I was asked the following question on Quora:
Why is planning & decision making situated in the frontal lobe?
Here’s my answer:
Why not? 🙂
I suppose the most obvious answer is the fact that the motor cortex resides in the frontal cortex.
Now you may justifiably ask: what does the motor cortex have to do with planning and decision-making?
The connection is this: to a large extent, the purpose of the brain is to control the body. So planning and decision-making, at the simplest possible level, involves determining when and how to move the body.
From this perspective, it is interesting to speculate that all thoughts derive from the process of virtual or simulated movement. Thought arises in the ‘gap’ between perception and action.
The way an organism interacts with its environment can be understood in terms of the perception-action loop.
Stimuli from the outside world enter the brain through the sensory organs and percolate through the various brain regions, allowing the organism to form neural ‘representations’ or ‘maps’ of the world. Signals originating inside the body (such as from the stomach or the lungs) allow for similar maps of the inner world of the organism.
By using memory to compare past experience with present conditions, an organism can anticipate the future to meet its current needs: either by acting in the present, or by planning an action for some future time.
The signals that control our voluntary muscles emanate from the motor cortex: the neurons in this part of the brain are the ‘switches’, ‘levers’ and ‘buttons’ that allow us to change our body position and configuration.
So going back one more step, the signals that influence the motor cortex constitute the ‘proximal’ decision signal. Much of the input to motor cortex comes from premotor and prefrontal areas, which are nearby in the frontal lobe. The thalamus also sends important signals to motor cortex, as do the neuromodulatory systems (which include the dopamine, acetylcholine, norepinephrine and serotonin systems).
Ultimately you can keep going ‘back’ to see how every part of the brain influences the ultimate decision: sensation, memory and emotion all play a role. But the prefrontal and premotor areas constitute the most easily identifiable decision areas.
As to why these brain areas are located in the frontal lobe at all… this is a much more difficult question. The short answer is evolution by natural selection. But the long answer is still incomplete. Brains are soft tissue, so they don’t leave fossils.
