What's Adolescence About?

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When we talk about the frontal cortex developing in this way, what exactly does that mean? Or is it more neurons coming online? or is it rewiring the neurons that are there? This is one of the cool things about brain development that like kind of transformed, you were thinking about it. Okay, developing brain, a brain that's doing a good job at getting ahead of the pack just in time for the SATs when you're a teenager... That's exactly the opposite of what you see. You have more neurons than what you're going to have as a young adult. What's adolescence about? It is not generating new circuitry. It's pruning out the circuitry that's

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There’s no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It’s a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action.

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Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. He is currently the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wonderfest’s Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

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