Frontal Cortex Quotes

The problem is, is when your focus is created by a crisis, then the frontal lobe shuts down essentially, the frontal cortex which is your intuitive intelligence. So you get very clever and very stupid in a crisis. Also, you pump adrenalin into your body from what you - physiologically you'll crash. ~ David Allen

Altogether, these observations suggest that several processes contribute to psychotic experience: the loss of familiarity with the world, hypothetically associated with noisy information processing; increased novelty detection mediated by the hippocampus; associated alterations of prefrontal cortical processing, which have reliably been associated with impairments in working memory and other executive functions; increased top-down effects of prior beliefs mediated by the frontal cortex that may reflect compensatory efforts to cope with an increasingly complex and unfamiliar world; and finally disinhibition of subcortical dopaminergic neurotransmission, which increases salience attribution to otherwise irrelevant stimuli. Furthermore, increased noise of chaotic or stress-dependent dopamine firing can reduce the encoding of errors of reward prediction elicited by primary and secondary reinforcers, thus contributing to a subjective focusing of attention on apparently novel and mysterious environmental cues while reducing attention and motivation elicited by common and natural and social stimuli. ~ Andreas Heinz

Metacognitive disorders can be interpreted in terms of early, historical views in which the frontal cortex is considered responsible for abstract reasoning, planning, and problem solving (see Goldstein, 1936; Halstead, 1947). Such complex, high-level characterizations of metacognition do not lend themselves easily to contributions of specific cognitive (or brain) components that mediate performance on metacognitive tasks. As such ~ Anonymous

As the language areas of the left hemisphere enter their sensitive period during the middle of the second year of life, grammatical language in the left integrates with the interpersonal and prosodic elements of communication already well developed in the right. As the cortical language centers mature, words are joined together to make sentences and can be used to express increasingly complex ideas flavored with emotion. As the frontal cortex continues to expand and connect with more neural networks, memory improves and a sense of time slowly emerges and autobiographical memory begins to connect the self with places and events, within and across time. The emerging narratives begin to organize the nascent sense of self and become the bedrock of our sense of self in interpersonal and physical space ~ Louis Cozolino

The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes. ~ Robert M. Sapolsky

Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives. ~ Bruce Feiler

Silence ain't no (treatment) treat meant! How many of us barely recognize these invisible and emotional lack of intelligence signs of the times...ain't nobody grown got time for! Adults with a developed frontal cortex ought to be ashamed of this kind of behavior. Listen, learn to level up, turn around and reach one by example, in order to teach another. Be the change that beautifies your communication world. ~ Tracey Bond

Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious. ~ Arca

We do not need to plug a fiber optic cable into our brains in order to access the Internet. Not only can the human retina transmit data at an impressive rate of nearly 10 million bits per second, but it comes pre-packaged with a massive amount of dedicated wetware, the visual cortex, that is highly adapted to extracting meaning from this information torrent and to interfacing with other brain areas for further processing. ~ Nick Bostrom

Much of what we do arises from automatic programming that bypasses conscious awareness and may even run contrary to our intentions, as Dr. Schwartz points out:
The passive side of mental life, which is generated solely and completely by brain mechanisms, dominates the tone and tenor of our day-to-day, even our second-to-second experience. During the quotidian business of daily life, the brain does indeed operate very much as a machine does.
Decisions that we may believe to be freely made can arise from unconscious emotional drives or subliminal beliefs. They can be dictated by events of which we have no recollection. The stronger a person's automatic brain mechanisms and the weaker the parts of the brain that can impose conscious control, the less true freedom that person will be able to exercise in her life. In OCD, and in many other conditions, no matter how intelligent and well-meaning the individual, the malfunctioning brain circuitry may override rational judgment and intention. Almost any human being when overwhelmed by stress or powerful emotions, will act or react not from intention but from mechanisms that are set off deep in the brain, rather than being generated in the conscious and volitional segments of the cortex. When acting from a driven or triggered state, we are not free. ~ Gabor Mate

Everybody goes into different dimensional planes. You do it every night when you dream. You are journeying into other dimensional planes. Dreams are not just functions of the cerebral cortex. ~ Frederick Lenz

