Dr. Mark D'Esposito

Hey, Andrew, thank you so much for inviting me.

I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah, so there's four lobes.

There's the frontal lobes, parietal, temporal, occipital, and the frontal lobes probably do take up more territory than the other lobes, probably about a third of the cortex.

And within the frontal lobes, I'm going to use the frontal lobes probably in our conversation a lot, but what I really mean is the prefrontal cortex.

So within the frontal lobes, there's also areas that are important for motor function as well.

But when we're talking about the frontal lobes and talking about its, you know, involvement in higher level cognitive abilities, we're talking about the prefrontal cortex.

And this is what's considered sort of the highest level of cortex in the brain.

So, yeah, when you think about it, people assign it all sorts of functions.

Almost every function you think of, people have sort of put into the frontal lobes.

But I think what we've all kind of...

move towards this idea of executive function, this ability to plan, to organize, to really transfer our thoughts into an action and really to be guided by goals and intentions and not be kind of ruled by sort of just automatic decisions.

A word we use in cognitive neuroscience is called cognitive control.

So cognitive control, executive function is what we attribute to the frontal lobe.

And so you can think of it as the CEO of the brain or the conductor of the orchestra, really the part of the brain that's really controlling the rest of the brain.

So yeah, if you had to choose which part you wanted to not leave home, it's your frontal lobes.

Yeah, I mean, at first I should say is that it shows up all the time.

And frontal lobe behavior is probably much more prevalent than we realize.

Certainly we think about it when you have a brain injury to the frontal lobes.

And there's lots of neurological disorders like stroke and traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer's disease that can affect the frontal lobe.