Frontal lobes

We knocked of Heroic Shadow Labyrinth and Steamvaults for Galein and Rubmytotem (courtesy of Sherider) last night. Shadow Lab went notably smoother -- just one recent reminder run and you get a lot less mispulling, forgetting who fears, etc. We did get sloppy in Murmur's room a few times, but that actually just gave Galein time to get back from rescuing Mastemodio from his broken-down car and get back in to complete the quest.

We took things at a pretty casual pace and spent a lot of time just chatting on vent. The conversation ranged pretty broadly over a very wide range of amusing and potentially controversial topics. Late at night, we touched on the issue of dealing with anger and/or frustration which reminded me today of a neuroscience point that might be worth mentioning.

The prefrontal cortex of the human brain (the frontal lobes) contains the brain regions associated with control of behavior, executive function and in particular, inhibiting inappropriate behavior. So you can sort of think of an outburst saying something you regret, or a particularly bad moment of decision making as a failure of your frontal lobes.

Of note, the frontal lobes are really slow to develop, so you see kids and younger people in general more at risk of a regrettable outburst. Interestingly, recent studies of neuro-development have pushed back the age that the frontal lobes are thought to be fully mature from late teens to late 20s (!). This finding was actually found to be comforting to mid-20s people I've discussed it with because it means that even if you still feel you experience occasional regrettable frontal lobe moments, you can expect things to get better because your frontal lobes are still growing in.

Sadly, for us older folks, we're already on the downslope of frontal lobe function, so it's probably only going to get worse from here.

Tangentially related, I found out yesterday that Google is offering to install "frontal lobes" in your email client:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html

The idea is that you can configure it to double or triple check that you really want to send that email at 3am, when you're at particular risk to be doing something like "drunk dialing" somebody you later wish you hadn't. If you try to send an email between 2am and 6am (configurable), it pops up a dialog box asking you if you really want to send that email and gives you some simple arithmetic problems to do to prove you're not cognitively impaired.

Alcohol goes pretty much straight to your frontal lobes, fwiw. Which is both pretty much what's intended when drinking and obviously also dramatically increases the risk of an embarassing frontal lobe failure.

Alcohol also ends up in your cerebellum pretty quickly too, which is why you get vertigo (balance) or gait (walking) impairments. In theory, it should throw off all sorts of other fine-motor timing functions, but in practice, I don't think it either makes me worse at Guitar Hero or less accurate at my tanking button sequence. Why that is, is a separate research topic for another time.