I feel a bit cheap when I write about how researchers have located a brain area for something or other. It’s unremarkable that every aspect of cognition occurs in the brain; that’s where it all goes on. Except most people still find it really interesting to hear that people perceive faces with a specific part of the brain, or inhibit their behavior with a specific part of the brain. (I heard once that if you’re at a teaching/education conference and really want to drive your point home, you say that your learning technique leads to changes in the brain zomg.) The aspect most relevant here is that convincing people that mental illnesses are brain disorders tends to carry a lot of weight. (Although actually, they tend to involve the body too, and that’s pretty important.)
My guess is a lot of it is due to our having different mental systems for handling people’s thoughts/beliefs/intentions and for handling people as biological bodies, so it’s counterintuitive and mentally catchy to find out that something you’d thought was part of the person is actually part of their body. Reality doesn’t have a boundary between biological and mental, but the distinction we have between the two in our minds tends to influence things in odd ways.
Anyhow, here’s the link that inspired this. I think this is interesting beyond the “omg it’s in the brain” aspect, because it lifts out “remembering visual information in order” as a thing in itself and suggests that it might be impaired in ADD (and my guess would be other mental disorders as well since bipolar also involves the prefrontal cortex, depression involves the prefrontal cortex, autism involves the prefrontal cortex, etcetera). I’d love to see some investigations on whether/how this is an issue in daily life.