Your Brain, Region by Region

Labeled brain diagram

Turn the brain and tap any part to name it. Switch the quiz on to test yourself.

Every part named, with leader lines. Tick Functional areas to show the motor, sensory, visual, auditory and language areas; choose Inside under View from for the midline structures. Save as PNG downloads the current view for printing or slides.

The parts on the diagram

The diagram names the parts of the brain that introductory anatomy and psychology courses ask about[1][2]:

  • Cerebrum, in two hemispheres, each with four lobes: frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital.
  • Cerebellum, under the back of the cerebrum.
  • Brainstem: midbrain, pons and medulla oblongata, from top to bottom.
  • Corpus callosum and thalamus, visible when the brain is cut at the midline (choose Inside).
  • With Functional areas ticked: the primary motor, somatosensory, auditory and visual cortex, the prefrontal cortex, and Broca's and Wernicke's areas.

Tap any part to read what it does, with a link to the chapter that explains it. The lobes keep the same colors everywhere on this site.

The one-line job descriptions are a simplification. Most things the brain does (seeing, speaking, remembering, moving) depend on many regions working together and on the fibers that connect them; a label says where a function mostly happens, or where damage most clearly breaks it, not that the function lives there alone[3]. How the job descriptions were written explains how these maps were made and what they leave out.

Test yourself

The quiz asks for each part in a shuffled order: the six big parts (the four lobes, the cerebellum and the medulla), or fourteen parts in all (the four lobes, the cerebellum, the three levels of the brainstem, the corpus callosum and five functional areas; the thalamus, prefrontal cortex and auditory cortex are labelled on the diagram but not quizzed). Tap the region on the model; a wrong first tap gives you a second try, and after a second miss the answer is shown. Labels are off; you can turn the brain at any time. The score counts parts found on the first try.

Figure 1 Find each region on the model. The prompt under the brain names the part to find; choose Lobes or All parts, and press New quiz for a different order. With All parts, choose Inside under View from when it asks for the corpus callosum, and Below for the pons and midbrain.#

About the model

The 3D brain is a schematic, built on this site in code rather than scanned from a person. Its proportions follow textbook figures of an adult brain (about 16.5 cm long and 14 cm wide), and the lobe borders follow the standard landmarks: the central sulcus, the lateral sulcus and the parieto-occipital sulcus[1][3]. The folds are illustrative: they give the surface the look of gyri and sulci but do not reproduce any real brain's pattern. The functional areas are drawn as bands and patches at their usual positions; in a real brain their edges are not sharp and their sizes vary. For learning where things are and what they do, that is enough; for surgery or diagnosis it is not, and nothing on this site is medical advice.

Each part has more on its chapter: the lobes and how their jobs were discovered in Chapter 1, the cerebellum and brainstem in Chapter 2, the corpus callosum and the split-brain experiment in Chapter 3, and the body maps on the motor and sensory strips on the homunculus page.

Sources

  1. Betts, J. G. et al. (2022). Anatomy and Physiology 2e, §13.2 The Central Nervous System. OpenStax, Rice University. textbook
  2. Spielman, R. M. et al. (2020). Psychology 2e, §3.4 The Brain and Spinal Cord. OpenStax, Rice University. textbook
  3. Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland (2024). Lobes of the brain. institutional