Question: Rebecca, would you say that some parts of the brain are more important than others? if so, why?

Susan Cartwright answered on 16 Jun 2015:

Some parts of the brain are more important than others, in the sense that damage to some parts does much more harm to the person than damage to other parts. As an extreme example, your brain stem controls your heart rate and your breathing: if it is damaged, you are likely to die very quickly. It seems to me that this makes it more important than the part of your brain that controls, say, your left leg: you could cope with a paralysed left leg, but a paralysed heart is another matter. Some strokes have much more serious effects on the patient than others, because they affect parts of the brain that control important functions, such as speech (which for most people is localised in some rather specific regions of the left side of their brain). There’s also a weird condition called hemispatial neglect, where patients lose all awareness of items on one side of their visual field: this seems to be very much more common following strokes in the right half of the brain (causing neglect of items on the left) than vice versa, so there must be something important going on there that is related to attention.
However, as brain scans carried out by people like Rebecca get more advanced, it is becoming increasingly clear that brain function is more complicated and more flexible than we used to think, so the idea that some bits of our brain aren’t really needed at all is certainly a myth.