Video: Let's color and learn brain anatomy

Did you know that the human brain contains about 86 billion neurons? That's more than 10 times the number of people on Earth. And today, we're going to navigate this neural metropolis with the help of some colored pencils and Kenhub's very own anatomy coloring pages.

The goal for today's video is to show you how powerful anatomy coloring books can be as a study tool by discussing proven techniques for improving memory and retention while also teaching you a thing or two about the human brain. And the best part? You can follow along with us. We're using Kenhub's free Anatomy Coloring Book PDF which you can download using the link in the description below. And don't worry, you won't have to watch me color all 86 billion neurons. I'll save that for the next video.

So our objective today with coloring is to take a more broad approach to coloring as opposed to like hyperspecific so you're going to see all these terms on the sides. We are not going to be coloring each of these because it would just get too detailed and I don't even think I have enough colors to pull it off, to be honest with you. Instead, we're going to take a very broad and general approach so then if you wanted to, you could use a marker in color on top to find all of these hyperspecific points.

Now, I want to quickly orient you to what you're looking at. This is a lateral view of the brain and this is an inferior view of the brain, so the bottom. So it's like we took the brain here, rotated it, and then you're looking at it from the bottom up. But we've also removed the cerebellum which we will discuss the cerebellum as well as the brainstem later on. But these two structures have been removed in order to see most, or rather, I should say, more of the cerebrum.

The cerebrum is this highly folded, almost looks coiled, aspect of the brain. This thing is absolutely immense. Now you can't do this - this is physically impossible - but if you could take the brain and unfold it and lay it flat, it's somewhere around 2 square feet or so in surface area which is extremely impressive. So that means when you fold it up like that, you're actually going to get - surprise, surprise - these folds.

Now we have names for these folds. So if you look on the side here, you're going to see sulcus, sulcus, gyrus, gyrus. A sulcus is like a crevice and a gyrus is a raised area. So all these lines are going to be sulci or you could say sulci and then the raised areas - the bumps - are going to be gyri, and these are absolutely essential to understanding the topography and just the overall layout of brain anatomy. What I mean by that is, say, like if we look at the central sulcus here. The central sulcus is this line that's going up like so. This separates frontal lobe from the parietal lobe and then the lateral sulcus here separates the frontal lobe from the temporal lobe, so we now can create a boundary. And in fact, the first one we're going to be coloring is the frontal lobe, so I'm going to go ahead over here and I'm just going to kind of find frontal lobe on the side. I'm going to do some basic color coding here, and I am going to create my border just like this. Come around, like so, and I now have my frontal lobe completely outlined.

So, but here's the thing. The sulci or sulci and gyri don't always create a nice boundary. So like, for instance, the separation between the temporal lobe and occipital lobe, there's not like this really neat area that can say, oh. It's like almost like a sign like you are now entering the occipital lobe, like we don't have that here. Instead, we determine different lobes primarily based off of function. The topography here is more of an artifact that is helpful for us studying the human brain. So, just so you know, that is going to playing a role.

Now, actually, I want to highlight this inferior view because we can see the frontal lobe from this inferior view here. But to identify it, we need to also figure out where the temporal pole is. So if you look here, it says temporal pole and then it's pointing to like there's this pointed edge right here in the most rostral or anterior aspect of the temporal lobe. We want to find that on this inferior picture, and sure enough, temporal pole, pointing to it, so we're going to come down like this and just go like that. And what that's going to do and we'll do it on the other side as well and then we'll go ahead and connect them and then outline like this. So what that does is now it gives us a nice clear understanding of the boundaries and borders of our frontal lobe and our frontal cortex.

This does not need to be perfect, right? We're not going for a Picasso here. So if I make… if I'm a little bit off, I'm really not that worried especially for this general brain anatomy. When it comes to like more specific brain anatomy, I think we should be more… we should care more. But for these generalized, it's not that big of a deal if we are a little bit off.

Now, like I mentioned, we're doing some color coding here, and color coding is basically where you're just assigning a color and you're like, “Justin, what other option is there when you're coloring? Who - how do you not do color coding?” Well, I've actually seen this many times over the years with teaching. Something called pattern coding. So let's say again if I wanted to go to that central sulcus, let's say I didn't have enough colors, and so I only had a few colors so what I could do is assign like some dots and I could come to that central sulcus and I could come here, go like this. This is pattern coding.

I really only recommend doing this as a last resort because it can get super confusing if you have like all like these slanted angles. You're going like this. You know, I've seen people get way… Basically, the only time I see this is when students come to class with only a few colors for lecture and so that they are desperately trying to stretch those out. I don't recommend doing pattern coding unless you absolutely have to.

