Is Your Frontal Cortex Fully Online?

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We have these sort of sub second time scale responses, which we can modulate or even override if we want to. Your testosterone levels this morning are going to have something to do with how likely you are to decide that somebody with a neutral facial expression actually has this threatening facial expression. And then what was this time scale you associated with the hormone system, with the endocrine system? You know, hours or a bunch of minutes to a few days or so. So playing out in that sort of time course, but that's just a smidgen of what we have to take into account because all we've gotten to is the biology of the last couple of days that have brought you to

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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