Brain Social Information Areas

Two new brain areas mapped

14 Jun 2012 | 03:51 BST | Posted by Kerri Smith | Category: Neuroscience

Organization for Human Brain Mapping Meeting, Beijing, China

S. BLUDAU

Katrin Amunts and her colleagues at the Research Centre Juelich, Germany are explorers. Explorers of the brain – striking out and finding new territories; rewriting and adding to our brain maps.

What, you thought we’d already got a map of the brain? “We have not got a complete map, and there is no such thing as a single map of the brain,” says Amunts. With major collaborator Karl Zilles, and joined by a host of keen-eyed lab members, over the past 20 years she’s been working on a project to map the brain in fine detail and using various different methods.

At a talk in the Neuroanatomy session here at the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping(OHBM), Amunts’ colleague Sebastian Bludau reported the discovery of two new brain areas. They’re at the very front of the brain, in a region called the frontal pole that we know is involved in such tasks as processing social information and working memory. He has christened them FP1  and FP2./.../