Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry was the victim of brain freeze when he failed to come up with the third of three federal agencies he vowed to slash if he won the White House. When the brain tries to make sense of a reasonable quantity of information, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex increases. But as you attempt to tap into more and more information, as Perry was presumably trying to do, activity in this brain region drops like a stone, a result of "cognitive and information overload," according to Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple's Fox School of Business.