Instant Genius - How neuroscience is reshaping our understanding of free will

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

How much control do we have over our actions and decisions? For most of us, it’s likely that the answer is that, of course, all of the choices we make are our own. But it’s long been argued by some scientists and philosophers that this isn’t the case at all. Could it be that the trajectories of our lives are largely already written into our biology, genes and neural circuitry before we’re even born? In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Hannah Critchlow, a neuroscientist and author based at the University of Cambridge and recipient of the 2026 Humanist Society’s Rosalind Franklin Medal. She explains how our personalities, beliefs and actions are deeply influenced by our ancestry, genes and upbringing, what’s happening in our brains when we make a decision, and how current research is showing that accepting our predispositions can likely help us all make the most of who we are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio. to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts

talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, a BBC science focus. How much control do we have over our actions and decisions? For most of us, it's likely that the answer is, of course, all of the choices we make are our own. But it's long been argued by some scientists and philosophers that this isn't the case at all. Could it be that the trajectories of our lives are largely already written into our biology, genes, and neurosurcuitary before we're even born? In this episode, we're joined by Dr Hannah Critchlow, a neuroscientist and author based at the University of Cambridge

and recipient of the 26 Humanist Society's Rosalind Franklin Medal. She explains how our personalities, beliefs and actions are. deeply influenced by our ancestry, genes and upbringing. What's happening in our brains when we do make a decision and how current research is showing that accepting our predispositions can likely have us all to make the most of who we are. So Dr Hannah Critchlow, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for the invitation, Jason.

You're welcome. So today we're talking about free will, the notion of free will. So a huge question to start with, but a very important one. Do we have a broad description of what we have? actually mean by free will? Is there a strict-ish definition of what we're talking about? So really, the primary study in this area came in around 1985 by a neuroscientist called Benjamin Libyme, and he was based at the University of California in San Francisco. Now, what he did was really quite a simple investigation. He took some volunteers in a laboratory

setting, and he attached an EEG machine to their skull. So he had little electrodes, and he was measuring the electrical activity on the motor cortex, which is a band of the brain, which basically runs around here, and instructs movement within the body. So, for example, there's an area on this side of the motor cortex, which instructs movement in the wrist. And he would ask his volunteers, have a look at a clock that's just there in front of you, and instruct your wrist to move. and notice the time when you're instructing your wrist to move. And what he found was that generally speaking for his volunteers, the electrocler burst of activity in the motor cortex that was directing that movement actually came 350 milliseconds before they were consciously aware that they were instructing that movement.

And then the actual movement came 200 milliseconds after that. So it seemed to be the sequence of event that within the brain, the direction of the movement occurred before the conscious awareness that you were instructing movement in your body. So the initiation of how you're going to interact with the world actually came before your conscious awareness. And from this, he surmised that perhaps we don't have any free will, which I think is quite a broad interpretation of the results. and there's been, you know, quite a lot of discussion about really the meaning of these findings since then. Perhaps it's just that people are kind of, they're having a delay with how they're actually monitoring the time that it's taken for their conscious awareness to register. But, you know, despite the different interpretations of these studies, what we do know is that going back across different cultures, across history as a species, we've always been fascinated with this concept. of destiny or fate, if you like.

And this idea that perhaps life trajectories might be pre-programmed into us. Maybe we're born to be destined to be great. Maybe we're, you know, we have this reason for life that is written into us when we're born. And there's no shaking that. We've got this story, this journey that we've got to go on throughout our life and that this is written into our biology. And it's an idea that has been very much investigated through storytelling and more recently through scientific investigation. And the results are fascinating, I find.

Yeah, so let's dig into some of those then. So I think the first thing that will come to most people's minds when they hear this idea and they want to frame it scientifically would be, well, our genes are passed on throughout generations? So are our genes playing a role in this idea at all? Yeah, so really in the last few decades, we've been able to peer into the brain as never before and watch as a conscious moving mammal, navigates this space, interacts with others and makes decisions in its environment

and decides how to interact. And the results are showing us how intricate and sophisticated our brains are. And then at the same time as being able to watch decisions being made in the mind, we've been able to live during this great era of a genomics revolution. So we're now able to sequence the DNA that we've been given from our mum and dad. And just to put some kind of concept of numbers on this, it's 3.2 billion base pairs of nucleotides that we've been given from our mum and dad in the genes. So there's something in the region of 20, 25,000 genes that we've been given.

