In this set of lectures, we're going to talk about the brainstem, and then we'll talk about the cranial nerves. The brainstem is this transition area between the spinal cord and the cerebral cortex. So, of course, here's our beautiful cortex up here, and out of the plane down here is our spinal cord, and so this large area here is our brainstem. It's continuous with the diencephalon which is here. It is the origin or destination depending on whether you're affarent or efferent information of all of your cranial nerves. There are three regions in the brainstem that I want you to know. Well, there's only three to know. First is the medulla oblongata. Once you get to know it better, you'll just call it the medulla for short. There is the pons here, and then up above that is the midbrain, and here they are in one of my favorite little bathtub toys. It's called a rubber brainstem and I use these a lot when I teach. When I teach graduate students and medical students, and it's a giant model of the brainstem. It makes everything just a little bit easier to see. So, what we have here again is our medulla. You have just a tiny bit of spinal cord attached still, our pons and our midbrain. This is the ventral surface of the brainstem which would be laying down along the base of your brain and this is the dorsal aspect and you can see it looks a little different. In this one, we have actually removed the cerebellum, if it was in C2 within an actual brain, would be sitting right on top of here, and again, we have a little bit of spinal cord down here. We have the pons and, I'm sorry, the medulla, the pons, and the midbrain. In these sections, we actually did some brain dissecting to eliminate these areas a little bit more specifically. So, again, we have the medulla here, we have the pons, and we have the midbrain, and on the ventral, I'm sorry, the dorsal surface again we can see the divisions between the midbrain, the pons, and the medulla. In the next segments, I'm going to go through the brainstem one piece at a time and talk about the landmarks and the cranial nerves that are associated with each one. So, in the next section, we'll talk about them, the medulla.
