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...
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...
Joseph LeDoux at New York University has shown how the BLA learns fear.fn14,20 Expose a rat to an innate trigger of fear—a shock. When this unconditioned stimulus occurs, the central amygdala activate...
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...
Irrational optimism can be great; it’s why only about 15 percent instead of 99 percent of humans get clinically depressed.
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...
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...
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 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, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.
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 a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you’ll understand the big picture. And in this red...
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...
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...
Hormonal responses to various fetal and childhood experiences have epigenetic effects on genes related to the growth factor BDNF, to the vasopressin and oxytocin system, and to estrogen sensitivity. T...
Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood … but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse. And if there was no such history, the variant was not predictive of anyth...
Cuando Igor Stravinsky yacía en su lecho de muerte, golpeaba repetidamente su anillo contra el metal de la barandilla de su cama de hospital y, cada vez que lo hacía, alarmaba a su mujer con el sonido...
But consider a paper published in Science in 2008.1 The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in forty countries (based on economic, educational, and political indi...
Ask subjects to estimate the likelihood of the same events again. Adults incorporate the feedback into the new estimates. Adolescents update their estimates as adults do for good news, but feedback ab...
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...