The angular gyrus has accumulated more proposed functional roles than almost any other cortical area, leading Seghier in 2013 to title his review “The angular gyrus, multiple functions and multiple subdivisions.” Tasks that engage it include arithmetic, reading, semantic retrieval, attention reorienting, theory-of-mind judgements, autobiographical memory, and the encoding of episodic experience. The unifying thread across these has been hypothesised to be the binding of multi-modal information into integrated representations.

The left angular gyrus and supramarginal gyrus together form Geschwind’s territory, the inferior parietal extension of the language network. Lesions here disconnect the dorsal phonological stream from posterior multimodal cortex and produce variants of conduction and transcortical sensory aphasia.

The phenomenon of evoking out-of-body experiences by stimulating the right temporoparietal junction was first reported by Blanke and colleagues in a stereo-EEG patient undergoing pre-surgical mapping for epilepsy. The experience is reproducible across stimulation sites clustered around the angular gyrus, consistent with the TPJ’s role in integrating visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive information into a coherent first-person spatial frame.