Individual Differences in Human Brains

We're wired differently. Surprise! Surprise!

Although most of our brains are wired pretty similarly in areas that deal with sensory stimuli like sound and vision, the situation isn’t nearly so straightforward in brain areas that’ve expanded most in our species’ recent evolution – the areas, in other words, that are considered crucial for uniquely human abilities like speech and self-reflection. In these newer areas of the brain, neural wiring and activity show striking differences from one person to the next.