Future Pundit on Recent Brain Research

"the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning, abstract reasoning and other higher brain function"

Only the prefontal lobes (35% of the cortex) are responsible for planning, abstract reasonaing and higher brain function. The rest of the cortex is "responsible" for creating visual, auditory, and visceral perception...as well as association of perceptual input.

These kinds of erroneous statements radically diminish credibility of the statements of research scientists. It makes you wonder if they know what they're talking about. If they do, then they should be more careful about what they say.

Fair?

Denny, My take on simplifications in scientific press releases is that if the scientists explained in detail what they were talking about the press releases would have to be so long no one would read them.

Sometimes I see some press release which has simplifications that confuse and lead to really wrong impressions. But in this case I don't see the harm done. My guess is that as human brains got larger than other primates a disproportionate part of the increase was allocated to the prefrontal lobes anyway. So this gene's mutations had the effect of making the prefrontal lobes larger and that, more than anything, made us self-aware and distinctly what we consider human.