4. The Occipital Lobes – A Brain Anatomy Series

Do you know what they do? 

Did you know? – The occipital lobes are located right at the back of the skull, beneath the parietal lobes and are very important in visual perception. 

Did you know? – Damage to the occipital lobes can seriously distort what the brain thinks it is seeing.   

What might it mean for your client? 

Are you seeing things? –  The answer may be yes, as damage to this area may result in hallucinations or inaccurately seeing objects.   

Didn’t you see me coming? – Due to the brain being unable to process information correctly it may have difficulty recognising movement. 

What’s that supposed to be? – Because of the distortions caused by injury to the occipital lobes the individual may have difficulty recognising colours or drawn objects, which means that any sort of diagram may be a complete mystery to them. 

How can Reach help your client? 

Assessment – The first stage of any rehabilitation programme is getting a full, professional view of the nature and scale of the clinical issues. Professionally approved tests will be carried out to measure the extent of the problems and assess which aspects of visual disturbance are having the most impact on day-to-day activities.

Rehabilitation – Our clinicians will tailor a programme to develop strategies that address a wide range of problems that may develop following an event that causes dysfunction of the occipital lobes. These may work on ways to expand restricted visual attention or to develop strategies to help locate objects in the environment that escape visual perception, and to help cope with hallucinations and other disturbances of the visual field while linking to professional colleagues as required.

To find out more about our rehabilitation programmes to help those with a traumatic brain injury to the occipital lobes, or with any other acquired brain injury, please contact us.