The Neuroscience of Reasoning

Species that possess large amounts of cortex and especially association cortex tend to show advanced reasoning skills. The relationship of large brains to complex behaviors may be driven by whether an organism is a predator. Many of the early neuroimaging studies of reasoning suggested that the frontal lobes were particularly important. Some network studies indicate that the frontal lobes may serve a coordinating or control function, possibly integrating wide-scale activity across the brain, rather than operating as a relational module. There is a strong impact of materials on reasoning studies in the brain. Materials invoke our semantic memories, which tend to be supported by temporal lobe regions. The integrated sets of information that we can use in reasoning are called schemas or scripts. Brain network interconnectivity looks to be an especially promising area toward capturing the complexity of neural processing in reasoning and may further clarify some of the roles of specific brain areas that have been linked to reasoning in various forms.