So I'm doing just some basic color coding, but then I'm also going to do what's called geographical coloring. By the way, if you haven't noticed, using twistables. These are my favorites. This is just super convenient. I don't have to worry about a pencil sharpener. Obviously, they're less precise. It's basically a crayon. It's - as I'm squeaking all over, I don't know if you guys can hear that - it's basically a crayon; going down here, do a light coloring, but I still love twistables. But I'm going to do something called geographical coloring.

Now geographical coloring, you start out really light and then you're going to create a gradient. So then I'm going to start increasing my pressure and I'm going to create a gradient, meaning, that I'm slowly, progressively starting to get darker. And what this does is it just, well, first and foremost, it just looks better, but the reason why you want it to look better - mine probably doesn't look that great - but the reason why you want it to look better is not just so you can impress, you know, your instructor or your study buddies; instead, this is actually helpful for your studies.

You see, anatomy is a science of classification, right. That's the whole gig is you're pointing to something, giving it a name, giving it a function. If you are off in your coloring or if it looks like you're just desperately squiggling, that's not going to go well and it's not going to be helpful in your studies. So when things can look pleasing to the eye as much as possible, that is going to be helpful, believe it or not. I've seen it time and time again. I know this to be true. But again, it doesn't need to be perfect, right? Again, we're not going for Picasso here.

So we have now done the frontal lobe. But the frontal lobe, I should say, right, this is in charge of a lot of really exciting stuff. So this is going to be, you know, morality, empathy, your personality, your rational decision making. But again, it's also going to be motor, initiating motor control, so then that primary and other motor cortex and other motor areas. So that's going to be the frontal lobe.

So now let's go ahead and move to the parietal lobe. So the parietal lobe, we can't see it all from this inferior image - this inferior view - so we're not even going to worry about it, but we're going to come over here on the right and bam! Parietal lobe, so I'm going to give this a nice - I think this is maroon, not the best with colors - but parietal lobe.

As you can see, I actually like coloring through the text. If you're an underliner, obviously, go with it. So with the parietal lobe, there is - so where we're looking for is going to be what's called the parieto-occipital sulcus. Unfortunately, you can't see it all that well. The parieto-occipital sulcus is best seen from a medial view, so if I could take the brain like you understand that there's two hemispheres. If we could split the brain open and look at it on the medial view, you would see this sulcus called the parieto-occipital sulcus that very clearly divides the parietal lobe from the occipital lobe. But it doesn't really show up all that well from a lateral view, but we can see parts of it and it's going to be about right here.

So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go like this and that is going to be a boundary for our occipital lobe. Now this lateral sulcus is also a nice boundary - the lateral sulcus again from the temporal lobe - but there isn't a nice neat one that separates these, right? So what we're going to do is we're just going to go like… we're just going to go like this. And this is already imperfect because the occipital lobe actually runs into the temporal lobe. Again, I'm not… I'm just not going to worry all that much about this right now. We're just trying to get a general lay of the land here. But then I ran up to that central sulcus again and we have our border, so I'm going to go ahead and start with my geographical coloring, so adding a light layer.

Now the parietal lobe is going to be in charge of sensory processing. So, like right now as I'm tapping my hand, what's happening is I can feel that - obviously - like I have neurons that are actually sending the signal up to my brain. But where it's being processed is here in what's called the postcentral gyrus or that primary somatosensory cortex back here. So this is where you have a lot of sensory processing in the body, but go ahead and start my geographical coloring, adding that gradient just to make this look a little bit better. Doesn't have to be fantastic, but there we go, all right.

So now we are going to move to the temporal lobe. So the temporal lobe we're going to find right here. So temporal lobe - go and use this; it looks like teal, I think - and the temporal lobe is going to be pretty easy at this point to define our border. It's going to kind of come around here just like this and we have the temporal lobe, at least from the lateral view. From the inferior view, again there's not a real clear line saying you are now entering the occipital lobe back here. So, what we're going to do is just throw up a line around where it says cerebral aqueduct.

The cerebral aqueduct is actually in this central core of the brain, but the line going to it, I think that works. So I'm going to go like this and I'm going to try and do something similar on the other side and then I'm going to go ahead and outline. Again, there's just not a real nice sulcus to help us out with the boundaries, but this is going to be our temporal lobe.

Now the temporal lobe is responsible for - most people know it for auditory processing. So like right now, my voice is coming to you through a device, right, the speakers in the device, but that is going through your ears and then that is going through your cochlear nerve and then that's actually going to go and processed into the temporal lobe. So you have a lot of auditory processing. But there's a lot of other cool stuff that happens in the temporal lobe as well such as you have like your ability to recognize faces is going to be… a lot of that is going to be processed or at least partially processed inside of the temporal lobe. You're also going to get - it helps with memory formation, long-term memory formation, for all areas of the brain, so it's going to get involved and just make sure that everything is good to go with your memories because memories are more distributed. There's not like a memory center that as convenient as that would be. So that is going to be our temporal lobe.

