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 other words, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.
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 other cases the challenge is to appreciate how, though human physiology resembles that of other species, we use the physiology in novel ways.
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 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...
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...
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...
If you (or any other mammal) bite into rancid food, the insular cortex lights up, causing you to spit it out, gag, feel nauseated, make a revolted facial expression—the insular cortex processes gustat...
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...
Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality—it must be a drag being right-wing. But despite that, in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists.42 Why? Perhaps it’s having simpler answers,...
Edward Tylor, a distinguished nineteenth-century cultural anthropologist. For him culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities a...
By using two elephants to do the job, damage will occur just because of how large, lumbering, and unsubtle elephants are. They squash the flowers in the process of entering the playground, they strew...
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...
Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films. This
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...
As adults, these kids are mostly what you’d expect. Low IQ and poor cognitive skills. Problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic. Anxiety and depression galore. The longer the inst...