The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity

executive freedom of the individual human to shape his future radically beyond the limits of any prior individual animal in the course of evolution.
    I must mark for the reader a clear separation between the simplistic notion of the prefrontal cortex as a mythical “CEO in the brain,” which it is not, and its central role in the conception and organization of goal-directed actions. This role is composed of several nervous subfunctions, including working memory, preparatory set for action, and inhibitory control. This book is not an apologia for a new theory of the prefrontal cortex to supersede all others. It is, rather, a synthetic view of the processes by which those subordinate functions of the prefrontal cortex, under its overriding function of temporally organizing action, serve our freedom and our ability to create the new, the good, the useful, and the beautiful.
    The ultimate foundation of human liberty consists of two cognitive functions that radically differentiate us humans from all other organisms. One is language and the other our ability to predict the future – and to shape our actions accordingly. Language is vastly more than an extension of animal communication. It is a means of imparting information, emotion, experience, and logical thought to ourselves and to others. Because language is also a means of predicting future events (Latin praedicere , to foretell) and of constructing plans of action, language and prediction are largely inseparable. The two functions are intimately related to each other, though neither is reducible to the other. One purpose of this book is to explore the nature of that relationship. In any case, both functions stem from the dynamics of a complex adaptive system determined by a finite past but open to an unlimited future. Both language and prediction are solidly based on the workings of the prefrontal cortex. For this reason alone the prefrontal cortex emerges from evolution as the cradle of liberty.
    The vast majority of our daily activities carry success rates of nearly 100 percent. Most of those daily activities, however, are automatic, overlearned, unconscious, and reinforced by repeated previous success. By contrast, our most momentous decisions, that is, those that shape our future (such as career, marriage, emigration, financial investment, new research, or child-bearing), are rarely based on prediction with the highest probability of success, or, conversely, with the lowest risk of failure. It is those momentous decisions that are clearly within the purview of the prefrontal cortex, as the enabler if not the executive of the brain.
    Consequently, also in the purview of the prefrontal cortex is all manner of creative or innovative activity in all fields of human endeavor, from the artistic to the social, to the professional, to the scientific, to the philanthropic, to the sporting. In the human agenda success and failure are defined by the attainment of goals not only in biological terms, including health, pleasure, and the absence of pain, but also in terms of values treasured by us humans: love, recognition, trust, credit, esthetic pleasure, praise, social acceptance, and others. Whether and to what extent those values are the result of the sublimation of biological urges is not essential to my present argument. What is essential is that our freedom to pursue them rests on the health and vigor of our prefrontal cortex.
    The critical dimension of that temporal-organizing function of the prefrontal cortex, the one that bears on freedom and creativity most directly, is the future. Curiously, almost everybody concerned with frontal functions ignores it, except clinicians and the students of working memory. The first because the planning difficulty of the patient who has suffered injury to the frontal lobe is so glaring, and the second because working memory, for which the frontal lobe is so important, is memory retained to be used in the near future. Everybody else seems afraid to be accused of teleology, that is, of believing that the future can cause the present, which is the nemesis of the physical scientist.
    There is another group of scientists, however, who are beginning to see the connection between the future and the prefrontal cortex: the neuroeconomists. The field of neuroeconomics deals with the role of brain structures in the prediction and probability of expected risk and value deriving from free choice – financial reward among others. The