And they're expressed and basically dictate how our bodies are going to be put together, including our brains. So how our brains are going to be put together. And recently we've been able to start to sequence these nucleotides, this DNA, this individual blueprints that we've been given from our mum and from our dad, that creates how our bodies are put together. But we've also been able to watch as we are created in the womb. So we can start to see how this embryo takes shape, how the brain of the baby is kind of creating the foundation for thought. we can start to see how 86 billion nerve cells that live in our brain, and we're actually born with that number of brain cells when we emerge from the womb, we can start to see how those nerve cells are being put together in that second trimester of pregnancy to create the foundation for thoughts for that baby. And then we can start to bring together those results with the genetic results as well. And what you can start to see is that there's this genetic signature that goes to shape the neural circuitry signature that you are born with as a baby when you emerge into this life.

And so there's these wonderful patterns of genetic predispositions that you've been given from that DNA code from the mum and dad that then plays out in how your neural circuitry is put together for that initial. circuitry of thought when you're a very young child. And then obviously your early life experiences will go on to shape and further sculpt that neural circuitry as you experience different things in life. So that affects your perception and your sense of reality. But nonetheless, we can see that that genetic code that you've been given goes on to dictate or kind of help shape that basic neural circuitry which creates the foundations for thought. So let's rewind a little bit then and look at what's going on our brains when we have a thought, you know, what do we know about that? You know, what even is a thought?

So each one of those 86 billion nerve cells that we're born with are actually connected up with something in the region of 10,000 other nerve cells. So we have this incredibly intricate, sophisticated circuit board of around 86 trillion connections within our mind. So it's incredibly complex. And each one of those nerve cells is this really beautiful structure. It's kind of got this star-shaped cell body, which spreads out with dendrites. And it's called dendritic arbors. And it looks a little bit like a tree, if you like.

So they've got the arborization, all the branches from the tree reaching out. And each one of those dendritic arbors basically has lots of other little sticks on it and leaves on it, if you like. But they're actually called synapses. and they connect up to neighbouring nerve cells. And then the tree trunk of that nerve cell structure is called an axon. And that's studded with pores. And those pores basically pump sodium and potassium on our ions in and out of that cell membrane. And that pumping of charged ions basically creates an electric current because it's a movement of charge.

And that electric current zips across that nerve cell to the next nerve cell. to the next nerve cell in the circuit because there's also connections, if you like, in the root system of the nerve cell as well as the leaf system. And so there's this really complicated, very intricate circuit board with these 86 trillion connections

basically passing these electric currents from one nerve cell in the circuit to the next nerve cell in the circuit at speeds of around 120 miles an hour these electric currents. So they're zipping around the brain really, really, really quickly And that is thought. So that's how an idea takes shape

through this movement of charged ions and the passage of electrical currents. And now the really interesting thing is that when your brain is being created, when you're in the womb, that initial circuitry, that basic way that those nerve cells are going to start connecting up

to allow that information to be processed, right? to create the root ways in your mind. That's all happening under the instruction of the genes being expressed. And those genes are basically handed down from your mum and from your dad. And that creates that neural circuitry, which is why I'm saying it's the foundation for thought. Yeah, so having said that, do we all think largely in the same way? Or is there sort of subtle variations from one person to the next due to this?

Yeah, so there's subtle variations. So each one of us, and when I was, you know, I was really emphasizing those numbers there, and that's because of the sheer power of these numbers. So I was talking about 3.2 billion base pairs of nucleotides, 86 billion nerve cells in each one of our brain, 8 to 6 trillion connections, right? So if you think about it, the number of permutations, the number of different differences that we can have within each one of us, there's a huge scope for diversity there, not just in the way that our nucleotides are put. together to create our genes, but also in the way that that trickles down to impact our neural circuitry. So if we compared your brain to my brain, there would be huge differences. I mean, there'd be similarities in where like the basic structures are. I shouldn't do that.