Researchers like Jonathan Winson, Gyorgy Buzsaki, Bruce McNaughton, and Matt Wilson believe memory consolidation occurs during sleep, and specifically that it is during sleep that the slow interleaving of information into cortical networks takes place. Recent studies support this notion. For example, Wilson and McNaughton recorded the activity of neurons in the rat hippocampus. Using technically sophisticated procedures, they were able to identify precise patterns of cell activity in the hippocampus as rats explored a novel environment. Subsequently, when the rats went to sleep, the neural patterns seemed to be repeated in the hippocampus, as if the rats were dreaming about the places they had explored. This is an impressive finding. Although it has not yet been demonstrated that the hippocampal playback during sleep is actually read and used by the cortex, the existing data are consistent with the possiblity. ~ Joseph E. LeDoux

One can speculate that the tardiness and wobbliness of humanity's progress on many of the "eternal problems" of philosophy are due to the unsuitability of the human cortex for philosophical work. On this view, our most celebrated philosophers are like dogs walking on their hind legs - just barely attaining the treshold level of performance required for engaging in the activity at all. ~ Nick Bostrom

UFCNo such thing as childhood memories, he says. We're just playing games with our neurons every day, tossing them around the hippocampus, constructing little fairy tales featuring characters named after people we used to live with. 'Your dad is just a flurry of molecular activity in your frontal lobe' he'll tell you... ~ Michel Faber

Now the dressing-room full of RSC hierarchy. Suddenly Trevor Nunn pushes his way through and 'Trevs' me. I've heard a lot about this 'Trevving', but never had it done to me. From what I'd heard, a 'Trev' is an arm round your shoulder and a sideways squeeze. But this 'Trev' is a full frontal hug, so complete and so intimate that the dressing-room instantly clears, as if by suction. I'm left alone in the arms of this famous man wondering whether it's polite to let go. ~ Antony Sher

Collectively this work suggests that the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are reciprocally related. That is, in order for the amygdala to respond to fear reactions, the prefrontal region has to be shut down. By the same logic, when the prefrontal region is active, the amygdala would be inhibited, making it harder to express fear. Pathological fear, then, may occur when the amygdala is unchecked by the prefrontal cortex, and treatment of pathological fear may require that the patient learn to increase activity in the prefrontal region so that the amygdala is less free to express fear. Clearly, decision-making ability in emotional situations is impaired in humans with damage to the medial and ventral prefrontal cortex, and abnormalities there also may predispose people to develop fear and anxiety disorders. These abnormalities could be due to genetic or epigenetic organization of prefrontal synapses or to experiences that subtly alter prefrontal synaptic connections. Indeed, the behavior of animals with abmormalities of the medial prefrontal cortex is reminiscent of humans with anxiety disorders: they develop fear reactions that are difficult to regulate. Although objective information about the world may indicate that a situation is not dangerous, because they cannot properly regulate fear circuits, they experience fear and anxiety in these safe situations. ~ Joseph E. LeDoux

There will come a time when a person you most likely pushed out through your vagina and nursed from your
nipples, whose bottom you wiped, and whose snot and spit you cleaned up over several sleep-starved years will apprehend you with a mixture of boredom and irritation and say, 'Get a life, Mum.'
This would be a good time to remember that a) violence never solved anything; b) teenagers don't have a full brain yet – the prefrontal cortex that controls the ability to make important distinctions, like who controls the pocket money, only kicks in around the age of twenty-four; and c) you are, in fact, the adult. ~ Joanne Fedler

Freedom does not die from frontal attack. It dies because men in power no longer believe in a system based upon liberty. ~ Herbert Hoover

You never want one thing at any given moment of life. Your mind always comes up with at least two choices. If your limbic system wins, the choice you make seems to be pleasurable at first but in the long run ends up being the wrong one. And if your prefrontal cortex wins the choice you make may appear rough at first, but in the long run it turns out to be the right one. ~ Abhijit Naskar

It looks like garbage, my ass. But trust me, you're lucky it's not full-frontal. ~ Rob Corddry

Unlike those other painters, Brewster hadn't resorted to indirect gazes or chiaroscuro to communicate the silence of his world. The faces were well-lit and frontal, and yet they were quiet. ~ Teju Cole

I'm alone. And I'm crying. And no one is coming to the crib. And the nightlight has burned out. And I'm mad. I'm so mad. Left frontal lobe. I ... I ... I don't feel so good. Left occipital lobe. I ... don't remember where ... Left parietal lobe. I ... I ... I can't remember my name,but ... but ... Right temporal ... but I'm still here. Right frontal. I'm still here ... Right occipital.I'm still ... Right parietal. I'm ... Cerebellum. I'm ... Thalamus. I ... Hypothalamus. I ... Hippocampus ... Medulla ... ~ Neal Shusterman

