Stroke — the Brain Up Close
Different parts of the brain run different jobs — so where a stroke lands decides what the patient loses. Meet the map first: four lobes on top, the cerebellum behind, and the brainstem carrying everything through.
Each dot names a part of the brain and the job it runs. The occipital lobe and cerebellum sit at the back — turn the brain around to find their dots.
The parts at a glance
Four lobes form the cerebrum — the big folded top. Under the back sits the cerebellum, and everything funnels through the brainstem into the spinal cord.
What it is
The brain is not one uniform organ — it is a set of regions with separate jobs. The frontal lobe plans and moves, the parietal lobe feels, the temporal lobe hears and understands language, and the occipital lobe sees. A stroke blocks blood flow to one region, so the deficit you find at the bedside points back to a place on this map.
Behind and below, the cerebellum keeps movement and balance smooth. The brainstem is the narrow stalk everything passes through — it also runs breathing, heart rate and consciousness itself, which is why brainstem strokes are so dangerous.
The bedside link
- Deficits name the place. Weakness on one side, lost speech, lost vision — each pattern points to the region that lost its blood supply.
- Left and right cross over. The right side of the brain mostly runs the left side of the body, and the other way around.
- Time is brain. Brain tissue dies by the minute without blood flow — the same clock-first thinking as the chest-pain lesson.