Damasio has produced an influential theory about emotion-laden decision making, rooted in the philosophies of Hume and William James; this will soon be discussed.61 Briefly, the frontal cortex runs as...
Chapter 3 discusses some unsettling research—stick your average person in a brain scanner, and show him a picture of someone of another race for only a tenth of a second. This is too fast for him to b...
Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise castration doesn’t decrease recidivism rates; as stated in one meta-anal...
Axonal remapping in blind or deaf individuals is great, exciting, and moving. It’s cool that your hippocampus expands if you drive a London cab. Ditto about the size and specialization of the auditory...
And their brains? Decreased total brain size, gray matter, white matter, frontal cortical metabolism, connectivity between regions, sizes of individual brain regions. Except for the amygdala. Which is...
And behavior is altered by situational labels—call the game the Wall Street Game, and people become less cooperative. Calling it the Community Game does the opposite.
All of that was eventually shown—there’s considerable adult neuro-genesis in the hippocampus (where roughly 3 percent of neurons are replaced each month) and lesser amounts in the cortex.22 It happens...
There are studies showing that one oxytocin receptor gene variant is associated with extreme aggression in kids, as well as a callous, unemotional style that foreshadows adult psychopathy.54 Moreover,...
In adults the anterior cingulate cortex activates when they see someone hurt. Ditto for the amygdala and insula, especially in instances of intentional harm—there is anger and disgust. PFC regions inc...
What helps define a particular culture? Values, beliefs, attributions, ideologies.
Thus, adult behavior produces persistent molecular brain changes in offspring, programming them to be likely to replicate that distinctive behavior in adulthood.76
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...
Similar intermixing of the real and the metaphorical occurs with temperature sensation. In another study from Bargh’s group, the researcher, hands full with something, would ask a subject to briefly h...
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...
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...
In another study subjects waited an unknown length of time to receive a shock.12 This lack of predictability and control was so aversive that many chose to receive a stronger shock immediately. And
If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an in...
Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.