The Parietal Lobe by Julie Nelms

The parietal lobe processes all information related to body sensations: touch, temperature, pain, and body movement. It also is involved in spatial awareness. The parietal lobe helps people know where their arms and legs are supposed to be. Facial expressions and body language are processed by the parietal lobe as well as pain and pressure.  The parietal lobe contains the very important, somatosensory cortex. The somatosensory cortex is organized in layers, which means that spatial relationships that exist in the body are represented on the surface of the somatosensory cortex. An example would be the portion of the cortex that deals with sensory information from the hand is next to the part that processes information from the wrist (Olson & Berryhill, 2009). In recent neuropsychological results, individuals with parietal lobe damage show both working memory and long-term memory losses. These losses are not everywhere; they are only clear under certain recoveries (Hower, Wixted, Berryhill & Olson, 2014). The parietal lobe helps bring back memories that you had before the injury. An injury to the parietal lobe is why older people have a difficult time trying to remember information, memories, and dates, due to Alzheimer’s and dementia. Researchers say that losses may be described as “metamemory” or individual memory loss. As you can see many things are processed through the partial lobe that pertains to our senses and memory.

References

Olson, I. R., & Berryhill, M. (2009). Some surprising findings on the involvement of the parietal lobe in human memory. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 91(2), 155-165.

Hower, K. H., Wixted, J., Berryhill, M. E., & Olson, I. R. (2014). Impaired perception of mnemonic oldness, but not mnemonic newness, after parietal lobe damage. Neuropsychologia, 56, 409-417.