Quick facts:
- Location: Bottom, back part of the cortex above the cerebellum and behind the temporal lobe
- Function: Responsible for processing visual information from the eyes such as color, shape and movement
The occiptial lobe is important to being able to correctly understand what your eyes are seeing. These lobes have to be very fast to process the rapid information that our eyes are sending. Similar to how the temporal lobe makes sense of auditory information, the occipital lobe makes sense of visual information so that we are able to understand it. If our occipital lobe was impaired, or injured we would not be able to correctly process visual signals, thus visual confusion would result.
What happens when your occipital lobe is damaged?
- You’ll have difficulty in finding objects in an environment
- Identifying colors will be difficult – this is different to color blindness and is known as color agnosia
- You might start experiencing hallucinations or visual illusions
- You might struggle to recognize words – this is different to dyslexia and is known as word blindness – which means you’ll have difficulty reading and writing
- You might experience trouble recognizing what a drawn object is
- You might not be able to see the movement of an object