Located at the back of the brain, the occipital lobe houses the primary and secondary visual cortices —V1for edge and line detection,V2–V4for increasingly complex attributes like shape and color. Visual information from the retina passes through the thalamus (specifically the lateral geniculate nucleus) before reaching V1, where the image is “assembled.” From there, processing diverges into two streams: theventral pathway(to the temporal lobe) for object recognition — the “what” — and thedorsal pathway(to the parietal lobe) for spatial location — the “where.” Color vision work by Semir Zeki in the 1970s established area V4 as central to hue perception, while early 20th-century lesion studies cemented the occipital lobe’s primacy in visual experience.