Becoming Indomitable

Jane Eyre, the Central Executive Network, and the Power of Persistence

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Little Jane sits on a windowsill, a cold pane of glass between her and the misty world beyond. Everything outside is flat and empty. But in her mind she is somewhere else entirely, transported by the book in her lap to “a rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray.” And in that image, something takes hold, something hard and small and durable that will shape the rest of her life.

Neuroscientists have mapped three networks that govern much of our inner life. In the default mode network, the mind wanders and we construct a sense of who we are. The salience network scans the world and decides what matters. But it is the third, the central executive network, that perhaps most determines how a life unfolds.

The little girl on the windowsill is Jane Eyre, the orphan at the center of Charlotte Brontë’s novel. She has nothing in the world that belongs to her. Her aunt scorns her. Her cousin strikes her. And when Jane cries out “Unjust! — unjust!” she is the one who is punished. She is a child, powerless and alone, dreaming of escape. Yet something small and indomitable in her refuses to break. Inspired by the scenes in her book, she turns on her aunt: “You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so…you treated me with miserable cruelty.”

She cannot yet name what is growing in her. But in the image of that lone rock holding fast against a violent sea, she forms “an idea of her own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive.” It is the first blurry sense that she, too, might hold fast.

The central executive network is anchored in the brain regions that evolved most recently and most dramatically, the ones that make us most distinctly human. It does many things: updating the contents of working memory, shifting flexibly between tasks, inhibiting impulsive responses. But when neuroscientists Naomi P. Friedman and Akira Miyake looked beneath all of these, they found one common capacity: the ability to fix our attention on a goal, hold it steady against the pull of distraction and impulse, and bend our effort toward making it real.¹

Jane awakens to her own capacity when she arrives at the Lowood School and, for the first time, finds people who believe in her. “I from that hour set to work afresh, resolved to pioneer my way through every difficulty,” she tells us. “I toiled hard, and my success was proportionate to my efforts.” Over eight years of steady, deliberate effort, she graduates at the top of her class and becomes a respected teacher. Where the sky was once iron and the ground shrouded in snow, the world around her begins to yield. The rock surrounded by a violent sea has become one surrounded by “a bright beck, full of dark stones and sparkling eddies.”

Jane’s trajectory is not just compelling fiction. In the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, psychologist Terrie Moffitt and her colleagues followed one thousand children from birth to age thirty-two. They found that a child’s self-control—the ability to wait, persist, and resist distraction—predicted their health, wealth, and likelihood of criminal behavior three decades later.² This held true even after accounting for IQ, gender, social class, and family circumstances. Neither intelligence nor privilege predicted how a life would take shape.

What mattered most was the capacity to persist.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Jane reaches further. At the end of her years at the school, a new restlessness takes hold: “I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer.” She turns her mind to a different question. “What do I want? A new place, in a new house, amongst new faces, under new circumstances.” There is no clear path forward, but she has learned to trust her own capacity. She orders her mind to find an answer and after an hour of mental chaos, one arrives: advertise for a new position. “This scheme I went over twice, thrice; it was then digested in my mind; I had it in a clear practical form: I felt satisfied, and fell asleep.”

She succeeds. She secures a position as governess at a country estate called Thornfield Hall. It’s a life she chose, pursued, and earned on her own terms.

And at Thornfield, she finds something she was not looking for. In her employer, Mr. Rochester, she discovers a mind that matches her own—restless, searching, unafraid of her. “I have a strange feeling with regard to you,” he tells her. “As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you.” For the first time in her life, Jane is not merely enduring or striving. She is happy. Rochester proposes, and she accepts with joy.

But at their wedding, a stranger steps forward with a secret. Rochester is already married, to a madwoman locked away in the very attic above Jane’s head. Jane is shattered. “I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive.”

Jane asks herself what she is to do. Rochester begs her to stay as his mistress. Her mind gives a prompt and dreadful answer: leave Thornfield at once. “Conscience, turned tyrant, held Passion by the throat,” she tells us. Everything in her clamors to remain, to forgive him, to love him.

This is precisely the conflict the central executive network evolved to manage, moments when impulse pulls one way and intention another. Neuroscientists Kevin Ochsner and James Gross have traced the mechanism in the brain. The prefrontal cortex, home of the central executive network, sends signals that modulate the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, dampening its reactive pull.³ Our impulses and emotions do not disappear. But the brain can hold something else alongside them—a principle, a commitment, a sense of who we are—and choose to act from that instead.

And Jane does. Laws and principles, she tells us, “are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour.” With the full force of her will, she declares: “there I plant my foot.”

So she flees the only love and home she has ever known. It is the greatest test of her capacity; not holding a goal against distraction, but holding a principle against the full weight of her own heart. The landscape of her exile becomes the image from the book in her lap all those years ago. Alone in the wilderness, she finds “a moss-blackened granite crag in a hidden angle” and sleeps beneath it, surrounded by “high banks of moor.”

