Cerebral Cortex

Also called Gray Matter, the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the brain’s cerebrum, make up the brain’s frontal lobe contained within the cerebrum, the largest brain area producing higher-order functions. Gray matter consists of densely packed nerve cells (neurons).Each neuron ends in dendrites, which receive chemical messages from other cells and send new information via electrical signals throughout the brain. The cerebral cortex is gray because that section of the nerve lacks the fatty covering material called myelin. Beneath the gray matter is white matter, made up of bundles of axons, the neuron’s long center section wrapped in myelin. Gray matter’s wrinkled surface contains deep grooves (sulci) and raised areas (gyri). Folds add to the surface area, allowing large amounts of information to be processed by more neurons. Gray matter is half the brain’s total mass, with six layers of 14-16 billion neurons. Left/right hemispheres contain four interconnected, but specialized lobes, each processing different types of information:

• Frontal lobe, with prefrontal cortex/PFC (cognition), motor cortex (body movement), and Broca’s area (speech production)
• Occipital lobe, with visual processing/interpretation, object/facial recognition, depth/distance perception, and visual world mapping
• Parietal lobe, with sensory information, spatial processing, and somatosensory cortex
• Temporal lobe, with language comprehension, speech formation, learning/long-term memory storage, and Wernicke’s area