The brain is the most crucial and complex organ in our body. After all, it makes us who we are! Our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and actions, all start here. And like any organ, it can be trained, adapted, damaged, and healed. Fun fact, did you know the brain is 60% fat? Or that it weighs, on average, just under 3 pounds? Your brain truly is amazing! Inside you right now are nearly the same amount of brain cells as there are stars in our galaxy! It is certainly mind-boggling – pun intended – to think that so much is packed into something surprisingly small.
The Lobes and Their Functions
- Frontal Lobe – The largest of the lobes and responsible for a whole lot that makes you, you. It manages things like your personality and emotions, intuition, speech and expressive language. The Frontal lobe is also where your concentration, problem-solving, judgement, planning, and actions come from. When you pick up a glass of water, this is what is planning the motor movements that will go down the spinal cord to the muscles and skeletal movement in your arm and fingers.
- Parietal Lobe – Your sense of touch, taste, and smell all are registered and recognised in the Parietal lobe. Even sharing certain functions with the Occipital, the Parietal helps with visual perception and differentiation of colours, shapes, and sizes. This lobe also influences your spatial awareness.
- Occipital Lobe – The Occipital is the machine behind the photographic lens. Not only does the lobe see the world, processing the colour and depth of images, but it also recognises information and objects meaningful to you like faces.
- Temporal Lobe – The Occipital sees the writing, along with the Parietal which helps read the writing, but the Temporal helps understand the language! A good example of how the lobes’ functions overlap and work together. Your memory, language, organisation, sequencing, and learning all function here.
- Cerebellum – If the Frontal lobe signals for the action, the Cerebellum, makes it work. Controlling your body motors, sense of balance, and coordination. It sounds simple, but this is very important for body movement and function!
- Brain Stem – Finally the lobes are attached to the brain stem. The brain stem is responsible for many vital functions of life, such as breathing, consciousness, blood pressure, heart rate, and sleep.
The Brain is Complex
Our brain is like a town filled with buildings that share or have unique functions, with 100 million brain cells working together. When you break things down and look at all the things the brain is responsible for, it’s easier to see just how devastating a brain injury can be. But learning more about your brain means learning about yourself. Functions you may struggle with you can pinpoint to places in the brain, whether it’s memory loss in the Temporal lobe or spatial perception in the Parietal.
Possible difficulties following brain injury can include:
· Cognitive difficulties
· Emotional and behavioural challenges
· Physical challenges
· Sensory issues
· Speech difficulties
But the brain is amazing, as we already said! It has the ability, to some degree, to heal over time. Maybe not to the same extent as it once was, but in time, it can recover. You can learn new techniques to cope with the symptoms of brain injury, and day-to-day life can become more manageable!
Conscious and Subconscious
Our body has hundreds and thousands of functions all happening without us knowing. To understand our brain a little more, we need to know the difference between conscious and subconscious thoughts. Your breathing right now is subconscious, you aren’t manually controlling it – until we mentioned it. Clicking through to this article, however, is more conscious. You manually chose to come and read this! Your thoughts and opinions right now are surface-level conscious thoughts.
“I took a bang on the right side and suffered a contrecoup injury on the left side, and these damaged my right temporal lobe especially. So, this is maybe why I suffer with memory issues, and also understanding language and hearing instructions. So, somebody can tell me some piece of information very, very quickly, and it goes very, very quickly. Because it doesn’t either go into the brain through understanding or stick into the short memory.”
~ Mark
How does Brain Injury Affect Your Memory?
There are three different levels of memory: immediate, short-term and long-term. Immediate memories, also known as sensory memories, are only held for a matter of seconds. It’s all about subconsciously processing what your senses are experiencing right now. It could be something you can see, hear, feel, taste or smell.
If you make a conscious effort to focus on a memory, it can be stored in the short-term. This is information that you are currently paying attention to and is held for about 20-30 seconds. These are things like remembering a conversation with a friend or listening to some information on the radio.
The final level is your long-term memories, and to move information from the short-term to the long-term memory, you need a strategy. Many brain injury survivors struggle with remembering information, so incorporating simple memory tools into your routine can make day-to-day functioning a lot easier.
Simple Tools to Help with Memory Difficulties
- Lists – probably one of the most obvious and simple tools to help us to remember things. I’m constantly writing to-do lists for business tasks as well as day-to-day stuff.
- Notes and signs – Post-it notes were a great invention in the 1970s and a brilliant memory tool. Stick them all over the house reminding you to pick up keys, medication, mobile phone and whatever else is essential to your day. Of course, you can use a more permanent sign if you wish.
- Mobile phones – Nowadays, our phones seem to be permanently attached to our bodies… so why not use them to help us? You can make to-do lists, set alarms, record voice notes and even take photos – These tools are excellent for activating the memory.
One thing I’m always aware of is that a phone can have too many features. I sometimes find that this can lead to overstimulation, so I’d suggest choosing a couple of tools that work best for you and sticking with those.
- Alarms – We purposely left this one out of the mobile phone list but it’s on there too. Setting alarm notifications are ideal to prompt you to do a task or to tell you when your meal is cooked. Personally, the mobile phone calendar has really helped me to remember many tasks that may have slipped my mind.
- Tidiness and organisation – We really don’t like clutter, and we’ve found that being tidy and organised, helps to clear the mind. Try labelling drawers, cupboards and jars to help you store and find things efficiently. Ensuring that certain objects are kept in a specific space will minimise the time and energy you have to spend looking for the things you need.