Brain Plays a Vital Role in the

¶ … brain plays a vital role in the area of cognitive functions. Different sections of the brain are responsible for a number of different cognitive capabilities including memory, prediction, emotional response, sensory perception, and numerous others. Despite the partitioning of the brain and its means of providing cognitive capabilities, the different areas of this organ work in concert to produce some pivotal cognitive processes including decision-making and deriving action (output) based on sensory information (which is akin to input).

Many of these vital processes for cognitive functions occur in the part of the brain refereed to as the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex has several different components each of which largely contributes to the way in which humans make decisions. Additionally, parts of the cerebral cortex are also responsible for facets of one's personality and how one manifests the emotion one feels. The basic paradigm that accounts for the way that people develop decision-making is that they perceive emotions from a variety of sensory perceptions.

These perceptions are utilized by a part of the cerebral cortex to make predictions in response to emotions to dictate the outcome of possible actions (Wager and Thagard, 2004). There is a direct correlation between these predictions and memory, in which individuals consider the previous results of actions and predictions and use them to determine future activity. The vast majority of the aforementioned cognitive functions take place in the prefrontal lobe of the cerebral cortex.

Other lobes include the parietal lobe (which accounts for augmenting sensory input with visual processes), the occipital lobe (which greatly pertains to visual perception), and the temporal lobe, which has a left and a right side responsible for syntax and word selection and speech, respectively. The parts of the frontal lobe that interact with one another to influence cognition include the amygdale and the hippocampus, which are associated with parsing through emotional information and memory storage and retrieval, respectively.

As previously mentioned however, these regions are not mutually exclusive with the functions that they perform (MacMillan, 1999) as the hippocampus and the rhinal cortex are also associated with memory. The case study of Phineas Gage indicates how vital the interaction between emotions, memories, and decision-making can be. Gage was a railroad worker who suffered a devastating accident when he was impaled through his cheek and the prefrontal cortex of his brain.

Doing so caused a dysfunction of his cortex in the sort of way that was not fully discovered until years later, since Gage miraculously survived the accident and lived for a lengthy period of time afterwards. However, Gage's personality suffered severely after the accident, as did his proficiency at his place of employment.

Prior to his accident Gage was renowned for his temperament and efficiency at work -- subsequently, he was prone to fits and emotional outbursts that not only affected his judgment but reduced the efficacy of his performance (Kihlstrom, 2010, p. 765). An examination of the specific nature of his injury and its relationship to the cognitive process reveals why. In a normal brain, the ventromedial frontal cortex contains somatic markers for neurons (Kean, 2014) that take emotional input from sensory perceptions and relates them to positive or negative outcomes based on predictions.

Such predictions are greatly formed based on experience and the memories created in its wake, which are stored in both the amygdala and the ventromedial frontal cortex. The predictive 'calculations' that require input from both the amygdala and the ventromedial frontal cortex are transmitted to the part of the cortex in which motor skills are accessed, and do so due to the hippocampus' capacity to send those calculations to the nucleus accumbens, which determines the correct action.

Gage, however, had incurred irreparable damage to his frontal lobe and to the areas that involved the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in particular. Thus, he was not able to process emotions due to sensory input.