But there'd be like there'd be lots of differences in terms of the nuances of those, that circuitry. And it's that circuitry that basically informs how we perceive the world, how we create our sense of reality, what information we pay attention to, what information we filter out. And then also, when we bring together lots of information from the outside world through all of the different senses and integrate it, which bits do we place more weighting on? Which bits do we really, you know, concentrate and focus in on? There'll be big differences between your brain and my brain and the circuitry that we have because of the genes that we've been given from our mum and dad.

and that will help us create different versions of reality, different perceptions of the world. And it will also create different habits in our thinking and different habits in the way that we make decisions and behave and focus. And then this is where it gets to the really beautiful thing. So there's been some lovely studies by Kristen Uttar Frith, who are neuroscientists that are based at University College London. And they found that when groups of people get together and freely discusses, us how they view the world, how they create their sense of reality. If they can communicate with each other freely, then they're much more likely, each one of them, to balance out any biases and then start to see the world in a much more accurate way. So when groups of diverse brains

get together, you start to create a much more accurate representation of reality. So in essence, we have very, very, very unique individual DNA. That plays out in our brain circuitry. It also plays out in the way that we look. So we've got different eye colour, different hair colour, different heights, different weights. But we also have different neural circuitry that creates different types of behaviours as well. So we've got different idiosyncrases and different flaws and different strengths in our behaviour. But when we get groups of very different brains together, then you start to see the world in a much more accurate way and then you can start to problem solve much more effectively because you've got a greater breadth of cognitive power with which to play from.

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Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking.

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This is really interesting. So, I mean, this presumably would help us to predict how somebody's going to respond to a certain stimuli or a certain event. You know, what can we say about that? Can we learn from studying somebody's brain patterns what their sort of typical habits of thought are? Is that possible? So what you can do is you can now very quickly take a DNA sample from someone. so take a quick swab inside the cheek, analyze the DNA from the saliva and the cells there, and I think it takes, you know, less than 30 minutes now to do that DNA sequencing, and it's very cheap.

And what that information tells you can give you some idea of the genetic predisposition that they might have. So we know from huge studies, including, you know, many, many, many, many people, that there is a heritability, which means a genetic element, a genetic predisposition, that accounts for the variants across the population that might be attributable to their genes that they've been given from their mum and dad. And we know that, for example, as I was saying, hair colour and eye colour and height and weight

might have a heritability of around 70 to 90%, say, when we look at more complex behaviours like our belief system, whether we're going to be extrovert or introvert, for example, whether we might be more likely to be left wing or right wing in our ideological kind of beliefs, whether we might be resistant to mental ill health issues, even how long we might live. There is some information that's held within that genetic sequence

that we've been given from our mum and dad, things like how impulsive we might be, how risk of us we might be. So some quite complex. behaviours there, that you can kind of use this genetic and this brain profiling data and bring it together to predict with some sensitivity what that person's behaviour will be like and what their habits in interacting with the world would be like. Yeah, I mean, that's really interesting because often discussions like this,

the whole nature of, well, the whole topic of nature versus nurture comes up. But in a way, an individual human being doesn't have any saying in either. to be honest, you know, I couldn't choose my parents, I couldn't choose my genes, I couldn't choose the way I was raised even, I couldn't choose the environment I grew up in. So, you know, where does the nature of our own personal free will come into that? Yeah, as a young child, you don't really have much choice, do you in your upbringing? And again, so it's reinforcing the genes that you've been, that have been passed down. So your parents have there, and they've basically given you your biological predispositions from the genetic material,

but they're also very much shaping the environments that you're in. They've made the choices for which area of the world they're going to be living in, which school you're probably going to be going to where you're going to be playing. So again, that's probably reinforcing their preferences and their ways of thinking and their ways of seeing the world. What we do know is that we, all of us, learn from our environments to a really high degree. And this is what I did my PhD research on. So I was looking at how these connections within the brain occur as we learn and respond to our environments.

