Prefrontal Cortex

I will try my best to make sure the jargon in this post is well defined, but I will be exploring science and philosophy, I apologize if it becomes convoluted, and hard to follow. The prefrontal cortex of the human brain is something I thought about while reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, and this part of the brain has always intrigued me. Here today, I will talk about this area of the brain, talk about what I think about this part of the brain, and if any other philosophy that comes to mind. The prefrontal cortex is located in the cerebrum, and more specifically near the front of your brain--hence "frontal"--as well as being in the frontal lobe, it is in the outermost layer of the brain, and it is the most novel area of the brain; According to evolution, the formation of the prefrontal cortex is the latest in our brains evolution, which I will dive into later, explains a lot. This area of the brain is where rational thought occurs, where you think about things in a logical and pragmatic way. It's also where your senses will end up after going through your limbic system. In other words, it's the place where you start wondering why you got livid, and overreacted when someone did the most frivolous thing to you. It's a great area of the brain, and we don't use it enough. Yeah, I don't think that we use this part of our brain enough, as a human race. We have physically evolved, and been given the tools to do amazing things, however we don't use these tools, we are stuck in old habits. Speaking of habits, they occur in the innermost layer of the brain, there's a part known as the basal ganglia, and this area of the brain is associated with, again, creating habits. This area, along with the hippocampus, and other emotion associated areas of the brain, are the oldest areas of the brain, so are humans thinking beings, or feeling beings? Well, in more ways than one, we are feeling before we are thinking. Besides that, I think this helps explain why we don't use our prefrontal cortex often. This is where we get into conjecture, and my personal thoughts. I think that as a race, we've grown habits, ways of doing things, and passed things down, and these things have formed before the prefrontal cortex, before rational thought, and there are things we call, "innate," are these things: love, emotion, morality, etc. just human habits that have been passed along? As we live, and grow, we form many habits, and a habit doesn't require the prefrontal cortex to be used, so by making life easier, for the brain (remember the brain is a machine not of production, but of efficiency), we stop thinking rationally, logically, and exercising that wonderful area of our brain. What this gets us to now is, simply asking, "alright, well what do we do about it?" In my mind, ask more questions, think about what you're doing, be more thoughtful, aware, and mindful. Habits are wonderful, but there is a time to question everything, why do we do everything? Do you truly know every single thing you do? If you studied yourself enough, even things that are random, are actually not, they're habits, very specifically going off to certain cues (habits are a three part process, cue, routine, reward, it's how you form and edit habits). In today's world, we are still naturally reacting pessimistically to things; whenever something goes wrong, our natural reaction is, the Sun's not coming up tomorrow. No, it is, there's still a few billion years left in the sun, and if I'm not mistaken, the world is still spinning. I digress, but that is what we do; we need to use our prefrontal cortex, and think, logically, and be optimistic. Optimism is a choice, and conscious choices are made with, you guessed it, our prefrontal cortex. I've said this from the beginning of my writing two years ago, the brain is a tool, don't let it use you, and the part of the brain that uses you is the old, emotional areas in the temporal lobe.

I hope that I didn’t get too confusing, and that I didn't say too many extraneous things, and I also hopefully conveyed my thoughts, and energy through this post. Addressing the newest part of the brain, how we should use it more, and my own philosophies littered through this post, the big takeaway here being, use your brain more. I also hope the pure science and philosophy in this post was nice, it helped me stretch those muscles, and hopefully I'll have a subject I can do this in again. Again, thank you for reading, I appreciate it, have an amazing week, and I’ll see you the next, peace. Original

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