קאווע שטיבל

An oft-repeated fact about adolescents is how “emotional intelligence” and “social intelligence” predict adult success and happiness better than do IQ or SAT scores. It’s all about social memory, emotional perspective taking, impulse control, empathy, ability to work with others, self-regulation. There is a parallel in other primates, with their big, slowly maturing frontal cortices. For example, what makes for a “successful” male baboon in his dominance hierarchy? Attaining high rank is about muscle, sharp canines, well-timed aggression. But once high status is achieved, maintaining it is all about social smarts — knowing which coalitions to form, how to intimidate a rival, having sufficient impulse control to ignore most provocations and to keep displacement aggression to a reasonable level. Similarly, among male rhesus monkeys a large prefrontal cortex goes hand in hand with social dominance

Adult life is filled with consequential forks in the road where the right thing is definitely harder. Navigating these successfully is the portfolio of the frontal cortex, and developing the ability to do this right in each context requires profound shaping by experience

This may be the answer. The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes