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,...
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...
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...
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.
Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.
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.
Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic.
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
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...
Lo cierto es que al volverse nuestra mente más estrecha de miras, menos permeable a la novedad, y al glorificar la repetición, nos estamos empobreciendo. Qué impactante descubrir que al llegar a los 4...
If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
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...
Justo cuando pensábamos que la pelea había terminado, va y me saca el refrito sin sentido de algo que pasó hace años.¿Y qué podemos hacer ante todo esto? ¿Cómo comercializar la 'Guía William James' de...
Instead, these findings suggest that the amygdala injects implicit distrust and vigilance into social decision making.23 All thanks to learning. In the words of the authors of the study, The generosit...
How’s this for a display of human kin selection: Subjects were given a scenario of a bus hurtling toward a human and a nondescript dog, and they could only save one. Whom would they pick? It depended...
Did destruction of the human amygdala lessen aggression? Pretty clearly so, when violence was a reflexive, inchoate outburst preceding a seizure.
Consider this: the human genome codes for about 1,500 different TFs, contains 4,000,000 TF-binding sites, and the average cell uses about 200,000 such sites to generate its distinctive gene-expression...
When women are ovulating, their fusiform face areas respond more to faces, with the (emotional) vmPFCs responding more to men’s faces in particular.