In search of the brain's executive

摘要

In unpublished work over about ten years starting in 1995, John Taylor, Raju Bapi, Guido Bugmann, Neill Taylor, and I developed a network theory of the cognitive functions of the frontal lobes. We dealt with the long popular notion of the prefrontal region as executive of the brain [1]. Some cognitive neuroscientists had called for abandoning the executive idea because the functions of planning, organizing, and controlling behavior were distributed over many brain regions and not run by a single “homunculus.” Yet we believed that the executive concept was still useful if we analyzed it in system terms, including the executive functions of the prefrontal's connections with other areas, notably basal ganglia and thalamus; parietal, premotor, and secondary sensory cortices; and amygdala.