers.  Seizures triggered by visual stimulation can range from mild to severe.

Certain types of blindness can be rooted in translation problems in the brain, rather than reception problems in the eyeball.

Lesions in the occipital-temporal-parietal junction:

  • Color agnosia: can see the colors but can’t recall the names; simplified colors (all greens appear to be the same green)
  • Movement agnosia: think weeping angels (things only move to a new position when you’re not looking at it) or moving items appear blurry
  • Agraphia: unable to communicate in writin

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Music Credits:  “Radio Martini” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Eyes In The Back of Your Head [Show Notes]

 in Brain / Podcasts  tagged dorsal / eyes / mom skills / occipital lobe / ventral by

Occipital Lobe Basics

The occipital lobe sits in the back of your head, it directly connects to your eyes.

2 Streams of messages that your eyes send to your occipital lobe.

  1. Ventral stream – translates “what”
  2. Dorsal stream – translates “where” and “how”

It sends translated information to the necessary part of the brain to respond or react to what you saw.  This is how hand-eye coordination works (not just for athletes).  And, since so much of the information we receive is visual means that the occipital lobe doesn’t do much else.

**The following is complete speculation based on my experiences as a Mom.**

Mom’s get accused of having eyes in the back of their head – but my guess is that mom’s gain a keener sense of spacial awareness regarding the things that are happening around you.  Also, mom’s hearing become much more attuned to specific sounds (aka knowing their baby’s voice from other baby voices) to the point of knowing the difference between the sound of crayons coloring on paper versus crayons coloring on a wall!

If it hasn’t been obvious, let me just say that no part of the brain acts and reacts all by itself.  Many of the complex activities we complete as humans involve many areas of the brain simultaneously or sequentially.

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Music Credits:  “Radio Martini” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/