I didn’t feel obliged to first disclose my feelings about the gland. But the equivalent feels appropriate here. Thus: I was raised highly observant and Orthodox, felt intensely religious. But then, ar...
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...
Importantly, maternal stress impacts fetal development. There are indirect routes—for example, stressed people consume less healthy diets and consume more substances of abuse. More directly, stress al...
In a healthy environment, increased threat sensitivity, poor emotion control and enhanced fear memory in MAOA-L [i.e., the warrior variant] men might only manifest as variation in temperament within a...
In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.
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 other words, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.
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 the West we nearly all have strong moral intuitions about the wrongness of slavery, child labor, or animal cruelty. But that sure didn’t used to be the case. Their wrongness has become an implicit...
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...
Infuse oxytocin into the brain of a virgin rat, and she’ll act maternally—retrieving, grooming, and licking pups. Block the actions of oxytocin in a rodent mother,*23 and she’ll stop maternal behavior...
Infuse oxytocin into the brain of a virgin rat, and she’ll act maternally—retrieving, grooming, and licking pups. Block the actions of oxytocin in a rodent mother,fn6,23 and she’ll stop maternal behav...
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...
It is the punisher’s mind-set where everything must be changed. The difficulty of this is explored in the superb book The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (2014) by Morris Hoffman, a...
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...
Knutson’s group shows that the greater the probability of reward, the more activation in the medial PFC.96 But switches from 50 to 25 percent and from 50 to 75 percent both reduce the magnitude of unc...
Let’s see what multifactorial means in a practical sense. Consider someone with frequent depression who is visiting a friend today, pouring her heart out about her problems. How much could you have pr...
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...
MAO-A variants show other important gene/environment interactions. For example, in one study the low-activity MAO-A variant predicts criminality, but only if coupled with high testosterone levels
Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a large scale,
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