Everything in physiology follows the rule that too much can be as bad as too little. There are optimal points of allostatic balance. For example, while a moderate amount of exercise generally increase...
Dunbar’s
Diallo, a West African immigrant in New York, matched a description of a rapist. Four white officers questioned him, and when the unarmed Diallo started to pull out his wallet, they decided it was a g...
As we saw in chapter 9, it is only when groups get large enough that people regularly interact with strangers that cultures invent moralizing gods. These are not gods who sit around the banquet table...
As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it—cognitively distorting how t...
A genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets. Depression
Stress weakens frontal connections with the hippocampus—essential for incorporating the new information that should prompt shifting to a new strategy—while strengthening frontal connections with more...
Here’s a highly simplified version of the next chapter’s focus on genes: (a) each gene specifies the production of a specific type of protein; (b) a gene has to be activated for the protein to be prod...
Acute stress strengthens connectivity between the frontal cortex and motoric areas, while weakening frontal-hippocampal connections; the result is decision making that is habitual, rather than incorpo...
Work by Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Boyce of UCSF, and others demonstrates something outrageous: By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a)...
When a rat wins a fight, the number of testosterone receptors increases in the ventral tegmentum and accumbens, increasing sensitivity to the hormone’s feel-good effects.10
What happens when children observe domestic violence, warfare, a gang murder, a school massacre? For weeks afterward there is impaired concentration and impulse control. Witnessing gun violence double...
This is the essence of learning. The lecturer says something, and it goes in one ear and out the other. The factoid is repeated; same thing. It’s repeated enough times and—aha!—the lightbulb goes on a...
The sensory cortex and visual cortex are far away from each other. How do those tactile neurons know (a) that there’s vacant property in the visual cortex; (b) that hooking up with those unoccupied ne...
The dissociation between fear and aggression is evident in violent psychopaths, who are the antithesis of fearful—both physiologically and subjectively they are less reactive to pain; their amygdalae...
The difference between survival and reproduction is shown with antagonistic pleiotropy, referring to traits that increase reproductive fitness early in life yet decrease life span. For example, primat...
Suddenly, I get this giddy desire to shock these guys a little. I continue, These baboons really are our relatives. In fact, this baboon is my cousin. And with that I lean over and give Daniel a loud...
Study a gene in only one environment and, by definition, you’ve eliminated the ability to see if it works differently in other environments (in other words, if other environments regulate the gene dif...
So ecological duress can increase or decrease aggression. This raises the key issue of what global warming will do to our best and worst behaviors. There will definitely be some upsides. Some regions...
Since it morphed from battle fatigue or shell shock into a formal psychiatric illness, combat PTSD has been framed as a result of the sheer terror of being under attack, of someone trying to kill you...