Look into a crowd and you’ll see a patchwork of unique faces—an assortment of skin tones and hair and eye colors, and noses, lips, and chins of different shapes and sizes. Each face is recognizable as a specific and individual person. Yet, in spite of this apparent distinctiveness, each face is still just one variation on a standard theme—eyes, noses, and mouths are generally placed in the same location on each of us.
The same is true of our brains. A stereotyped map of brain organization holds true from person to person: for example, the frontal lobes for higher-order thinking and planning reside just behind the forehead, the visual cortex is positioned in the back of the brain, and the auditory cortices sit along the sides. These lobes and other major anatomical landmarks of the brain are recognizable even in a newborn. Zooming in to examine the organization of a ...
