Andrew Huberman· PhD
in the case of the anterior mid singulate cortex we will soon discuss the fact that it gets robust input from a lot of different areas and we'll talk about what those areas are because this is extremely important when thinking about the different psychological and physiological resources that you can draw upon to engage tenacity and willpower but for the time being let me just go through the evidence in kind of list format of why we feel so confident that the anterior mid singulate cortex is such a vital hub for engaging tenacity and willpower for each of these points that I'm about to make there is indeed at least one if not several quality reviewed studies in humans so there's a lot of data from animals both rodents and primate models Etc that we're not talking about today but I should mention all of which supports the human data and vice versa the data I'm going to describe now come from humans and from a variety of different types of studies so there are a lot of different ways that one can consider if a brain area is implicated in a given psychological or physiological phenomenon like motivation or sadness or visual perception and those include for instance if a brain area is active during a given phenomenon so one way to explore this is to put literally wire electrodes down below the skull record the electric activity of neurons and assess whether or not the electrical activity of those neurons changes when a person is say viewing faces or feeling a particular way like feeling tenacious or feeling bored or feeling aggressive and so on another way of assessing a particular brain area's role in a given physiological or psychological phenomenon is in individuals where that particular brain area is injured you might expect that a particular phenomenon like willpower like the ability to perceive faces is present or absent whether not it's exacerbated or whether or not it's diminished other ways of assessing whether or not a given brain area is involved in a given phenomenon is whether or not that brain area literally changes size whether or not changes in volume over the course of some sort of training so for instance if somebody is not able to play a musical instrument such as myself and then I or a subject in one of these experiments learns a musical instrument and the volume the size of the particular brain area is assessed across the learning or simply before and after that musical learning and it grows or perhaps even if it shrinks or changes shape one might determine that it is somehow somehow involved in the process of learning a musical instrument you couldn't unequivocally conclude that but along with other types of evidence one could perhaps conclude that so that's just a partial list of ways to assess brain area function other ways include assessing what other areas a given brain area gets input from so for instance in the case of the anterior mid singulate cortex we will soon discuss the fact that it gets robust input from the autonomic nervous system which you already learned about it gets robust input from reward systems of the brain such as the dopamine and serotonin based reward systems of the brain and it gets robust input from the context and strategy setting areas of the brain as well and many other different brain areas