Dr. Mark D'Esposito

You said, well, don't eat, but I'm hungry, right?

Another sort of example is where the frontal lobe is not completely kind of developed.

So when I think about rules, I think about the brain.

You know, the brain processes information, obviously, but it also stores information.

The most important thing it does is store all sorts of information all over the brain.

And I think what the frontal lobes do is they store rules.

And what's interesting about the way it stores rules, they seem to store the rules in a hierarchical fashion.

And what I mean by that is that there's different levels

to rules.

I like to give the example of playing golf.

I tell a story a lot about my good friend, Bob Knight, when he hits a ball into the woods and he has to try and hit the ball out of the woods, he's holding on to all different levels of rules on how to successfully get his ball back towards the green.

So the most simplest one is just like, where is the flat?

I've got to maintain a

orientation to get to the flag, you know, so he's holding that.

He also had a higher level rules.

He knows that if he kicks the ball, it's a penalty, so he's not going to do that, right?

And then another higher level rule might be if I just keep doing this, you know, this is going to be healthy for me.

And so he's storing all this information at sort of different levels of hierarchy.

And he's applying it to ultimately achieve this very simple act of, or not so simple act of hitting the golf ball.

So I think about sort of the frontal cortex is able to call upon the rule in the appropriate context.