A major depression, these findings suggest, can be the outcome of particularly severe lessons in uncontrollability for those of us who are already vulnerable. This may explain an array of findings tha...
A genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets. Depression
A final depressing point about inequality and violence. As we’ve seen, a rat being shocked activates a stress response. But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less o...
If you’re stressed like a normal mammal in an acute physical crisis, the stress response is lifesaving. But if instead you chronically activate the stress response for reasons of psychological stress,...
If some octopus moved in next door, I would feel hostile superiority because I have a spine and it didn’t, but that animosity might melt into a sense of kinship when I discovered that the octopus, lik...
Here’s a highly simplified version of the next chapter’s focus on genes: (a) each gene specifies the production of a specific type of protein; (b) a gene has to be activated for the protein to be prod...
Growing strong from adversity is mostly a luxury for those who are better off.
Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our coll...
Thus, particularly important is a 2011 study that used transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques to temporarily inactivate the vmPFC; subjects became less likely to change their answer to conform.
Thus there’s dopaminergic activation during schadenfreude—gloating over an envied person’s fall from grace.
This is thought to reflect the killer combination that these folks are often burdened with, namely, high work demands but little autonomy—responsibility without control.
This is great. But what I’m grasping at is an idea about a subtler goal. This thinking owes a lot to conversations with Manjula Waldron of Ohio State University, an engineering professor who also happ...
The dissociation between fear and aggression is evident in violent psychopaths, who are the antithesis of fearful—both physiologically and subjectively they are less reactive to pain; their amygdalae...
The defining feature of a major depression is loss of pleasure. If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong e...
Study a gene in only one environment and, by definition, you’ve eliminated the ability to see if it works differently in other environments (in other words, if other environments regulate the gene dif...
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 child behavioral development research is implicitly stage oriented, concerning: (a) the sequence with which stages emerge; (b) how experience influences the speed and surety with which that seque...
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 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...
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...