So there's this beautiful process by which we learn. So as we soak up new information, a little filipodia reaches out from one nerve cell and makes a connection with a neighbouring nerve cell. And that filipodia is like this worm-like structure in the brain. It's minuscule, you know, it's nanometers small. And as that connection is consolidated from a learned thing into a memory, it becomes much more of a stable dendritic spine it's called. And now it's mushroom-shaped. And it's got these lovely receptors there that help to transfer that electric signal

that I was talking about earlier with high integrity and high responsiveness. And then that mushroom-shaped dendritic spine can actually mature and change and grow into a heart-shaped dendritic spine and then split into two new connections within the brain so it can amplify the way that that signal is being sent from one nerve cell to another. So this is a dynamic process that is happening in our brains all the time. So every day we're able to create new connections via this very dynamic flexible approach within our brain to create new routes by which those electric circuits, there's electric currents can zip around our brain to create our sense of reality

and instruct how we're going to react to the world. Now, when we're a very young child, we have a huge amount of plasticity. If you zoomed into a little baby's brain, then you would see that there's huge amounts of connectivity changes that are occurring. We've got lots and lots and lots of those lovely philipodia kind of rooting around, trying to make new connections. And we know that babies sleep as well for quite a high proportion of the day and the nights, hopefully. And that sleep process really helps to consolidate what they've learned during the day into those nice stable connections, those memory spines.

As we get older, we're still able to have that plasticity, that flexibility, that ability to learn from our environment. but our scope for that, our potential for that, is slightly diminished. So there's more learning from the environment that occurs within those young baby brains. But as you say, how much control does a baby have over its environment? So again, really, the genes that we've been given from our families, that we've been brought up by our parents that have been given us that genetic code, is really amplifying some of those personality traits by the choices that the parents are making

in terms of how that child is being brought up. Yeah, so I've heard of a concept called transgenerational memory. That sounds almost like science fiction. Is there really, is there much we can say about that? Yeah, so we've been talking really just about the parents, haven't we, shaping the baby's brain and shaping the baby's trajectory and a little bit of how the environment can then later go on to impact the decision-making of that baby as it grows up. But more recently, there's been this wonderful area of neuroscience,

or wonderful area of biology really called epigenetics, which has looked at how memories can be transmitted across generations, not through any changes in the DNA sequence, but via a different mode. Now, the initial study in this came actually fairly recently in 2014. So there's this wonderful guy called Kerry Reisler who works in America. And he did a study that basically left the neuroscience community reeling. They were really shocked by the findings for this because it's quite profound. What he did was he knew that mice loved the sweet smell of cherries.

So when the sweet smell of cherries kind of hits their nose, they go, oh, that smells lovely. And there's an electric signal which basically zips across from the nose all the way to this region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is buried deep in the mouse's brain. And we've got one of those regions as well, the nucleus accumbens. It's involved in our feelings of reward and pleasure and motivation. And so this area sparks to life with electrical activity in the mouse because it's smelt this sweet. smell of cherry, and it starts feeling very motivated to scurry around and look for this lovely, lovely little sweet treat to nibble on. And what Kerry did was he went against all that, all those evolutionary ingrained cues and signals that have been developed in the neural

circuitry of the mouse. And he actually paired that sweet smell with an electric shock. So the poor mice got a waft of cherry and then they got a mild electric shock in their environment. And they're very quickly after a few iterations of this, learned to pair the sweet smell of cherries with an electric shock. And so they started to, whenever they smelt cherries, tense up in anticipation of a shock coming. So preparing their bodies, preparing their muscles for this mild electric shock. So it's kind of the opposite of Pavlov's dog. It's a very mean experiment, a mean version of that. And what Kerry did after the mice learnt this new way of responding to the cherries was to just leave the mice be.

So at this point they didn't get any electric shocks and they didn't get any sweet smell of cherries. And they settled down and they had a family. And the pups also had a lovely life. So no electric shocks but no sweet smell of cherries. And they had a family as well. So now we're talking about the grand pups of the original mice in the study.

And at this point Kerry wafted in the sweet smell of cherries and what he discovered was that somehow the mice, had learnt to freeze in anticipation and to exhibit more anxious, kind of stressed behaviour when they smelt the cherries. So it was almost as though the grandparents had somehow transmitted this new experience down the line across two generations to impact the behaviour of the grandpups. Now, Kerry was interested in how exactly this had happened. He thought perhaps they had been telling the story of this new association. on warning the pups and the grandpups.

