Passingham Richard E. - The neurobiology of the prefrontal cortex: anatomy, evolution, and the origin of insight

Oxford Psychology Series

Editors: Mark DEposito, Daniel Schacter, Jon Driver, Anne Treisman, Trevor Robbins, Lawrence Weiskrantz

1. The Neuropsychology of Anxiety
J. A. Gray

2. Elements of Episodic Memory
E. Tulving

3. Conditioning and Associative Learning
N. J. Mackintosh

4. Visual Masking
B. G. Breitmeyer

5. The Musical Mind
J. A. Sloboda

6. Elements of Psychophysical Theory
J.-C. Falmagne

7. Animal Intelligence
L. Weiskrantz

8. Response Times
R. D. Luce

9. Mental Representations
A. Paivio

10. Memory, Imprinting, and the Brain
G. Horn

11. Working Memory
A. Baddeley

12. Blindsight
L. Weiskrantz

13. Profile Analysis
D. M. Green

14. Spatial Vision
R. L. DeValois and K. K. DeValois

15. The Neural and Behavioural Organization of Goal-Directed Movements
M. Jeannerod

16. Visual Pattern Analyzers
N. V. S. Graham

17. Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch
C. L. Krumhansl

18. Perceptual and Associative Learning
G. Hall

19. Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge
A. S. Reber

20. Neuromotor Mechanisms in Human Communication
D. Kimura

21. The Frontal Lobes and Voluntary Action
R. Passingham

22. Classification and Cognition
W. K. Estes

23. Vowel Perception and Production
B. S. Rosner and J. B. Pickering

24. Visual Stress
A. Wilkins

25. Electrophysiology of Mind
Edited by M. D. Rugg and M. G. H. Coles

26. Attention and Memory
N. Cowan

27. The Visual Brain in Action
A. D. Milner and M. A. Goodale

28. Perceptual Consequences of Cochlear Damage
B. C. J. Moore

29. Binocular Vision and Stereopsis
I. P. Howard and B. J. Rogers

30. The Measurement of Sensation
D. Laming

31. Conditioned Taste Aversion
J. Bures, F. BermdezRattoni, and T. Yamamoto

32. The Developing Visual Brain
J. Atkinson

33. The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, 2e
J. A. Gray and N. McNaughton

34. Looking Down on Human Intelligence
I. J. Deary

35. From Conditioning to Conscious Recollection
H. Eichenbaum and N. J. Cohen

36. Understanding Figurative Language
S. Glucksberg

37. Active Vision
J. M. Findlay and I. D. Gilchrist

38. The Science of False Memory
C. J. Brainerd and V. F. Reyna

39. The Case for Mental Imagery
S. M. Kosslyn, W. L. Thompson, and G. Ganis

40. Seeing Black and White
A. Gilchrist

41. Visual Masking, 2eB.
Breitmeyer and H. men

42. Motor Cognition
M. Jeannerod

43. The Visual Brain in Action
A. D. Milner and M. A. Goodale

44. The Continuity of Mind
M. Spivey

45. Working Memory, Thought, and Action
A. Baddeley

46. What Is Special about the Human Brain?
R. Passingham

47. Visual Reflections
M. McCloskey

48. Principles of Visual Attention
C. Bundesen and T. Habekost

49. Major Issues in Cognitive Aging
T. A. Salthouse

Anatomy, Evolution, and the Origin of Insight

Richard E. Passingham
Steven P. Wise

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Dedication

In memory of
Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic (19372003)
Edward V. Evarts (19261985)
Edward G. Jones (19392011)

Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display
of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals
observed by Germans sit still and think and at last evolve the solution out of
their inner consciousness.
Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (1925)

In the 1960s, the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria gave a much anticipated lecture in London, which one of us attended. He started by drawing a brain on the blackboard and placing a large question mark over the prefrontal cortex. At the end of the lecture, he triumphantly rubbed out the question mark. Readers of this book will not be so lucky.

Why prefrontal, why now?

One of us had a go in an earlier book, The Frontal Lobes and Voluntary Action (Passingham 1993). That book treated the frontal lobes as a whole, including its motor areas, and it suggested that their key functions involve conditional behaviour. In this kind of behaviour, one sensory context determines which action to take and other contexts lead to other actions.

The publisher later asked for a second edition, but a simple revision was out of the question. Too much has changed. The 1993 book appeared in the infancy of functional imaging, which has altered the field profoundly. The book proudly showed a brain scan as the frontispiece and described the first authors early results from positron emission tomographyand that was all. The intervening years have seen thousands of imaging papers, with more on the prefrontal cortex than on anything else.