ALPHABETICAL BRAIN™ VOCABULARY DETAILS about PREFRONTAL CORTEX Brain Flash Card #12 WHAT IS YOUR PREFRONTAL CORTEX AND WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT? What is the purpose and function of your PREFRONTAL CORTEX or PFC? The purpose of your PreFrontal Cortex is to make you the master of your emotions, which means that it gives you "executive control" over your feelings, if you know how to manage your emotions! All it takes is to do critical thinking and critical reading, meaning deliberately "slow" thinking or reasoning in contrast to "fast" thinking, which is directly related to instinctual or intuitive thinking based upon learned behaviors and memories of your attitudes of the past. Critical thinking and reading are skills that involve asking questions to satisfy your curiosity. At the most profound philosophical level of abstraction, they can be about the nature of reality and the ultimate purpose of the universe! The questions you ask yourself and your most trusted friends and relatives can involve the most serious kinds of intellectual activity as you make your own life meaningful within the social context that you were born into first and later within the personal context that you create for yourself. Everybody, no matter what their age, needs to cope with life's great issues and make fulfilling decisions at some time in their lives. The best way to cope now is to apply critical thinking and reading skills to create your own goals and plans based upon humanistic values. NOTE: See consciousness #1, neurons #2, potentiation #7, connectome #9, plasticity #10, cerebral cortex #11, and working memory #15. INSTANTLY GO TO: FACT CHECKER about PREFRONTAL CORTEX #12 OR RETURN TO: PREFRONTAL CORTEX: BRAIN FLASH CARD #12 OR RETURN TO: LIST OF 15 FREE BRAIN FLASH CARDS