Remarkably, the size of neurons’ dendritic trees in the hippocampus expands and contracts like an accordion throughout a female rat’s ovulatory cycle, with the size (and her cognitive skills) peaking...
Perhaps fifty years since we learned that reading problems of a type that we now call dyslexia aren’t due to laziness but instead involve microscopic cortical malformations.
Neuropsychologists are coming to recognize that there is a specialized subset of long-term memory. Remote memories are ones stretching back to your childhood—the name of your village, your native lang...
Most broadly, the PFC chooses between conflicting options—Coke or Pepsi; blurting out what you really think or restraining yourself; pulling the trigger or not. And often the conflict being resolved i...
Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a large scale,
Meanwhile, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) arises from different midbrain/brain-stem nuclei that project down the spine to the body. In contrast to the SNS and the four Fs, the PNS is about c...
Logically, gambling shouldn’t evoke much anticipatory dopamine, given the astronomical odds against winning. But the behavioral engineering—the 24-7 activity and lack of time cues, the cheap alcohol p...
Josh Greene and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton wrote an extremely clearheaded piece on this, For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything. Where neuroscience and the rest of biology change no...
In our world riddled with male violence, the problem isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression.
In other words, while evidence of corporate social responsibility (scenario C) boosts sales a bit, it’s far more effective when the individual and the business share social responsibility and the indi...
In a test of the theory, Kees Keizer of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands asked whether cues of one type of norm violation made people prone to violating other norms.39 When bicycles were...
In a study of employees throughout the world working for the same multinational bank, what was the most important reason cited to help someone? Among Americans it was that the person had previously he...
If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just r...
If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation. The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decre...
I once received a lesson in kids’ private world of rule making from my then-four-year-old son. We had gone to a public bathroom together; we stood side by side at two urinals, and I finished a bit ear...
Furthermore, as shown with neuroimaging, when contemplating mouthwash versus soap, those who had just spoken a lie activated parts of the sensorimotor cortex related to the mouth (i.e., the subjects w...
Freud was fascinated with depression and focused on the issue that we began with—why is it that most of us can have occasional terrible experiences, feel depressed, and then recover, while a few of us...
Finally, for the same criminal conviction, the more stereotypically African a black individual’s facial features, the longer the sentence.15 In contrast, juries view black (but not white) male defenda...
Finally, for the same criminal conviction, the more stereotypically Af-rican a black individual’s facial features, the longer the sentence.15 In contrast, juries view black (but not white) male defend...
Eyes often have an implicit censorious power.22 Post a large picture of a pair of eyes at a bus stop (versus a picture of flowers), and people become more likely to clean up litter. Post a picture of...