Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area.

There is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord.

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

Why care if it is the brain stem or the cerebral cortex and how this is made?

You cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between cerebral cortex and brain stem.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

On the side here, this is temporal cortex.

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.

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.

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.

It also can actually damage the brain, when left unchecked over time. Especially in regions like the hippocampus which is involved in memory consolidation and the frontal cortex.

So from the retina you go onto visual cortex.

Finally his willpower erodes as his frontal cortex changes.

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

Look at cerebral cortex, look at brain stem, look at body, and you get the picture of the interconnectivity in which you have the brain stem providing the grounding for the self in a very tight interconnection with the body.

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

It's a little different than the way we think about brain disorders like Huntington's or Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease where you have a bombed out part of your cortex.

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.

The first two are shared with many, many other species, and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species.

We have this big cortex, we're pretty proud of ourselves.

The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex.

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

And as you can see, large amounts of the brain are not purple, showing that if one person has a thicker bit of cortex in that region, so does his fraternal twin.

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.

Brain magic.

Our brain's visual cortex is especially sensitive to the physics of motion.

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

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

What a brain!

And the brain?

Use your brain!