06/05/2025
Know Your Frontal Lobe
Your frontal lobe handles many abilities, including:
Reasoning: This includes simple and complex processing of information. Logic, reasoning, judgment, decision-making and creativity all fall into this category.
Social understanding: Your frontal lobe controls your understanding of social norms and helps determine what you should and shouldn’t do or say.
Executive functions: Some examples of these include self-control and inhibitions, attention span and working memory.
Voluntary muscle movements: These are intentional movements, such as moving your hand to pick something up or moving your legs to stand up and walk around. Your frontal lobe also contains the brain area that controls the muscles you use for speaking.
Learning and recalling information: This is your brain’s ability to process and learn new information for later use. Your frontal lobe also helps retrieve information later.
Executive function refers to mental processes (executive functioning skills) that help you set and carry out goals. You use these skills to solve problems, make plans and manage emotions. Research suggests strong executive functioning skills make a difference in your mental and physical health and quality of life. Poor skills can affect your ability to do well in school, find and keep a job, or have strong social connections.
There are three main executive functions:
Working memory.
Cognitive flexibility.
Inhibition control.
Research suggests the main executive functions develop at different times throughout your lifetime, starting in infancy. Most types of executive function become less effective as you get older.
Working memory
You rely on working memory to make sense of information that you receive or events that happen over time. For example, say you get your news from a website that posts frequent updates. Working memory is how you integrate new information from a news update on a specific issue with what you read before to adjust how you think and feel about the issue.
Research shows that your working memory executive function develops during childhood and adolescence and reaches its peak in your early 30s. This function starts to decline after age 35 and into middle age and old age (age 65 and older).
Cognitive flexibility
Cognitive flexibility comes into play when you need to adapt to change, whether that’s your personal situation or a change in your environment.
You show cognitive flexibility when you’re able to smoothly shift gears between tasks, thought processes and situations. You use cognitive flexibility when you multitask — for example, answering a colleague’s question while writing an email.
You’re also using cognitive flexibility when you use empathy — like thinking about an issue from another person’s perspective. Likewise, you use this executive function skill to change course when you must solve a problem and realize the solution you had in mind won’t work.
Some experts believe that children start developing cognitive flexibility at age 3 and complete development at age 12. Other experts believe this executive function continues to improve up until around age 29.
Inhibition control (inhibitory control)
This skill focuses on how well you control your thoughts, emotions and focus. By using inhibitory control, you’re able to manage your reactions to situations.
For example, you’d use this executive functioning skill when you focus on a conversation in a noisy office by consciously blocking (inhibiting) other conversations and noise. And if that office conversation takes a turn that makes you feel angry or anxious, inhibition control is how you resist the urge to do something you’ll later regret, like losing your temper and storming out of the office.
Research suggests inhibition control development begins in infancy and starts to decline when you reach your 60s.
