top of page

Brain Systems That Control Your Behavior

Presenter:

Dr. Robert Sapolsky

Time:

7:40

Summary

You have three brains—the triune, the limbic, and the cortex—and they're all fighting for dominance as you go about your life. The so-called lizard brain (the triune) is perhaps the one we tend to think of as instinctual and gives us our basic instincts like, for example, staying alive or not touching fire.

Transcript

What's the best way to think about the brain? It's insanely complicated. Everything connects to everything, a gazillion little subres. Um, amid all that complexity, there's a broadly. Sort of simplifying way to sort of think about aspects of brain function when it comes to behavior. And this was an idea put forth by this guy, Paul McClean, a grand puma on the field.


Conceptually of thinking in the brain of the brain is coming in three functional layers. The triune brain, and again, this is highly schematic. The brain really doesn't come in three layers, but one can think of the first most, the bottom, most, the most ancient as being what's often termed the reptilian brain, where basically the parts in there, we've got the same wiring as in a lizard, isn't a any ancient creature.

bottom of page