What are its primary functions?

The anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) helps generate persistence and willpower, allocate resources to meet challenges, and coordinate brain and body responses.

1. Willpower and effort: It is engaged by difficult tasks and helps people marshal themselves to persist, exert effort, or resist an impulse. 1
2. Resource allocation: It helps direct energy and fuel toward the brain and body functions needed for current goals and challenges. 2
3. Emotional, behavioral, and bodily responses: It connects with reward pathways and behavioral-control systems, and with autonomic, immune, and endocrine systems that influence functions such as heart rate and breathing. 3 4
4. Plasticity and persistence: The aMCC can change with experience and challenge; spontaneous activity is associated with grit, while greater activity is linked to persistence and willingness to exert effort. 5 6