So in this video, we're going to be talking about the major regions of the brain, and there are 4 of these regions. So the first is the cerebrum. And I would bet if I asked you to close your eyes and just picture a brain, this is probably what you're going to be imagining. The cerebrum is the largest, most anterior part of the brain. Everything that you see here in green is really the bulk of the brain, and it contains the cerebral cortex, which has that incredibly distinctive wrinkly kind of tree bark appearance to it that we all know as a brain. So that is the cerebrum.
Now the next structure is the diencephalon. The diencephalon is the central part of the forebrain. When I say forebrain, I just mean if we draw a line in the brain right about there, everything above that is the forebrain. So the cerebrum and diencephalon are part of the forebrain. The diencephalon is the center or the middle of the brain. It's an internal structure. The brain that we're looking at here is see-through, and that pink part is right in the middle of it. The diencephalon consists of a few subdivisions: it has the thalamus, the hypothalamus, and the epithalamus. All right. Now, don't worry too much about what, you know, where those are or what those look like. We're going to cover that in a future video. So just know what the diencephalon is for now.
Moving downward a little bit, we have the brainstem. The brainstem is this structure here and has the very important job of connecting the cerebrum to the spinal cord. It consists of 3 major subdivisions: we have the midbrain, right there in the middle of the brain, the pons, and the medulla oblongata. Okay? Again, don't worry too much about what those do yet. We'll cover all of that in future videos. Just kind of know where the brainstem is for now.
And finally, we have the cerebellum. The cerebellum actually means "little brain," and that's what it looks like. It looks like a teeny tiny brain kind of tucked right into the back of your brain right there. The cerebellum coordinates our motor activity. Quite often, when we think about the brain, we kind of think of the cerebrum as being like what's in charge. But when it comes to anything motor-related, coordination, smooth movement, regulating motor activity, the cerebellum is really who controls all of that stuff.
So that is quite a bit of terminology to cover all at once. But again, you don't have to know the details and the functions of all of these subregions or anything like that. What I want you to be able to do right now is to be able to look at a diagram just like this and be able to label where the cerebrum, brainstem, diencephalon, and cerebellum are. We're going to go over function and detail in future videos. So I'll see you there.