The temporal lobe sits on the side of the brain, beneath the lateral sulcus (Sylvian Fissure). It’s primarily involved in auditory processing, language comprehension memory formation, emotional processing, and visual object recognition. It’s deeply connected with the limbic system (explained in its own section), which explains its role in emotion and memory.
The Wernicke’s Area is typically located in the posterior part is the left superior temporal gyrus, and it responsible for language comprehension, and processing the meaning of words and sentence structure. Damage causes fluent, but meaningless speech and poor language understanding.
The Auditory Cortex is located deep within the superior temporal gyrus, and is involved in processing sound, and organizing sounds tonotopically (different frequencies match to different locations)
The Superior Temporal Gyrus (STG) is the topmost gyrus of the temporal lobe, just beneath the lateral sulcus. It contains the primary auditory cortex, plays a key role in processing complex auditory information, and is involved in aspects of social cognition, like interpreting tone of voice (prosody)
The Middle Temporal Gyrus (MTG) is located between the superior and inferior temporal gyro, and is involved in visual motion perception, interpreting other people’s actions, language processing and lexical retrieval, and supports semantic memory and word meaning.
The Inferior Temporal Gyrus (ITG) is the bottommost gyrus of the temporal lobe. The ITG specializes in visual object recognition (faces, shapes, objects), its involves in processing complex visual stimulus, and it plays a major role in the ventral visual stream, which identifies what it is you are seeing. Damage to the ITG can cause visual agnosia, which is the inability to recognize objects even with normal vision.
Temporal Lobe