And then last, let's choose a good purple and let's do the occipital lobe. What's nice is it's just what's left over, right, so we don't have to really worry about our borders or boundaries - we just kind of highlight it here. It's going to be right here. And the occipital lobe is the one that most people know. When I'm teaching this in the classroom, the students, almost everyone can tell me what the occipital lobe is responsible for, or at least mostly responsible for, and that's going to be visual processing.

So visual processing actually gets taken care of - I kind of do it. I'm going to do a little bit different this way. I'm going to actually darker like this. Go that way… spice it up. The visual processing happens through different layers. You have like V1 through V5. So you have the eyeball connects to the optic nerve, connects to the optic pathways, which will eventually translate back to the occipital lobe, and then what happens is it goes to an area called V1 and then V1 might offload some of that visual information to be processed in V2 which could go to V3 which could go to V4 so on and so forth.

So you have a lot of visual processing that's going to be happening in here. So as strange as this is to think about, as you're looking at your device and watching this video right now, that's in the back of your head, right. That's happening in that occipital lobe.

All right, so what I want to do now is finish this off with the cerebellum and the brainstem. Now actually, did I even… if I go back here, I don't think I even colored - yep, I didn't. We got to go… we got to add some purple here to the occipital lobe. We now have those all good.

But with the cerebellum and brainstem, there isn't… it's not listed here on the sides. So if you wanted to and you're following along at home, you'd just write in cerebellum… you'd write in brainstem. So I'm going to grab - wait, did I already do this one? I did this -- no, this is different. Yeah, it's all right. It's not a big deal.

We're going to go like this on our cerebellum and go ahead and color it in. Now cerebellum actually translates to little brain… to little brain, and that's because cerebrum translates to brain. Now the cerebellum is kind of having a moment of sorts and neuroscientists and researchers have been finding different functions and accessory functions that we just didn't realize were happening inside of the cerebellum.

But classically, what you'll hear the cerebellum responsible for is creating like a blueprint. It's helping to refine motor control. So what I mean by that is if I want to wiggle my fingers, well, that is going to originate up in my primary motor cortex, but then it's going to communicate with the cerebellum to refine it and make it all fluid so it's not just jumbling and, you know, it's just not this hectic movement. So the cerebellum is essential for absolute refined motor control.

And then - grab myself an orange - we have the brainstem. Now the brainstem is actually three different areas - three different areas. You have the midbrain, the pons, and the medulla oblongata. So we can see a bit of the pons and we can see the medulla oblongata.

Now all three of them - you think of this as like a transitionary structure or structures because this is where the spinal cord would be coming into it or out of it, depending on how you're looking at it, and going up to the brain which means you have incoming and outgoing signals, right; afferent and efferent signals that are going to be going in and out. And so there's… and this also has like different rhythmic centers. So, for instance, like breathing. Your breathing rhythmic center is going to be located in the medulla oblongata. That's going to be essential for just - I mean, if you didn't have that, you wouldn't - you'd have to think like breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, which would be impossible. So the brainstem, as simple as it is in a lot of ways or unexciting as it may appear, is actually extraordinarily important.

And then we have - I don't even know if I have a color for it, I don't have a color handy for it - this central core right here, there is a lot going on. So again, we've removed the brainstem and the cerebellum so what you're looking at is kind of like the brainstem transitioning into the diencephalon. Diencephalon is like the central core. It's like a peach pit in a peach. This is where you're going to find the thalamus, the epithalamus, the subthalamus. A lot of different structures are going to be in there and it's kind of like a hub where signals are going in and out of; very similar to the brainstem, but at the same time that's because it goes through the brainstem and then through the thalamus.

These coloring pages are only a small taste of what Kenhub has to offer with videos comprehensively covering over 600 topics in less than 30 minutes each; six types of spaced repetition-inspired quizzes including identification practice, clinical question banks, and personalization options; a huge library of easy-to-read articles, and a complete HD color atlas, it's your one-stop shop for all things anatomy learning.

Remember, understanding anatomy is key to understanding human health, so keep coloring, keep learning, and who knows? The next groundbreaking medical discovery might just come from that beautiful brain of yours which you can now label accurately, I might add.

Thanks for joining me on this colorful exploration of the brain. If you have half as much fun as I did, you're going to be doing just great. But be sure to like this video and leave us a comment below, letting us know what other coloring techniques that you like to use.

Until next time, keep those neurons firing and those colored pencils sharpened.