Quotes About Prefrontal Cortex

The production of myelin by OPCs in the brains of infants and children helps explain how they do smart things; the incomplete myelination of the prefrontal cortex in the brains of teens helps explain why they do stupid things.)

Bring your dopamine or adrenaline level down by activating other regions of the brain other than the prefrontal cortex.

People who are very Tuned In to context tend to have strong connections from the hippocampus to areas in the prefrontal cortex that control executive functions and that hold long-term memories in the neocortex.

Yet we had fingered the prefrontal cortex. This region was considered the seat of human reason, the locus of forethought and wisdom and rationality and other cognitive functions that distinguish us from "lower" animals. But we were saying it rules our emotions, too—and that the barricade that psychology had erected between reason and emotion has no basis in fact.

the prefrontal cortex developed. This is the part of our brain responsible for higher thinking.

When you're up early and all alone, away from the overstimulation and noise, your attention isn't being fragmented by technology, meetings and other forces that can limit maximum productivity," mused the billionaire. "And so the prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain responsible for rational thinking—as well as constant worrying—actually shuts off for a short time.

We have this thin layer of prefrontal cortex made just for us, sitting on top of this big animal brain. Getting this thin little layer to handle more is unrealistic." The prefrontal cortex doesn't control most of the decisions we make every day. We can't fundamentally get more out of that unique, thin layer of prefrontal cortex. "It's already overtaxed,

Certainly the prefrontal cortex is an important thing; I'm as proud of mine as the next guy.

they found considerable plasticity from the onset of puberty into the early twenties. Once this was discovered, it became obvious that the upheavals of adolescence and early adulthood coincide with a previously unrecognized sensitive period of brain maturation in the prefrontal cortex

The limbic system explodes during puberty, but the prefrontal cortex keeps maturing for another 10 years.

This led to the masterpiece of evolution, the region that distinguishes humans from all other creatures. It is a specialized area of the frontal lobe, just behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex.

People who have trained their brains to think in the positive, actually wire more neural networks into the left prefrontal cortex of their brain.

The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, will persist.

Scientists call this shutdown7 "transient hypofrontality." Transient means temporary. "Hypo," the opposite of "hyper," means "less than normal." And frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that generates our sense of self. During transient hypofrontality, because large swatches of the prefrontal cortex turn off, that inner critic comes offline. Woody goes quiet.

The explanations may help us understand the parts of the brain that made a behavior tempting, but they say nothing about the other parts of the brain (primarily in the prefrontal cortex) that could have inhibited the behavior by anticipating how the community would respond to it. [...] Why should we discard our lever on the system for inhibition just because we are coming to understand the system for temptation?

The amygdala plays an important role in the acquisition, storage, expression, and extinction of threat memories. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFCVM) regulates the acquisition, storage, expression, and extinction of threat memories by the amygdala. The hippocampus learns about the context of acquisition and modulates the expression and extinction of threat memories in relation to context.

In order for extinction to reduce the ability of a Pavlovian CS to elicit defense responses, the amygdala's control over these responses has to be changed. Key to this process is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFCVM) and its ability to regulate the amygdala-housed circuits that store the CS-US memory, which when activated results in the expression of defense responses. The

Attentional amplification of sensory awareness in any sensory medium is achieved by top-down signals from prefrontal cortex that modulate activity of single neurons in sensory brain areas in the absence of any sensory stimulation and significantly increase baseline activity in the corresponding target region.

When we force a smile, we activate facial muscles with our prefrontal cortex. But when we smile because we are in a good mood, our nerves are controlled by our limbic system, which activates a slightly different set of muscles. Our brains can tell the subtle difference between the two, which was beneficial for our evolution.)

I theorize that humans are different from animals because we understand time. We have temporal consciousness in addition to spatial and social consciousness. The latest part of the brain to evolve is the prefrontal cortex, which lies just behind our forehead. It is constantly running simulations of the future.

On this scale, the human brain is 7.5 times bigger than the brain of a typical mammal weighing as much as we do, with all other mammals having smaller encephalization quotients. Why the size of say, the prefrontal cortex, should relate to the size

The human brain is "under construction" throughout childhood and adolescence; in fact, the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for good judgment, emotional regulation, impulse control, and other admirable "adult" qualities, is not fully mature until after the age of twenty!

humans the prefrontal cortex takes up a larger ratio of the brain's top layer, the neocortex, than in any other species, and has been the site of the major evolutionary changes that make us human. This neural zone, as we will see, holds the seeds of awakening to enduring well-being, but it is also entwined with emotional suffering. We can envision wonderful possibilities, and we also can be disturbed by worrisome

But the brain's executive center, located behind the forehead in our prefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among all animals and a paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipate the future—and worry about it—as well as to think about the past—and regret.