What’s the most important region of your brain?

Most popular science-savvy folks would argue it’s your frontal lobe, because that’s “what makes us human.” After all, it is much larger in us than in our close cousins, the chimps and apes, and many language functions are believed to have some key residence there. Others might say it’s the limbic system which is supposedly responsible for our emotions (many of which are actually quite primitive such as hunger and physical attraction), and perhaps the occasionally less region-committed scholarly sort of person might argue that it’s not one region but a series of regions and the connections between them that make us human, like our mirror-neuron system which may allow us to get the gist of social situations and act accordingly.

Drawn in 1911 by Ramon y Cajal.

Many researchers will simply tell you that the region they’ve studied the most is – of course – the most important. So, if you asked me – based on my experiences and observations in neuroscience – I would say that it seems to be the hippocampus. I would venture that funding from the NIH for this tiny region – barely the size of a walnut on either side – outstrips the rest by far. So the question is, why?

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I present to you a simple argument I’ve heard before.

Everything humans do can be explained as a combination of behaviors they exhibit. These behaviors in turn are caused by the interaction of various systems in the body such as the endocrine, nervous, and reproductive systems. These systems function due to the interaction of the cells which form them. Cellular physiology is determined by a set of biochemical pathways which respond to stimuli from the environment. These biochemical pathways have certain kinetics and thermodynamics which can be elucidated by chemistry. Chemistry is just applied physics.

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