Say I decide that it would be a good thing to insert pictures here demonstrating cultural relativism, displaying an act that is commonsensical in one culture but deeply distressing in another. I know,...
Our nights are filled with worries about a different class of diseases; we are now living well enough and long enough to slowly fall apart.
When women are ovulating, their fusiform face areas respond more to faces, with the (emotional) vmPFCs responding more to men’s faces in particular.
The average level of happiness increases in old age; fewer negative emotions occur and, when they do, they don’t persist as long. Connected to this, brain-imaging studies show that negative images hav...
Two fantasies dominated my darting then. I wanted to dart Fritz Lipmann. Lipmann was an incredibly famous biochemist, got the Nobel Prize decades ago, and now was an august octogenarian who would spen...
Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic.
Prior to the monotheistic Yahweh, the gods made sense, in that they had familiar, if supra-human appetites—they didn’t just want a lamb shank, they wanted the best lamb shank, wanted to seduce all the...
I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is...
Two Last Thoughts If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be It’s complicated. Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep...
The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference. The biologies of strong love and strong hate are similar in many ways, as we’ll see.
Schultz’s group has shown that the magnitude of an anticipatory dopamine rise reflects two variables. First is the size of the anticipated reward. A monkey has learned that a light
Look at systematic patterns of cultural variation as they pertain to the best and worst of our behaviors. Explore how different types of brains produce different culture and different types of culture...
Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; dopamine binds the value of a reward to the resulting work. It’s about the motivation ar...
Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.
You asked amygdala experts what behavior their favorite brain structure brings to mind, aggression wouldn’t top their list. It would be fear and anxiety.
Testosterone increases the excitability of amygdaloid neurons, and glucocorticoids decrease excitability of prefrontal cortical neurons.
Glucocorticoids in
These differing emphases explain a lot—for example, the classical liberal view is that everyone has equal rights to happiness; rightists instead discount fairness in favor of expedient authority, gene...
The human olfactory system is atrophied; roughly 40 percent of a rat’s brain is devoted to olfactory processing, versus 3 percent in us.
The explains why basal levels of testosterone have little to do with subsequent aggression, and why increases in testosterone due to puberty, sexual stimulation, or the start of mating season don’t in...