“The prefrontal cortex bears responsibility for ADHD too. We can think of inattention in general as an inability to inhibit interest in unimportant stimuli and motor impulses. In other words, we can’t stop paying attention to what we shouldn’t be paying attention to. The prefrontal cortex is also the home of working memory, which sustains attention during a delay for a reward, and holds multiple issues in the mind at once. If working memory is impaired, we can’t stay on task or work toward a long-term goal because we can’t keep an idea in mind long enough to operate on it or to ponder, process, sequence, plan, rehearse, and evaluate consequences. Working memory, which is like our random-access memory (RAM), can be considered the backbone of all the executive functions. A failure of working memory is also why people with ADHD are terrible at keeping track of time and thus prone to procrastination. They literally forget to worry about the passing time, so they never get started on the task at hand.”