Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area.

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

It goes to the nucleus accumbens, all the way up to the prefrontal cortex, orbital frontal cortex, where decisions are made, high level.

You don't form images with your primary visual cortex.

The cerebral cortex is made up of gray matter.

You're flying through the cortex of my colleague's brain.

This big cortex, or whatever, we're pretty proud of ourselves.

Each individual's cortex is folded differently, very much like a fingerprint.

So you have the prefrontal cortex here, lighting up in red.

When people have these simple geometrical hallucinations, the primary visual cortex is activated.

And primary visual cortex sees just simple geometry, just the simplest of shapes.

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

I've gone and had an fMRI myself, to see how my visual cortex is taking over.

Again, I'm putting your anterior cingulate cortex to the test here, causing you conflicting pattern detections.

It's been shown to promote pre frontal cortex development where a lot of cognition is happening.

When images are formed, a higher part of the visual cortex is involved in the temporal lobe.

Interestingly, this approach also emphasizes the significance of the prefrontal cortex for the generation of the visualization.

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

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

Now, at this level, in what's called the inferotemporal cortex, there are only visual images, or figments or fragments.

The series centers on the conflicts between a mutated bandicoot named Crash Bandicoot and his creator, Doctor Neo Cortex.

It takes a central cortex, if you like, to be able to orchestrate all those elements at the same time.

And some of the research now is showing is that people on the spectrum actually think with primary visual cortex.

From that perspective, feelings are closely tied to those regions of the cortex which are unique to primates, and humans in particular.

In other words, if somebody touches me, my hand, neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires.

Similar relationships have been observed between depression and an area of the anterior cingulate cortex implicated in the modulation of emotional behavior.

The wiring from your sensory apparatus to those bits is shorter than the bits that have to pass through the thinky bit, the cortex.

And instead of getting normal perception, you're getting an anarchic, convulsive stimulation, or release, of all of these visual cells in the inferotemporal cortex.

This was a woman who didn't have trouble with her eyes, but the visual parts of her brain, a little tumor in the occipital cortex.

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

This is partly motivated by how visual, auditory or other sensory information is handled in separate parts of the cerebral cortex in the human brain.

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.

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.

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

And indeed, you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex, which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats.

So, cooking is a very important technology, because it allowed us to acquire what brought you all here the big brain, this wonderful cerebral cortex we have.

Now what does a pre frontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time?

Well, it turns out the pre frontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is it is an experience simulator.

A 96 electrode Utah Array was placed on the surface of his brain over the region of motor cortex that controlled his dominant left hand and arm.

So just the same way that we were able to jump over the damaged circuitry in the retina to get to the retina's output cells, we can jump over the damaged circuitry in the cochlea to get the auditory nerve, or jump over damaged areas in the cortex, in the motor cortex, to bridge the gap produced by a stroke.

Light enters, hits the back of the retina, and is circulated, most of which is streamed to the very back of the brain, at the primary visual cortex.

Models of working memory, relying on theories of network oscillations and persistent activity, have been built to capture some features of the prefrontal cortex in context related memory.

Now, I had this brain scan done several years ago, and I used to joke around about having a gigantic Internet trunk line going deep into my visual cortex.

See, our pattern detection device, which appears to be located in the anterior cingulate cortex it's our little detection device there can be easily fooled, and this is the problem.

For one thing, those circuits almost always involved in human awareness include the lateral prefrontal cortex (due to the part it plays in short term memory and executive and control functions).