I would rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy ~ Dean Martin

Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into drag-lined canals that give him 'waterfront' lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness. ~ John D. MacDonald

The brain's auditory cortex, for instance, processes an audio signal from your ear faster than a visual signal is processed in the visual cortex. The difference is around 40 milliseconds, which is not much, but enough to justify using a gun for starting a race, instead of a light flash. The faster audio processing speed means that sprint runners react more quickly to a bang than to a flash of light. ~ Jean Paul Zogby

In brain scans, music lights up the medial prefrontal cortex and triggers a memory that starts playing in your mind. All of a sudden you can see a place, a person, an incident. The strongest responses to music - the ones that elicit vivid memories - cause the greatest activity on brain scans. ~ Jodi Picoult

If Jefferson's leadership is to be set apart from others similarly situated later on, it should not be because he was inclined to finesse a frontal assault on the old [Federalist] governmental establishment, but because he transformed national politics so thoroughly without being forced into any make-or-break confrontation with it. Jefferson pursued the reconstruction of American government and politics relentlessly, and the regime he created in the end was profoundly different from the one he displaced. Yet, the most remarkable aspect of his transformation is how little resistance he encountered in the process from the institutions and interests previously attached to the old order. Jefferson's authority to reconstruct proved singularly disarming and all-encompassing. ~ Stephen Skowronek

Following a trauma at any age, there's a reduction in the number of neural pathways between the limbic system (pertaining to feelings) and the cortex system (managing thought and cognition). So after being traumatized, you're less aware of your feelings. ~ Doreen Virtue

A neurosurgeon once told me about operating on the brain of a young man with epilepsy. As is customary in this kind of operation, the patient was wide awake, under
only local anesthesia, while the surgeon delicately explored his exposed cortex, makingsure that the parts tentatively to be removed were not absolutely vital by stimulating
them electrically and asking the patient what he experienced. Some stimulations provoked visual flashes or hand-raisings, others a sort of buzzing sensation, but one spot
produced a delighted response from the patient: "It's 'Outta Get Me' by Guns N' Roses.
my favorite heavy metal band!"

I asked the neurosurgeon If he had asked the patient to sing or hum along with the music, since it would be fascinating to learn how "high fidelity" the provoked memory
was, would it be in exactly the same key and tempo as the record?
Such a song (unliken"Silent Night") has one canonical version. so we could simply have superimposed a recording of the patients humming with the standard record and compared the results.
Unfortunately, even though a tape recorder had been running during the operation, thesurgeon hadn't asked the patient to sing along. 'Why not?" I asked, and he replied: "I hate rock music!'

Later in the conversation the neurosurgeon happened to remark that he was going to have to operate again on the same young man. and I expressed the hope that he would
just check to see if he could r ~ Wilder Penfield

The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch - Homo Sapiens - would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected.

Yes, Einstein was a badass. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge. ~ Alastair Reynolds

If you want big improvements, she said, chew gum. Gum? Sure enough, chewing gum has been shown to improve a person's immediate recall of learned words by some 24 percent. Long-term recall improves by a larger 36 percent. To get the benefit, you actually have to chew gum as you are studying; for some reason you can't merely move your jaw up and down. I also discovered that drinking sage tea increases one's recall of words modestly, as does the odor of rosemary. Something as mundane as coffee provides a benefit, too. Drinking two cups of coffee increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe, where working memory is controlled, and in the anterior cingulum, where attention is controlled. ~ Michael Erard

Jocks were pretty much exempt from the standards that bound the rest of us. Teachers and administrators humor them because it's in everyone's interests to coax them through school and get them out of the building. Since it's unethical to turn them loose on society, they get sent to college to be kept out of the mix until their frontal lobes develop more fully. As enticement they are given sports scholarships that will later amount to nothing, not even good health. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Chorea - a twinkling movement or motor scintillation - does not have its origin in the cerebral cortex, but in the deeper parts of the brain, the basal ganglia and upper brainstem, which are the parts that mediate normal awakening. Thus these observations of chorea during migraine support the notion that migraine is a form of arousal disorder, something located in the strange borderlands of sleep - a disorder which has its origin deep in the brainstem, and not superficially, in the cortical mantle, as is often supposed (a ~ Oliver Sacks

man with his frontal lobes pushed back like that is unpredictable. ~ Rex Stout

An angry frontal attack puts even the most invulnerable person on the defensive. ~ Sue Patton Thoele

