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.

Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area.

Really, consciousness is seated in the frontal lobe.

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

And he studied Alzheimer's patients that had frontal temporal lobe dementia.

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

The side and the underside of the prefrontal show deep vertical grooves.

And in particular, one area of the temporal lobe is called the fusiform gyrus.

The dorsal surface of the turtle's head has a single pair of prefrontal scales.

And you can see here, he's starting to get more energy into the frontal lobe.

We know that if you stimulate the temporal lobe, you can produce a feeling of out of body experiences, near death experiences, which you can do by just touching an electrode to the temporal lobe there.

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

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.

No student has ever complained of pains in the front lobe of the left side of the brain.

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.

It has also been suggested that stimulation of the temporal lobe by psychoactive ingredients of 'Magic Mushrooms' mimics religious experiences.

The prefrontal possesses a flange, continuing from the lower part of the lacrimal bone to the lower part of the ascending process of the prefrontal, and connecting to a process on the side of the praemaxilla to form an elevation on the side of the crest base.

And the temporal lobe hallucinations are all sense hallucinations, full of feeling, full of familiarity, located in space and time, coherent, dramatic.

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

You have the middle area, where the temporal lobe might be, in here, and the posterior portion, where the maintenance functions are in the back.

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.

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.

Well, we know exactly where it happens, in the temporal lobe, right across, sort of above your ear there, in a little structure called the fusiform gyrus.

You'll see broad bacterial groups, and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe, it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group.

Just very simply, the three parts of the brain the frontal lobe, where you focus your attention and concentration you have the temporal lobe, where you form images and keep memories and the posterior part of your brain, which contains the cerebellum, which controls motion and the brain stem, where you have your basic maintenance functions, like heartbeat and respiration.

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.

Removal of just one lobe of the lung is specifically referred to as a lobectomy, and that of a segment of the lung as a wedge resection (or segmentectomy).

There is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy, and sometimes, if one has this, one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past.

And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the frontal lobe. And particularly, a part called the pre frontal cortex.

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).

At each separation and orientation, the lobe pattern of the interferometer produces an output which is one component of the Fourier transform of the spatial distribution of the brightness of the observed object.

Neuropsychology and neuroimaging The first researcher to note and catalog the abnormal experiences associated with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) was neurologist Norman Geschwind, who noted a set of religious behavioral traits associated with TLE seizures.

And when you're happy what we call positive valence you squirt dopamine into the prefrontal lobes, which makes you a breadth first problem solver you're more susceptible to interruption you do out of the box thinking.

And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago, but it was during the time I was writing my last book, and some people say that book is quite different.

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 we think, at least in this preliminary it's one study it's probably wrong, but it's one study we think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that, to be creative, you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe.

I do have to say, somebody I read recently that van Gogh wasn't really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don't I suppose it does something in some part of your brain.

So at least as far as these aspects of our awareness depending on the prefrontal cortex are concerned among them the knowledge who we are and the ability to plan and to make decisions there is reason to assume that humans are distinct even from other primates.

Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self aware than grown ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically teenage behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain.

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.

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.

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.