Axonal remapping in blind or deaf individuals is great, exciting, and moving. It’s cool that your hippocampus expands if you drive a London cab. Ditto about the size and specialization of the auditory...
As we saw in chapter 9, it is only when groups get large enough that people regularly interact with strangers that cultures invent moralizing gods. These are not gods who sit around the banquet table...
And you’d better bet that changes along the lines of those presented in this chapter occurred in the brains of anyone transformed by these transformations. A different world makes for a different worl...
A high incidence of 7R, associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking, is the legacy of humans who made the greatest migrations in human history.
When the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest.
In adults the anterior cingulate cortex activates when they see someone hurt. Ditto for the amygdala and insula, especially in instances of intentional harm—there is anger and disgust. PFC regions inc...
Games. A summary: Exposing children to a violent TV or film clip increases their odds of aggression soon after.41 Interestingly, the effect is stronger in girls (amid their having lower overall levels...
Young humans are like chimps—six-year-olds not only prefer to be with kids like themselves (by whatever criteria) but readily say so. It isn’t until around age ten that kids learn that some feelings a...
Work by Shelley Taylor of UCLA shows that fight or flight is the typical response to stress in males, and naturally, the stress literature is predominantly studies of males by males.83 Things often di...
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism?21 The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it’...
What’s a heritability score? What does a gene do? is at least two questions. How does a gene influence average levels of a trait? How does a gene influence variation among people in levels of that tra...
What Wilkinson and others have shown is that poverty is not only a predictor of poor health but, independent of absolute income, so is poverty amid plenty—the more income inequality there is in a soci...
Various studies, predominantly by Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, show that when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressiv...
Two complications illustrate some endocrine principles.fn16 Estrogen contributes to maternal aggression. But estrogen can also reduce aggression and enhance empathy and emotional recognition. It turns...
Thus, adult behavior produces persistent molecular brain changes in offspring, programming them to be likely to replicate that distinctive behavior in adulthood.76
Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.
This was based on studies of a rare disorder, congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). An enzyme in the adrenal glands has a mutation, and instead of making glucocorticoids, they make testosterone and ot...
These are crucially different. For example, how much do genes have to do with people’s scores averaging 100 on this thing called an IQ test? Then how much do genes have to do with one person scoring h...
There’s support for the idea—three of my favorites are that (a) forcing depressed people to smile makes them feel better; (b) instructing people to take on a more dominant posture makes them feel more...
There’s an additional depressing reason why stress fosters aggression—because it reduces stress. Shock a rat and its glucocorticoid levels and blood pressure rise; with enough shocks, it’s at risk for...