Petrol heads

Why nothing in motorsport is quite as dangerous as a racing driver’s brain

RICARDO DIVILA

How we think, and how profoundly irrational we can be, actually comes from the way our brain is laid out and how it evolved. You have an area of your brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and your baseline software is the limbic system. The limbic system is operational when you are born but the PFC will slowly mature up to your mid-20s, normally. So, for your first years you are more reliant on the limbic system. The limbic system will flood you with dopamine when taking risks or being impulsive, which was presumably a good trait when we were in the Stone Age. The corollary is that as you mature the prefrontal cortex starts making you more responsible and will help you make more rational decisions and the really silly,…

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Racecar Engineering (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2018

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