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...
The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it with slavery.
The Southern sense of honor in place is also seen in Robert E. Lee; he opposed Southern secession, even made some ambiguous statements that could be viewed as opposed to slavery. Yet when offered the...
Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it.
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...
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...
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...
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.
Now consider a genome consisting of genes A and B, meaning three different transcription profiles—A is transcribed, B is transcribed, A and B are transcribed—requiring three different TFs (assuming yo...
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, when the amygdala wants to mobilize a behavior—say, fleeing—it talks to the frontal cortex, seeking its executive approval. But if sufficiently aroused, the amygdala talks directly to subco...
LeDoux and others have shown how auditory information about the tone stimulates BLA neurons. At first, activation of those neurons is irrelevant to the central amygdala (whose neurons are destined to...
Kids learn dichotomies in the absence of any ill intent. When a kindergarten teacher says, Good morning, boys and girls, the kids are being taught that dividing the world that way is more meaningful t...
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...
It is far from guaranteed that an empathic state leads to a compassionate act. One reason for this is captured superbly by the essayist Leslie Jamison: [Empathy] can also offer a dangerous sense of co...
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 other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation. Similarly, work by my Stanford colleague Brian Knutson has shown dopamine pathway acti...
In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions—religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit—bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds facing a potential tragedy of the c...
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...