Building a Better Brain: Where Nature Meets Nurture

This Element is an excerpt from Making Sense of People: Decoding the Mysteries of Personality (9780132172608) by Samuel Barondes. Available in print and digital formats.

How your brain builds itself, evolves, and develops the unique personality that will guide you for the rest of your life.

We now know much about how our brains develop under the guidance of our personal gene variants and environments. Each brain--like each face--has its own innate building plans. These plans were not drafted by the systematic methods of architects. Instead, each brain uses a scheme that would drive contractors crazy, with continuous remodeling due to changes in both genetic and environmental instructions as the project proceeds....