So he did some neat experiments using IVF and fostering out the pups and he found that storytelling certainly wasn't the mode. So they weren't learning through any communication. So then what he did was he started to analyse the sperm of the original grandfather and what he found was that there was a epigenetic change. So there was a change not in the DNA in the sperm, not in the sequence, but in the shape of the sperm. sperm DNA. So DNA is usually this beautiful spiral staircase kind of structure and and then it's

tightly, tightly, tightly packaged because you've got to get, I mean, for humans, it's 3.2 billion base pairs like really, really tightly packaged into all of your chromosomes. So they really, really compact it up in every one of your, basically almost every one of your cells in your body. There's really tightly packaged DNA. And the way that it is shaped actually affects how enzymes can access it to express those genes. And what Kerry found out was that the experience of pairing, the electric shock with the sweet smell of cherry had actually changed the shape, the packaging of that DNA in the grandfather's sperm.

So now the enzymes accessed it in a different way and that affected how the neural circuitry was being put together in the baby's brain when it was in the womb. and also in the grand pup's brain when it was in the womb and before it was born. So now what was happening was the root that was going from the cherry being kind of triggering a response in the nose was basically now being re-routed because the neural circuitry had basically, that the genes had been expressed to change the neural circuitry. So it was now going to the amygdala, which is an area of the brain that's involved in the fear response. So it had been re-routed from the nucleus accumbens to go to the amygdala, which created that fear and that kind of anxious response in the mice. So basically the memory had been transmitted across, in this case, over two generations, and it had changed the way that it was responding to this trigger of this nice sweet smell of cherries.

So I find that this sort of thing really interesting, because personally speaking, I'm really terrified of snakes. But I've never lived anywhere, really, where there are. ar snakes in the wild. I've rarely seen them other than on television, but they're just absolutely like the mice make me freeze and just, oh, no, I just can't deal with them. I couldn't, for example, you know, when people put them around their necks, there's absolutely no way I could do that. And I was wondering, is that a similar thing? What Kerry and researchers since then have found out is that in sea elegans, which is, you know, the little kind of earthworms, yeah, you actually, you can transmit these types of signals, these traumatic memories, these concerns over something

in the region of 12 to 14 generations. And there seems to be a similar mechanism. Again, it's this change in the way that the DNA is packaged via these epigenetic modifications that affect the gene expression, which affects then how the neural circuitry is wired together. So there's similar mechanisms that exist in humans. So it might be that, experiences can be transmitted for humans in much the same way. I mean, there is no scientific consensus within the neuroscience community about this yet. It's a very new area of scientific study. As I said, the original kind of study in this just came out 11 years ago. So we're kind of accruing more and more and more data. But it does seem to be the case that memories can be

transmitted in humans as well, using this similar type of epigenetic modification to affect the neural circuitry. Now, when we look at your fear of snakes, or, for example, a lot of people are frightened of spiders, what we know is that, for example, for spiders, there's something in the region of 38,000 species of spiders across the world, of which only 0.2% of these spiders actually kind of are any danger to humans. So that's quite a low probability that you should be frightened of spiders. But it's something that a lot of us are.

And similarly for snakes, there's something in the region of, I think in America, they found out that there was 16,000 cases of humans being hurt by snakes every single year, but only six people per year die from a snake-related injury, which I mean is still fairly high, isn't it? if you consider that from an English perspective. But statistically speaking, snakes and spiders aren't really that terrifying to us.

So is it that maybe going back in our evolutionary history, there's some ingrained response that helps to protect us, similarly to this sweet smell of cherries that Kerry was kind of giving, maybe there's some evolutionary ingrained response to make us more wary of snakes and spiders? Well, first of all, when you look at children across different cultures, the way that they focus their gaze on snakes, for example, then you can see that they do seem to have a hypervigilance to them. So they seem to, from a very young age, before we've learned anything through storytelling or from observing other people's reactions, we seem to focus our gaze on snake-like objects when there's lots going on in the environment. But also we know that we can very much learn our responses from those around us. So, for example, when I was bringing my young son up, Max, we were living on a houseboat in the river Cam. And spiders were actually very useful because they used to gobble up all the midges. And so when we were living in England in Cambridge, Max showed no fear of spiders.

