Prefrontal in sentence

60 examples of Prefrontal in a sentence

The first is the prefrontal cortex, right behind your forehead, critical for things like decision-making, focus, attention and your personality.

Number two: the most common finding in neuroscience studies, looking at effects of long-term exercise, is improved attention function dependent on your prefrontal cortex.

The more you're working out, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex gets.

Because the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus are the two areas that are most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases and normal cognitive decline in aging.

So with increased exercise over your lifetime, you're not going to cure dementia or Alzheimer's disease, but what you're going to do is you're going to create the strongest, biggest hippocampus and prefrontal cortex so it takes longer for these diseases to actually have an effect.

In red is an area that's active in the prefrontal cortex, the frontal lobe of the brain, and in blue is this area that was deactivated.

So we had this focal area called the medial prefrontal cortex that went way up in activity.

We had this broad patch of area called the lateral prefrontal cortex that went way down in activity, I'll summarize that for you.

And you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fMRI, versus the right prefrontal cortex.

This is an area in the prefrontal cortex, a region where we can use cognition to try to overcome aversive emotional states.

So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains.

One of the brain regions that changes most dramatically during adolescence is called prefrontal cortex.

So this is a model of the human brain, and this is prefrontal cortex, right at the front.

Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area.

The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex.

You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls, and that's probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average, and then during adolescence, there's a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex.

Now that might sound bad, but actually this is a really important developmental process, because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells, the synapses, and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning, the elimination of unwanted synapses.

You prune away the weaker branches so that the remaining, important branches, can grow stronger, and this process, which effectively fine-tunes brain tissue according to the species-specific environment, is happening in prefrontal cortex and in other brain regions during the period of human adolescence.

So in my lab, we bring adolescents and adults into the lab to have a brain scan, we give them some kind of task that involves thinking about other people, their minds, their mental states, their emotions, and one of the findings that we've found several times now, as have other labs around the world, is part of the prefrontal cortex called medial prefrontal cortex, which is shown in blue on the slide, and it's right in the middle of prefrontal cortex in the midline of your head.

This region is more active in adolescents when they make these social decisions and think about other people than it is in adults, and this is actually a meta-analysis of nine different studies in this area from labs around the world, and they all show the same thing, that activity in this medial prefrontal cortex area decreases during the period of adolescence.

And this region, the regions within the limbic system, have been found to be hypersensitive to the rewarding feeling of risk-taking in adolescents compared with adults, and at the very same time, the prefrontal cortex, which you can see in blue in the slide here, which stops us taking excessive risks, is still very much in development in adolescents.

The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down.

And you see activity in some regions we've seen today, medial prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial, however, up here, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, an area that's involved in lots of types of conflict resolution, like if you're playing "Simon Says," and also the right and left temporoparietal junction.

These are scans from Judy Rapoport and her colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in which they studied children with very early onset schizophrenia, and you can see already in the top there's areas that are red or orange, yellow, are places where there's less gray matter, and as they followed them over five years, comparing them to age match controls, you can see that, particularly in areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the superior temporal gyrus, there's a profound loss of gray matter.

But there was one treatment, which actually had been pioneered at the Hartford Hospital in the early 1940s, and you can imagine what it was: it was prefrontal lobotomy.

And you know, of course, what'll happen if you do a prefrontal lobotomy.

In very short, people who have more activity in the right side of the prefrontal cortex are more depressed, withdrawn.

So there are important changes happening in the structure and function of the brain during adolescence, especially in the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system, and these are areas that are crucial for things like self-control, decision-making, emotion processing and regulation and sensitivity to reward and risk, all of which can affect how you function in a stressful circumstance, like a police interrogation.

A lot of it comes down to the prefrontal cortex, that front part of our brain that sits over our eyes and usually helps us focus in positive ways.

It inhibits the prefrontal cortex, which is necessary for impulse control and executive function, a critical area for learning.

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