Because of your genetic inheritance and the oddities of your early childhood environment, your brain’s wiring is utterly unique—no one has ever had a brain wired just like yours, and given the brain’s complexity, no one ever will. Some parts of your brain have tight thickets of synaptic connections, while other parts are far less dense. And when we examine your brain’s growth—when we count the new neurons and their connections—it turns out that you grow far more neurons and synaptic connections where you already have the most pre-existing neurons and synaptic connections. Perhaps this is caused by nature’s harshly efficient use-it-or-lose-it design, or perhaps, with so much pre-existing biological infrastructure supporting your densest synaptic regions, it is simply easier to forge new connections where you already have lots. Either way, we now know that, though every brain grows, each grows most where it’s already strongest. The arrow of brain development points toward specialization. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux memorably described it, “Brain growth is like new buds on an existing branch, rather than new branches.

It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not only not poorer, but it is even richer.’

—Cicero (106–43 BC)

If there’s one quality I believe defines wisdom in the workplace more than any other, it is the capacity for holistic or systems thinking that allows one to get the “gist” of something by synthesizing a wide variety of information quickly.

With our super-plastic neocortices and well-organized senses, Homo sapiens are the gluttons of the informavore world. We are uniquely skilled at acquiring, processing, and ordering information, and uniquely versatile when it comes to letting that information shape who we are. And when we are deprived of sensory information, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, we conjure sometimes fantastical information-rich worlds from the darkness to feed our inner informavore.

One sees a kaleidoscopic array of symptoms and dysfunctions, never exactly the same in any two people. The neurological dysfunctions interact with all that is particular and unique in an individual—their preexisting strengths and weaknesses, their intellectual powers, their skills, their life experience, their character, their habitual styles, as well as their particular life situations.