The rock against the sea was once only an image in a book. Now, afraid and exposed, she inhabits it with nothing between her and the sky but granite. Not a watery sea of spray and billow, but an inland sea of grass and silence with Jane at its center, holding fast.

Somehow, she survives. She secures a new position, becomes a headmistress, comes into her own fortune. When she finally returns to Rochester, she finds him free. His wife has burned Thornfield to the ground and perished in the blaze. This time she meets him not as a dependent or a governess, but as his equal—on her own terms, with her own life firmly beneath her feet.

She is no longer the little girl on the windowsill, hiding behind glass from the world outside, imagining a rock against the sea. She is the rock. And she is free.

Thank you to Brigitte Kratz for the help on this one ◡̈

1. Executive functions (the higher-order cognitive processes that regulate our thoughts and behavior in the service of goals) have long been associated with the frontal lobes, but their internal structure remained unclear for decades. In a landmark 2000 study, Akira Miyake and Naomi P. Friedman identified three core executive functions: the ability to shift flexibly between tasks, to update and monitor the contents of working memory, and to inhibit impulsive or prepotent responses. Using latent variable analysis, they found that these three functions were related but clearly separable, a pattern they termed “unity and diversity.” In subsequent work, Friedman and Miyake discovered something deeper: beneath the diversity of these functions lay a single common factor, which they characterized as the ability to actively maintain and manage goals and use those goals to bias ongoing processing. This common capacity was required by all executive function tasks, but was especially evident in tasks demanding inhibition, suggesting that what we often call self-control may be less about suppressing impulses and more about holding a goal firmly enough that the impulse loses its pull. Their framework has become one of the most widely cited models in cognitive psychology.

The foundational paper is Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000), “The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex ‘frontal lobe’ tasks: A latent variable analysis,” Cognitive Psychology, 41, 49–100. [Available at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10945922/] The common factor framework is developed in Friedman, N. P. & Miyake, A. (2012), “The Nature and Organization of Individual Differences in Executive Functions: Four General Conclusions,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21(1), 8–14. [Available at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3388901/]

2. The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study is one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever conducted. Beginning in 1972–73, researchers enrolled 1,037 children born in a single year in Dunedin, New Zealand, and have followed them with remarkable 96% retention across decades. In 2011, psychologist Terrie Moffitt and her colleagues, including Avshalom Caspi, published a study examining whether childhood self-control as assessed through observations, teacher ratings, parent reports, and self-reports gathered during the first decade of life predicted outcomes at age thirty-two. The results were striking. Children with lower self-control were significantly more likely to experience poor physical health (including respiratory problems, sexually transmitted infections, and obesity), substance dependence, financial difficulties, and criminal conviction. Crucially, these associations held along a gradient: outcomes improved at every incremental level of self-control, not just at the extremes. And the pattern persisted even after controlling for IQ and socioeconomic background. To further isolate self-control as the active ingredient, the researchers replicated their findings using a separate British cohort of 500 fraternal twin pairs, showing that the sibling with lower self-control at age five had worse outcomes at age twelve, even though both siblings shared the same family environment.

Moffitt, T. E., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D., Dickson, N., Hancox, R. J., Harrington, H., Houts, R., Poulton, R., Roberts, B. W., Ross, S., Sears, M. R., Thomson, W. M., & Caspi, A. (2011), “A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 2693–2698. [Available at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3041102/]

3. When we encounter something emotionally charged like a threat, a betrayal, or a loss, the amygdala responds rapidly, triggering the cascade of physiological and psychological reactions we experience as emotion. But we are not captive to that response. In 2002, neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner and psychologist James Gross conducted one of the first functional neuroimaging studies of what happens in the brain when we deliberately reframe an emotional experience, a strategy known as cognitive reappraisal. Participants were shown highly negative images and asked either to simply attend to their emotional response or to reinterpret the scene in a way that reduced its emotional impact. When participants reappraised, the researchers observed increased activation in lateral and medial prefrontal regions (areas associated with cognitive control, working memory, and the selection of goal-relevant information) and decreased activation in the amygdala. The pattern suggested a top-down mechanism: the prefrontal cortex, by constructing a new interpretation, effectively dampens the amygdala’s alarm signal. Subsequent work by Ochsner, Gross, and others has refined this model, demonstrating that different reappraisal strategies (reinterpreting the meaning of an event versus distancing oneself from it) recruit partially distinct prefrontal systems, but all depend on the same fundamental interaction between cortical control regions and subcortical emotional response systems.

The original study is Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2002), “Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(8), 1215–1229. The broader framework is reviewed in Ochsner, K. N. & Gross, J. J. (2005), "The cognitive control of emotion," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242–249. [Available at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15866151/]