Disinhibition: more than a misnomer.

Despite great progress in the science of social cognition, the old Victorian notion of disinhibition is entrenched in our current thinking. According to this notion, the frontal lobes serve to inhibit the subcortical structures, and with the release of such inhibition, innate behaviors are released. This paper makes a case that the notion of disinhibition is more than a problem of semantics and is rooted in an erroneous, social Darwinistic view of brain organization as a hierarchical and dichotomous order between cortical and subcortical structures, which has no anchorage in the hardwiring of the brain neuroanatomy that suggests a mutually reciprocal relationship between these structures.