the values according to which we conduct our lives today will shape the future.

Probably the most important characteristic of the PFC is its connectedness. Virtually all other parts of the brain link to it directly. All of your senses, your feelings and memories, even the parts of your brain regulating your inner biology, have direct neural connections to your PFC.

Our lives are filled with a nonstop barrage of inner and external motivations competing for our attention, and it’s a crucial part of the PFC’s function to prioritize these.

Bolte Taylor, like Sperry and Gazzaniga, discovered that the hemispheres are like two contrasting personalities within a single mind. The left half, she writes, ‘thrives on details, details, and more details about those details …

our mainstream culture’s self-congratulatory obsession with humaniqueness blinds us to the vast amount of animate intelligence we share with our fellow creatures.

was using the IQ test to assess the abilities of over a

If the information available is fuzzy or ambiguous, the left hemisphere simply fills in the gaps with whatever it can find, creating an elaborate story, if necessary, to make everything comprehensible.

master collage of what this moment in time looks like, sounds like, tastes like, smells like, and feels like’. It is ‘free to think intuitively outside the box, and it creatively explores the possibilities that each new moment brings … It identifies our similarities and recognizes our relationship with this marvelous planet, which sustains our

Jonathan Haidt has suggested that feelings are so much more central to our lives than reason that they dominate most of what we do and even form the basis of our moral judgment.