And in fact, we would spend a bit of time looking at them and finding them quite interesting in looking at spriters. spider webs. Then we moved to Australia for a little bit and he very quickly learned that actually you should be concerned about spiders and snakes. And then when we returned back to England, he brought that fear with him. And there was obviously a mismatch in expectation because a lot of people, his friends in England, weren't frightened of them at all. So I think it's a bit of both is basically what I'm saying there. But there's different modes by which we can create our perception of the world. So we might be genetically predisposed to be much more risk-averse of certain things from our parents, from the genes that we've been given. There's also the stories that have

been handed down, the emotions that we're soaking up from other people and their reactions that we're imitating because we're very sociable species and so we do learn from each other. And then on top of that, there might be these epigenetic responses that have been passed down across generations. And all of this goes to shape our perception of the world to create a very unique way that we see the world and a very unique way that we interact with them. Yeah. So sort of in a way we're all in, well, in some ways, predetermined to think and act in certain ways. But you mentioned there the snakes thing. Having heard that, so I know it's sort of an irrational fear. I don't need to be afraid of them. But what can we do to break up?

of these sort of predetermined patterns of behaviour and thinking based on this knowledge? So actually Kerry's been looking into this quite a lot and with others around the world, following on from his initial studies in the mice with the cherries. And he's done some fantastic collaborations which have resulted in research that have been published just in the last year where they've been looking at the power of CBT, so cognitive behavioural therapy, to actually epitory. epigenetically reverse any fears that might have been epigenetically put into our biology and into our response. So CBT, for example, can have a really positive impact and can actually

exert its root epigenetically as well. We pick up emotions from other people and we learn from their perception of the world. And there's some really lovely research that, as again, And it's very recent. So scientists have been analyzing not just the electrical activity that occurs within an individual's mind to help create their sense of reality. So watching those electric signals zip across the brain, across all the different regions in that very individual mind, that very individual neural circuitry that we have. So they've been doing that for over 100 years now since the EEG was first developed. but more recently, just over the last 10 years or so, researchers have been looking at what happens

when groups of people get together and what happens to those electrical oscillations when we all start to work together. And we can start to see that those electrical signals start to become synchronized with each other. They start to become in step with each other when groups of brains are working together well. So when we were able to learn from each other,

other, build consensus to communicate freely without a huge amount of dominance dynamics, when we can start to really balance out those biases in our information processing that we might have and start to create almost kind of a hive mind where we've got this beautiful super brain that's working in step with each other, all lovely and kind of physiologically aligned. And that's when you start to get more consensus building and more innovation as well. So ideas being able to be able to. to hop from mind to mind so that we can evolve our thinking and innovate and problem solve more effectively. And you can actually use that degree of brain synchronicity between different groups of brains to predict how well that group is performing and how well it might be problem

solving. So how do we use any of the findings from these studies then to inform our own personal choices? I believe that as we start to reveal how our brains operate, how they create our decisions, how they create our sense of reality and our interactions with life. All of this can be used in a very empowering way. So although there's nothing that I can do about the genes that I've been given from my mum and dad, and they're very good genes, thanks, mum and dad. And I can't do anything about what happened to my ancestors, you know, generations before. What I can do is accept, well, this is the biology that I've got, this is the brain that I have.

and perhaps there's particular weaknesses there or flaws are idiosyncrasies, but perhaps also there's strengths. So maybe it's empowering to know the biology that predisposes me to behave in particular way and to then put into practice different ways that my life can be arranged to make the most of those strengths and also perhaps ensure that I'm surrounding myself by people that bring out best me and perhaps make up for some of the worst bits of me. And maybe that way of viewing individuality can be useful in raising my son as well and be understanding about him.

Fascinating stuff. Dr Hannah Critchlow, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Jason. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Hannah Critchlow. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, The Science of Fate, or pre-order her upcoming book, The 21st Century Brain.

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