The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) mediates the body’s response to arousing circumstances, for example, producing the famed fight or flight stress response. To use the feeble joke told to first-year...
The subject is also fascinating because of the nature of the revisionism—neuroplasticity radiates optimism. Books on the topic are entitled The Brain That Changes Itself, Train Your Mind, Change Your...
The strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by its emergence in kids. By age three to four, kids already group people by race and gender, have more negative views of such Thems, and perceive other-race faces...
The depths of human conformity and obedience are shown by the speed with which they occur—it takes less than 200 milliseconds for your brain to register that the group has picked a different answer fr...
The cognitive capacities of near-term fetuses are even more remarkable. For example, fetuses can distinguish between two pairs of nonsense syllables (biba versus babi). How do you know? Get this—Mom s...
The 2D:4D ratio is so variable, and the sex difference so small, that you can’t determine someone’s sex by knowing it. But it does tell you something about the extent of fetal testosterone exposure. S...
Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless—we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually...
So if whites see a black face shown at a subliminal speed, the amygdala activates.10 But if the face is shown long enough for conscious processing, the anterior cingulate and the cognitive dlPFC then...
Second depressing finding: subliminal signaling of race also affects the fusiform face area, the cortical region that specializes in facial recognition.11 Damaging the fusiform, for example, selective...
Remarkably, the fetal brain generates far more neurons than are found in the adult. Why? During late fetal development, there is a dramatic competition in much of the brain, with winning neurons being...
Part of the reason for the evolutionary success of primates, human or otherwise, is that we are a pretty smart collection of animals. What’s more, our thumbs work in particularly fancy and advantageou...
One study showed kids, ages five to thirteen, pairs of faces of candidates from obscure elections and asked them whom they’d prefer as captain on a hypothetical boat trip. And kids picked the winner 7...
One stretch of the gene is repeated a variable number of times, and the version with seven repeats (the 7R form) produces a receptor protein that is sparse in the cortex and relatively unresponsive to...
One last bit of bad news. We’ve been focusing on the stress-related consequences of activating the cardiovascular system too often. What about turning it off at the end of each psychological stressor?...
Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views...
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...
John Archer in a definitive 2006 review, There is a weak and inconsistent association between testosterone levels and aggression in [human] adults, and … administration of testosterone to volunteers t...
It is never really the case that stress makes you sick, or even increases your risk of being sick. Stress increases your risk of getting diseases that make you sick, or if you have such a disease, str...
In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before...