© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Dynamic Landscape of the Frontal Lobe: A Tribute to Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic
1 Department of Neurobiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06510, USA, 2 Department of Health Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA and, 3 Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3190, USA
Address corresponding to email: xjwang@yale.edu.
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
A rod going through the frontal lobe of Phineas Gage in 1848 signaled the beginning of the quest to understand the enigma of this fascinating region of the cortical mantle. In the ensuing 100 years, progress was extraordinarily slow, save for the work of Jacobsen in 1935 revealing that the lateral prefrontal cortex was necessary for monkeys to hold stimuli for a short delay. In the 40 years after Jacobsen's work, neuroscientists such as Teuber, Nauta, and Luria were unable to pin down the neural basis of the prefrontal cortex in organized behavior. These eminent scientists referred to the frontal cortex as "a riddle," "mystifying," and the "youngest and most complex portion of the cortex." The situation began to change in the 1970s, and the last decade has witnessed an accelerated growth in the field of prefrontal research. Today, empowered with techniques like