Editorial introduction to Greenwood/West dialogue

Abstract

Although a U.S. Presidential Proclamation designated the 1990s “The Decade of the Brain,” not all cerebral constituents shared equally in the limelight. By anyone's accounting, the prefrontal cortex was the darling of clinicians and neuroscientists throughout the '90s, with everything from schizophrenia and anorexia nervosa to pathological gambling and the emergence of artistic skill attributed to “frontal lobe dysfunction” (David, 1992; Miller et al., 1998; Rugle & Melamed, 1993). It should come as no surprise, then, that that most universal of cognitive afflictions, aging, should be linked to changes in frontal cortex.