But often, it's easier to resist temptation with distraction, or to be so inculcated in doing the right thing that it's automatic, outside the frontal cortex's portfolio - Then it isn't the harder thing, it's the only thing you can do.

We're getting along so well; I trust you so much for this one second that I'm going to let you yank on me.

On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.

Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease.

Perhaps most excitingly, we are uncovering the brain basis of our behaviors - normal, abnormal and in-between. We are mapping a neurobiology of what makes us us.

Finish this lecture, go outside, and unexpectedly get gored by an elephant, and you are going to secrete glucocorticoids. There's no way out of it. You cannot psychologically reframe your experience and decide you did not like the shirt, here's an excuse to throw it out - that sort of thing.

What happened in the milliseconds before a behavior to cause it? That's in the neurobiological realm.