People see essentialism embedded in bloodlines—i.e., genes.
On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical...
Moreover, sustained stress and glucocorticoid exposure enhance LTP and suppress LTD in the amygdala, boosting fear conditioning, and suppress LTP in the frontal cortex. Combining these effects—more ex...
Moderate, transient stress (i.e., the good, stimulatory stress) promotes hippocampal LTP, while prolonged stress disrupts it and promotes LTD—one reason why cognition tanks at such times. This is the...
Meaney and colleagues, one of the most cited papers published in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience. They had shown previously that offspring of more attentive rat mothers (those that frequen...
Major depression. As will be detailed in chapter 14, major depression is utterly intertwined with prolonged stress, and this connection includes elevated glucocorticoid levels in about half the people...
Let’s incorporate behavior. If someone has extensive frontocortical damage, how predictable is it that you’d note something odd about them, behaviorally, after a five-minute conversation? Something li...
Knowledge emerged about synapses, neurotransmitter-ology was born, and this idea was modified—a new memory requires the formation of a new synapse, a new connection between an axon terminal and a dend...
It is the ambiguity of violence, that we can pull a trigger as an act of hideous aggression or of self-sacrificing love, that is so challenging.
If people around you smell scared, your brain tilts toward concluding that you are too.
If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritabili...
I was in San Francisco for the quake, and much was made of the fact that fancy downtown hotels opened their doors to house people needing shelter. It’s worth noting that this generosity was for people...
I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncu...
I am not worried if scientists go and explain everything. This is for a very simple reason: an impala sprinting across the Savannah can be reduced to biomechanics, and Bach can be reduced to counterpo...
First, can fetal or childhood exposure to synthetic glucocorticoids have lifelong, adverse effects? Glucocorticoids (such as hydrocortisone) are prescribed in vast amounts, because of their immunosupp...
During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and disrupts frontocortical function; we’re more fearful...
Damasio has produced an influential theory about emotion-laden decision making, rooted in the philosophies of Hume and William James; this will soon be discussed.61 Briefly, the frontal cortex runs as...
Culture leaves long-lasting residues—Shiites and Sunnis slaughter each other over a succession issue fourteen centuries old; across thirty-three countries population density in the year 1500 significa...
Chapter 3 discusses some unsettling research—stick your average person in a brain scanner, and show him a picture of someone of another race for only a tenth of a second. This is too fast for him to b...
Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise castration doesn’t decrease recidivism rates; as stated in one meta-anal...