The Neuroscience of You

between them randomly. On the other hand, if one member of your team has incredibly strong verbal skills, while the other is an excellent graphic designer, your team would perform better as a whole if the tasks were systematically assigned to the individual best qualified for the job.

Job assignment in the brain works a bit like this. If the two hemispheres were truly identical to each other, there would be no rhyme or reason to which functions they might come to perform. But as soon as they start to differ-even a little bit-an opportunity is created for one hemisphere to be better suited for certain types of jobs than for others. When this happens, the assignment of jobs across hemispheres becomes more systematic. And as the jobs that a particular brain region is asked to do become more similar to one another, that region can adapt, developing a more specialized structure that allows it to perform the particular type of tasks it's involved in even better.

I assume that the benefits of specialization are somewhat self-explanatory. If everything else were equal, many people would rather have an extremely talented graphic designer on their team than one with average skills. But what if that graphic designer was bad at everything else? If your whole team were made up of people with non-overlapping skills, what would happen if someone needed help or called in sick? One of the measurable costs to specialization in the brain is that the refinement process by which an area becomes specialized makes it better and better suited for doing fewer and fewer things.

Stefan Knecht and colleagues demonstrated this increased vulnerability associated with lopsidedness in a study that looked at language laterality-a term neuroscientists use to describe the extent to which any of your brain's functions come to depend more on one hemisphere than the other. To do so, they first measured changes in blood flow in the two hemispheres when 324

Smart, funny, irreverent reading this book is like downloading a PhD in neuroscience in one exuberant sitting. It s a must read for any budding neuroscientists out there, and anyone else who wants to know how our brains work and why it matters.
Anna Lembke, author of New York Times bestseller Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
 
We re all the same: human beings. At the same time, we re all different individuals. In her marvelous, accessible, often funny and always informative book, Chantel Prat reconciles this seeming paradox. Read this book; you ll understand and admire your species and your brain as never before. And you ll have a hell of a lot of fun getting there!  
David P. Barash author most recently of Threats: Intimidation and its Discontents
 
Neuroscientists emphasize how most brains work, but finally here s a book that emphasizes how your brain works! Chantel Prat artfully describes why and how our brains differ skillfully interweaving accessible facts about genetics, environment, and brain science to help explain what makes you uniquely YOU! The book is a joy, the footnotes are hilarious, and the topic is of central importance to all those interested in human uniqueness, cognitive science, and how much we share and differ from the rest of humanity.
Patricia K Kuhl, cognitive neuroscientist, Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and author of The Scientist in the Crib