Here is another summary that I think is a bit more understandable than the one above
the Executive Brain:Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind by Elkhonon Goldberg Reviewed by Neil Greenberg
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/goldberg.pdf
some excerpts
"acute stress can effectively take the prefrontalcortex"off-line"allowing the organism to default to more conservative phylogenetically older mechanisms that evoke instinctive or highly automatized action patterns(18)"
"Could there be a dysfunction of that key modulator of frontal lobe function,the mesocortical dopamine system?This system which originates in the ventral-tegmental area of the brain stem can be selectively activated by stress(21)
