What is the occipital part of the brain?
The occipital lobe is the visual processing area of the brain. It is associated with visuospatial processing, distance and depth perception, color determination, object and face recognition, and memory formation.
What are 3 functions of the occipital lobe?
The occipital lobe participates in vision processing. It processes and interprets everything we see. The occipital lobe is also responsible for analyzing contents, such as shapes, colors, and movement, and also for interpreting and drawing conclusions about the images we see.
What would happen if the occipital lobe was damaged?
Injury to the occipital lobes may lead to vision impairments such as blindness or blind spots; visual distortions and visual inattention. The occipital lobes are also associated with various behaviors and functions that include: visual recognition; visual attention; and spatial analysis.
What are the symptoms of a damaged occipital lobe?
OCCIPITAL LOBES: most posterior, at the back of the head
- Defects in vision (Visual Field Cuts).
- Difficulty with locating objects in environment.
- Difficulty with identifying colors (Color Agnosia).
- Production of hallucinations.
- Visual illusions – inaccurately seeing objects.
- Word blindness – inability to recognize words.
What is occipital?
Emerging from between bones of the spine in the upper neck, the two greater occipital nerves make their way through muscles at the back of the head and into the scalp. They sometimes reach nearly as far forward as the forehead, but do not cover the face or the area near the ears; other nerves supply these regions.
What causes damage to the occipital lobe?
As is the case with other traumatic brain injuries, damage to the occipital lobe most often occurs as a result of vehicle crashes, falls, and firearms. Taking steps to prevent these injuries could save you or a loved one a lifetime of the added stress and depression that accompanies traumatic brain injuries.
How do you keep your occipital lobe healthy?
Treatment for Occipital Lobe Damage
- Eye exercises. These exercises engage your brain’s neuroplasticity and can help improve vision.
- Scanning therapy. This therapy helps patients with visual field loss learn to compensate by scanning their environment more efficiently.
- Prismatic adaptation.
Can you live without your occipital lobe?
The occipital lobe is one of the less-known brain structures that all humans carry about within their crania. Survival after severe damage to the occipital lobe is possible because it is involved in but one process, a very important one: vision. The occipital lobe houses the primary visual cortex of the brain.
Can you live without occipital lobe?
Can damage to the occipital lobe cause blindness?
Damage to the occipital lobe results in complete or partial blindness or visual agnosia depending on the location and severity of the damage. Vision begins with the spatial, temporal, and chromatic components of light falling on the photoreceptors of the retina and ends in the perception of the world around us.
What does an occipital headache feel like?
Occipital Neuralgia is a condition in which the occipital nerves, the nerves that run through the scalp, are injured or inflamed. This causes headaches that feel like severe piercing, throbbing or shock-like pain in the upper neck, back of the head or behind the ears.
The occipital lobe is one of the four major lobes of the cerebral cortex in the brain of mammals. The occipital lobe is the visual processing center of the mammalian brain containing most of the anatomical region of the visual cortex.
What are the most common causes of occipital lobe injury?
Four common types of injury often cause damage to the occipital lobe. These include automobile crashes, blunt force trauma, strokes and gunshots. One of the more common reasons for injury to the occipital lobe is being in an automobile crash. Any time there is significant impact to the back of the head, there is a risk for damage.
How does the occipital lobe in the brain work?
Each lobe of the brain has a specific function that works together to regulate the human body. The occipital lobe is responsible for vision . Essentially, visual information comes in through the eyes and into the occipital lobe via two streams: the ventral stream and the dorsal stream.
What are the symptoms of occipital head injury?
The occipital lobe is not particularly vulnerable to injury due to its location at the back of the brain. Although, when damage does occur it presents a variety of symptoms ranging from hallucinations, illusions, the loss of vision, and the inability to recognize faces and objects.
