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...
Testosterone increases the excitability of amygdaloid neurons, and glucocorticoids decrease excitability of prefrontal cortical neurons.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Expose subjects to evidence of someone else in pain. If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation....
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...
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.
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 facing Me-versus-Us moral dilemmas of resisting selfishness, our rapid intuitions are good, honed by evolutionary selection for cooperation in a sea of green-beard markers.35 And in such settings...