Neural Substrates of Planning

Many will agree that algebra is difficult to learn -- it involves planning, problem-solving, the manipulation of symbols, and the application of abstract rules. Although it's tempting to imagine a specialized region of the brain for each of these processes, they may actually recruit roughly the same widely-distributed and general-purpose "task network" of brain regions.

However, the functional specialization of each brain region may be best understood as fulfilling a particular balance between the computational tradeoffs that arise in connectionist networks. Prefrontal, posterior and subcortical regions may interact in a complementary fashion to satisfy these opposing requirements, as described below in a sample domain of high-level cognition: planning.

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