Gunnar – prefrontal cortex

The regions in the prefrontal cortex, the higher order thinking and reasoning regions of the brain. But some of those regions in the medial –middle– area are involved in stress regulation. The logic here, nature’s logic, seems to be, that if you’re going to grow, if you’re going to live in an environment of threat, you need to be an act first, think later person. And so these biases you’re seeing, and what’s happening to the brain, are getting you to perceive threat and react, and the prefrontal cortex isn’t saying, “Wait a minute, let’s think about it. Should we run? Should we not run?  Was it a tiger? Did it have stripes?” It’s going [slap] “outta here!” 

And you’re getting bias towards that. That’s what we think is happening. We’re looking for evidence of it. It certainly fits with what we think is one of the biggest challenges for children who grow up under really chronic stress. Which is they get into environments, like school, where they need to think, a lot, and inhibit action, a lot. And it’s really, really hard for them. Especially when there’s any distraction around, especially if anything’s going on at home, which it often is, which is making them feel more anxious that day, is that they really are getting tipped toward act first, think later. 

And the school context, the context we need for making a really good living, is a struggle because the brain, through eons of evolution, has mapped itself towards survival in a very different kind of environment. And we’re learning ways to help those children rewire, right, and we’re looking for evidence. The clearest evidence we ever see is a reduced brain volume, especially in the prefrontal lobes. That’s been the, I mean, consistent, over and over and over and over again, our finding the prefrontal cortex really struggles to develop in the context of adversity.