In search of the brain´s executive

In unpublished work over about ten years starting in 1995, John Taylor, Raju Bapi, Guido Bugmann, Neill Taylor, and I developed a network theory of the cognitive functions of the frontal lobes. We dealt with the long popular notion of the prefrontal region as executive of the brain [1]. Some cognitive neuroscientists had called for abandoning the executive idea because the functions of planning, organizing, and controlling behavior were distributed over many brain regions and not run by a single “homunculus.” Yet we believed that the executive concept was still useful if we analyzed it in system terms, including the executive functions of the prefrontal´s connections with other areas, notably basal ganglia and thalamus; parietal, premotor, and secondary sensory cortices; and amygdala.