It would adjust the primal and executive regions of the brain.
Therefore, it should recruit not only the default network, but also executive regions.
To investigate whether default network and executive regions can be coactive in the context of goal-directed simulation, we designed a problem-solving task in which participants simulated solving several specific problems in imaginary scenarios while in the MRI scanner.
A functional connectivity analysis with posterior cingulate and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex seeds revealed that activity in these regions was coupled throughout the goal-directed simulation period and associated with a distributed network of other default and executive regions, including medial prefrontal cortex, medial temporal, and parietal regions.
Adaptive training relative to control activities resulted in a complex pattern of subtle and localised structural changes: Training was associated with increases in cortical thickness in right-lateralised executive regions, notably the right caudal middle frontal cortex, as well as increases in the volume of the left pallidum.
Historically, disorders of women's sexual desire haven't responded to drugs that act on hormones or blood flow; unlike Viagra, a female-desire drug would need to make adjustments in the primal and executive regions in the brain, tapping into the psyche.
Previous investigations using task-irrelevant distracters that induce general negative affect identified opposing patterns of activity in affective and executive regions (increased vs. decreased, respectively) [18], which were demonstrated to be specific to emotional distraction [17], [40], [41].
In Locke & Braver [8], it was found that task performance under reward conditions was primarily associated with a sustained rather than transient increase in activation within executive regions such as PFC and parietal cortex, when compared to performance under baseline, non-reward conditions.
Similarly, to identify activity in the dorsal executive regions that was sensitive to the presence of emotional distracters, separate t maps were first computed to identify voxels where emotional distracters produced reduced activity compared to both scrambled and neutral distracters (emotional < scrambled & emotional < neutral).
In this latter work, TUTs were reported to be associated with co-recruitment of "Default Mode" (precuneus, posterior cingulate) regions and "Executive" regions including DLPFC.
In the schizophrenia patients, bilateral gray matter reduction in Heschl's gyrus as well as motor and executive regions of the frontal cortex was correlated with reduced MMN amplitude in response to frequency deviants, while reduced gray matter in right Heschl's gyrus was also correlated with reduced MMN to duration deviants.
