A team of researchers led by the University of California, Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute has tracked the progress of a thought through the brain, showing how a region called the prefrontal cortex coordinates activity to help us act in response to a perception. The team's results appear in the journal Nature Human Behavior. Recording the electrical activity of neurons directly from the surface of the brain, lead author Dr. Avgusta Shestyuk and colleagues found that for a simple task, such as repeating a word presented visually or aurally, the visual and auditory cortexes reacted first to perceive the word. The prefrontal cortex then kicked in to interpret the meaning, followed by activation of the motor cortex in preparation for a response. During the half-second between stimulus and response, the prefrontal cortex remained active to coordinate all the other brain areas. For a particularly hard task, like determining the antonym of a word, the brain required several