Obviously, a theme of this book is just how many things can go wrong in the body because of stress and how important it is for everyone to recognize this. However, it would be utterly negligent to exa...
Now we have hundreds of carefully engineered, designed, and marketed commercial foods filled with rapidly absorbed processed sugars that cause a burst of sensation that can’t be matched by some lowly...
Moreover, sustained stress and glucocorticoid exposure enhance LTP and suppress LTD in the amygdala, boosting fear conditioning, and suppress LTP in the frontal cortex. Combining these effects—more ex...
Moderate, transient stress (i.e., the good, stimulatory stress) promotes hippocampal LTP, while prolonged stress disrupts it and promotes LTD—one reason why cognition tanks at such times. This is the...
Men with more masculine 2D:4D ratios tend toward higher levels of aggression and math scores; more assertive personalities; higher rates of ADHD and autism (diseases with strong male biases); and decr...
Meaney and colleagues, one of the most cited papers published in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience. They had shown previously that offspring of more attentive rat mothers (those that frequen...
Major depression. As will be detailed in chapter 14, major depression is utterly intertwined with prolonged stress, and this connection includes elevated glucocorticoid levels in about half the people...
It takes surprisingly little in terms of uncontrollable unpleasantness to make humans give up and become helpless in a generalized way.
If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to complete pictures.
If people around you smell scared, your brain tilts toward concluding that you are too.
If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritabili...
I was in San Francisco for the quake, and much was made of the fact that fancy downtown hotels opened their doors to house people needing shelter. It’s worth noting that this generosity was for people...
I didn’t feel obliged to first disclose my feelings about the gland. But the equivalent feels appropriate here. Thus: I was raised highly observant and Orthodox, felt intensely religious. But then, ar...
I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncu...
I am not worried if scientists go and explain everything. This is for a very simple reason: an impala sprinting across the Savannah can be reduced to biomechanics, and Bach can be reduced to counterpo...
How does this work? Rodents produce pheromonal odors with individual signatures, derived from genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This is a super variable gene cluster that produc...
Greene calls the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality is shown by the fact that most intergroup conflicts on our planet ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose right is righter.
For starters, circulating oxytocin levels are elevated in couples when they’ve first hooked up. Furthermore, the higher the levels, the more physical affection, the more behaviors are synchronized, th...
First, can fetal or childhood exposure to synthetic glucocorticoids have lifelong, adverse effects? Glucocorticoids (such as hydrocortisone) are prescribed in vast amounts, because of their immunosupp...
During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and disrupts frontocortical function; we’re more fearful...