THE AMYGDALAfn8 IS the archetypal limbic structure, sitting under the cortex in the temporal lobe. It is central to mediating aggression, along with other behaviors that tell us tons about aggression.
Subliminal cuing and unconscious priming influence numerous behaviors unrelated to this book. People think potato chips taste better when hearing crunching sounds. We like a neutral stimulus more if,...
Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of lifestyle, like heart disease or diabetes, where damage slowly accumulates over time...
No brain region is an island, and the formation of circuits connecting far-flung brain regions is crucial—how else can the frontal cortex use its few myelinated neurons to talk to neurons in the brain...
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...
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...
In a typical study, higher testosterone levels would be observed in those male prisoners with higher rates of aggression. But being aggressive stimulates testosterone secretion; no wonder more aggress...
Glutamate signaling works in a fancier way that is essential to learning.2 To simplify considerably, while dendritic spines typically contain only one type of receptor, those responsive to glutamate c...
Did destruction of the human amygdala lessen aggression? Pretty clearly so, when violence was a reflexive, inchoate outburst preceding a seizure.
If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
Women with variants of genes that produce higher levels of oxytocin or oxytocin receptors average higher levels of touching their infants and more synchronized gazing with them.
When it comes to empathy and compassion, rich people tend to suck. This has been explored at length in a series of studies by Dacher Keltner of UC Berkeley. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the a...
When conservatives, but not liberals, are instructed to use reappraisal techniques (e.g., Try to view the images in a detached, unemotional way), they express less conservative political sentiments. I...
We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
There’s also subliminal cuing about beauty.18 From an early age, in both sexes and across cultures, attractive people are judged to be smarter, kinder, and more honest. We’re more likely to vote for a...
Powerful support for an amygdaloid role in fear processing comes from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in cal...
People see essentialism embedded in bloodlines—i.e., genes.
Lots of work has examined the genes involved, most broadly showing that variants that produce lowered dopamine signaling (less dopamine in the synapse, fewer dopamine receptors, or lower responsivenes...
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...
In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.