Understanding the Frontal Lobes

Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute Conference focuses on an area of the brain believed to integrate thought, behaviour and emotions.

A key “take home” message of the recent Frontal Lobes conference in Toronto is that a fit brain is the best defense against age-related cognitive decline.

One of several neuroscientists who delivered that message was Dr. Art Kramer of the University of Illinois. “Use it or lose it,” he cautioned on the closing day of this intense five-day conference which heard from more than 40 top Canadian and internationally-recognized presenters. The good news, Dr. Kramer added, is that levels of cognitive performance are “malleable” and “open to enhancement” throughout the lifespan.

The conference, which is held every 10 years, was hosted this year by the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest and the University of California at Berkeley and attended by close to 700 clinicians, scientists and academics. The aim is to continually advance understanding of the role of frontal lobes in aging (from childhood to late life), the disorders that can disrupt this highly evolved but vulnerable part of the brain, and the way forward for treatment and rehabilitation when something goes wrong.

Frontal lobes research is the science of “what makes us human,” explained co-chair Dr. Donald Stuss, a senior scientist with the Rotman Research Institute. Once thought of as the “conductor” of the brain, the frontal lobes area is now seen more as one part of a “chamber orchestra” that works in concert with other areas to integrate thought, behaviour and emotions.

“Exciting new experimental findings are beginning to reveal how human thought and action unfolds with sub-second precision,” noted Dr. Knight, director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at Berkeley. “These findings provide the roadmap for understanding both normal human behaviour and how it goes awry in neurological, psychiatric and developmental disorders.”

Conference presenters reported on new approaches to understanding, diagnosing and treating these illnesses.