▪ Abstract The prefrontal cortex has long been suspected to play an important role in
cognitive control, in the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal
goals. Its neural basis, however, has remained a mystery. Here, we propose that cognitive
control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that
represent goals and the means to achieve them. They provide bias signals to other brain
structures whose net effect is to guide the flow of activity along neural pathways that …