The Orbitofrontal Cortex - Our built-in Economist

PsyDactic

In this episode, I am sliding down and under the front part of the brain and consider the orbital frontal cortex, that part of the brain right above and a little behind your eyes. It is much smaller than the lateral gyri on the prefrontal cortex, but appears to be an important probability generator in our brain when we need to consider different options that can result in different rewards or in order to avoid aversive stimuli. The most basic kinds of rewards that neuroscientists can study are for food, because lab animals will respond to those, and while the OFC is definitely intimately related to food, in humans, its powers of prognostication are much more generalized.

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