Prefrontal synthesis

As a result, "mental synthesis" was adapted to describe the active process of assembling two or more independent objectNEs from memory into novel combinations.

[8][15][16] The term "prefrontal synthesis" was later proposed for use in place of "mental synthesis" in order to emphasize the role of the PFC and further distance this type of voluntary imagination from other types of involuntary imagination, such as REM-sleep dreaming, day-time dreaming, hallucination, and spontaneous insight.

There is a dearth of dependent clauses and, more generally, an underutilization of what Chomsky characterizes as the potential for recursiveness of language"[18][19] The mechanism of PFS is hypothesized to involve synchronization of several independent object-encoding neuronal ensembles (objectNEs).

However, once those objectNEs are time-shifted by the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) to fire in-phase with each other, they are consciously experienced as one unified object or scene.

In the process of formation of novel receptive memories, neurons are synchronized by simultaneous external stimulation (e.g., light reflected from a moving object is falling on the retina at the same time).