There is no future in it, Will Henry," he said pensively. "The future belongs to science. The fate of our species will be determined by the likes of Edison and Tesla, not Wordsworth or Whitman. The poets will lie upon the shores of Babylon and weep, poisoned by the fruit that grows from the ground where the Muses' corpses rot. The poets' voices will be drowned out by the gears of progress. I foresee the day when all sentiment is reduced to a chemical equation in our brains - hope, faith, even love - their exact locations pinned down and mapped out, so we may point to it and say, 'Here, in this region of our cerebral cortex, lies the soul.' ~ Rick Yancey

The first thing is that we're being attacked by both the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild. Both of these groups are trying to diminish the importance and strength of the director. They're trying to do it through both frontal and side attacks. ~ John Frankenheimer

Our ordinary method of dealing with ingrained sin is to launch a frontal attack. We rely on our willpower and determination. Whatever may be the issue for us--anger, fear, bitterness, gluttony, pride, lust, substance abuse--we determine never to do it again; we pray against it, fight against it, set our will against it. But the struggle is all in vain, and we find ourselves once again morally bankrupt or, worse yet, so proud of our external righteousness that "whitened sepulchers" is a mild description of our condition. ~ Richard J. Foster

I play characters who are comfortable naked, but that's something you work up to. I did a play off-Broadway in New York when I was in college. It was full-frontal nudity. It's nerve-racking. ~ Joe Manganiello

We possess no criterion which enables us to distinguish exactly between a psychical process and a physiological one, between an act occurring in the cerebral cortex and one occurring in the sub-cortical substance; for 'consciousness', whatever that may be, is not attached to every activity of the cerebral cortex, nor is it always attached in an equal degree to any particular one of its activities; it is not a thing which is bound up with any locality in the nervous system. ~ Sigmund Freud

The supposed reality of misfiring synapses, chemical imbalances, frontal lobe anomalies and the like - did not sway her desire for escape into an alternate universe - where she could discover fascinating things about her inner world - or where she could hide from the real world. ~ Kelly Proudfoot

The old sound was alcoholic. The tradition was finally broken. The music is sex and drugs and happy. And happy is the joke the music understands best. Ultra sonic sounds on records to cause frontal lobotomies. Hey, don't be afraid. You'd better take drugs and learn to love PLASTIC. All diffrent kinds of plastic- pliable, rigid, colored, colorful, nonattached plastic. - Lou Reed (1965-1968) ~ Legs McNeil

According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence. ~ Steven Pinker

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. ~ Carl Sagan

Maybe lobsters, who are also without frontal lobes, are detached from the neurological-registration-of-injury-or-hazard we call pain in just the same way. There is, after all, a difference between (1) pain as a purely neurological event, and (2) actual suffering, which seems crucially to involved an emotional component, an awareness of pain as unpleasant, as something to fear/dislike/want to avoid. [ ... ] To my lay mind, the lobster's behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it way well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering. ~ David Foster Wallace

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. ~ Tom Waits

Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neo-cortex, and the foundation of intelligence. ~ Jeff Hawkins

Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climable trees. That's why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn't interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it's those silent fur-covered merchants of death you've got to watch out for. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

Our earliest ancestors were descended from primates who thrived for millions of years in a treetop environment, and who in the process had evolved one of the most remarkable visual systems in nature. To move quickly and efficiently in such a world, they developed extremely sophisticated eye and muscle coordination. Their eyes slowly evolved into a full-frontal position on the face, giving them binocular, stereoscopic vision. This system provides the brain a highly accurate three-dimensional and detailed perspective, but is rather narrow. Animals that possess such vision - as opposed to eyes on the side or half side - are generally efficient predators like owls or cats. They use this powerful sight to home in on prey in the distance. Tree-living primates evolved this vision for a different purpose - to navigate branches, and to spot fruits, berries, and insects with greater effectiveness. They also evolved elaborate color vision. ~ Robert Greene

We're all inadequate," David answered. "Just think: the light from the outside world is mapped onto the retina, then further mapped onto the visual cortex, then broken apart and analyzed in other areas of the brain. At every step there's a loss of information. In the end, what we are aware of is not the outside world per se, but the image of the world projected onto our brains. Plato was anatomically right; we do see shadows on a wall. ~ Carolyn Ives Gilman