Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Of monkeys and men

A recent study coming out of Japan, got me thinking about executive functions. Tetsuro Matsuzawa and team found that although human and chimp prefrontal cortexes start out a similar size in infancy, humans' prefrontal cortexes grow faster beginning at a very young age.


So, what has your frontal lobe done for you lately? It's the portion of our brains' credited with your long-term self image, personality and impulse control. It helps us predict future consequences of our current actions.



Unfortunately, not every outcome is predictable - as seen in the Rise of the Planet of the Apes trailer:



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