Dr. Mark D'Esposito

But it's really interesting, like you said, is it really just sort of maintaining, telling you what's relevant and what's not relevant, or is it allowing you to switch?

I think it does all those things.

It definitely, what we call, sends these top-down signals.

It's sending signals to the other brain about what you should be paying attention to and what you shouldn't be paying attention to.

So, for example...

We've done studies with functional imaging where we have them look at pictures of faces and scenes and that lights up the back of your brain.

Your visual cortex has areas that can process faces and process scenes.

But sometimes we have you just want to pay attention to the faces and not the scenes and other times we want you to pay attention to the scenes and not the faces.

Even though it's getting the same bottom-up visual input, the prefrontal cortex will show greater activity to the relevant information.

It's sending a signal saying, pay attention to the faces, ignore the scenes, or vice versa.

So it's directing all of this information that we're bombarded with.

to what's relevant.

But at the same time, it's also allowing us to switch.

If we now have to go switch to another task, it says, okay, this is not important now.

We're going to move over to this other task.

So there's many different components of how it can control behavior, but it does all of these things in this incredible way that we still don't completely understand, but we know that's the source of all of this control is coming from the prefrontal cortex.

Yeah, I was just sort of talking in terms of our knowledge of how, you know, changing... In one of your podcasts, you talked about how TMS to the prefrontal cortex can slow heart rate.

So I meant in that sort of way.

Got it.

That, yeah, by influencing cortical function, obviously we can influence organs like the... Got it.