An introduction to human brain anatomy

Abstract

This tutorial chapter provides an overview of the human brain anatomy. Knowledge of brain anatomy is fundamental to our understanding of cognitive processes in health and disease; moreover, anatomical constraints are vital for neurocomputational models and can be important for psychological theorizing as well. The main challenge in understanding brain anatomy is to integrate the different levels of description ranging from molecules to macroscopic brain networks. This chapter contains three main sections. The first section provides a brief introduction to the neuroanatomical nomenclature. The second section provides an introduction to the different levels of brain anatomy and describes commonly used atlases for the visualization of functional imaging data. The third section provides a concrete example of how human brain structure relates to performance.