And so we had this focal area called the medial prefrontal cortex that went way up in activity.

Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area.

And you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fMRI, versus the right prefrontal cortex.

So you have the prefrontal cortex here, lighting up in red.

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

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

So in my lab, we bring adolescents and adults into the lab to have a brain scan, we give them some kind of task that involves thinking about other people, their minds, their mental states, their emotions, and one of the findings that we've found several times now, as have other labs around the world, is part of the prefrontal cortex called medial prefrontal cortex, which is shown in blue on the slide, and it's right in the middle of prefrontal cortex in the midline of your head.

Interestingly, this approach also emphasizes the significance of the prefrontal cortex for the generation of the visualization.

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

Medial disdyakistriacontahedron

Medial deltoidal hexecontahedron

Medial hexagonal hexecontahedron

Medial icosacronic hexecontahedron

Medial pentagonal hexecontahedron

Medial rhombic triacontahedron

Medial triambic icosahedron

We had this broad patch of area called the lateral prefrontal cortex that went way down in activity, and I'll summarize that for you here.

The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls, and that's probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average, and then during adolescence, there's a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex.

In red is an area that active in the prefrontal cortex, the frontal lobe of the brain, and in blue is this area that was deactivated.

Medial inverted pentagonal hexecontahedron

Models of working memory, relying on theories of network oscillations and persistent activity, have been built to capture some features of the prefrontal cortex in context related memory.

This region is more active in adolescents when they make these social decisions and think about other people than it is in adults, and this is actually a meta analysis of nine different studies in this area from labs around the world, and they all show the same thing, that activity in this medial prefrontal cortex area decreases during the period of adolescence.

For one thing, those circuits almost always involved in human awareness include the lateral prefrontal cortex (due to the part it plays in short term memory and executive and control functions).

This tendon passes behind the medial condyle of the femur, curves around the medial condyle of the tibia where it becomes flattened, and inserts into the upper part of the medial surface of the body of the tibia, below the condyle.

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.

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

The cerebral cortex is made up of gray matter.

You're flying through the cortex of my colleague's brain.

The side and the underside of the prefrontal show deep vertical grooves.

So at least as far as these aspects of our awareness depending on the prefrontal cortex are concerned among them the knowledge who we are and the ability to plan and to make decisions there is reason to assume that humans are distinct even from other primates.

Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self aware than grown ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically teenage behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain.

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.

This big cortex, or whatever, we're pretty proud of ourselves.

With its total of four mirrors, the telescope can also focus on the medial infrared spectrum.

Now that might sound bad, but actually this is a really important developmental process, because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells, the synapses, and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning, the elimination of unwanted synapses.

The dorsal surface of the turtle's head has a single pair of prefrontal scales.

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

So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains.

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

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

I've gone and had an fMRI myself, to see how my visual cortex is taking over.

Again, I'm putting your anterior cingulate cortex to the test here, causing you conflicting pattern detections.

It's been shown to promote pre frontal cortex development where a lot of cognition is happening.

And this region, the regions within the limbic system, have been found to be hypersensitive to the rewarding feeling of risk taking in adolescents compared with adults, and at the very same time, the prefrontal cortex, which you can see in blue in the slide here, which stops us taking excessive risks, is still very much in development in adolescents.

The prefrontal possesses a flange, continuing from the lower part of the lacrimal bone to the lower part of the ascending process of the prefrontal, and connecting to a process on the side of the praemaxilla to form an elevation on the side of the crest base.