The impact of social relationships on life expectancy appears to be at least as large as that of variables such as cigarette smoking, hypertension, obesity, and level of physical activity.
The final misconception is that evolution is just a theory. I will boldly assume that readers who have gotten this far believe in evolution. Opponents inevitably bring up that irritating canard that e...
The candidate gene approaches show that the effect of a single gene on a behavior is typically tiny. In other words, having the warrior gene variant of MAO probably has less effect on your behavior th...
The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it with slavery.
Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless—we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually...
Stress and glucocorticoids have inverted-U effects here as well. Moderate, transient stress (or exposure to the equivalent glucocorticoid levels) increases spine number in the hippocampus; sustained s...
Starting with a 1979 study, low levels of serotonin in the brain were shown to be associated with elevated levels of human aggression, with end points ranging from psychological measures of hostility...
Something roughly akin to love is needed for proper biological development, and its absence is among the most aching, distorting stressors that we can suffer.
So oxytocin is central to female mammals nursing, wanting to nurse their child, and remembering which one is their child.
So if whites see a black face shown at a subliminal speed, the amygdala activates.10 But if the face is shown long enough for conscious processing, the anterior cingulate and the cognitive dlPFC then...
Second depressing finding: subliminal signaling of race also affects the fusiform face area, the cortical region that specializes in facial recognition.11 Damaging the fusiform, for example, selective...
Remarkably, the fetal brain generates far more neurons than are found in the adult. Why? During late fetal development, there is a dramatic competition in much of the brain, with winning neurons being...
Remarkably, studies have examined brains of transgender individuals, concentrating on brain regions that, on the average, differ in size between men and women. And consistently, regardless of the desi...
Remapping occurs regularly throughout the brain in the absence of injury. My favorite examples concern musicians, who have larger auditory cortical representation of musical sounds than do nonmusician...
Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it. The researchers then studied subjects from sixty-seven countries, considering the prevalence i...
One study showed kids, ages five to thirteen, pairs of faces of candidates from obscure elections and asked them whom they’d prefer as captain on a hypothetical boat trip. And kids picked the winner 7...
One stretch of the gene is repeated a variable number of times, and the version with seven repeats (the 7R form) produces a receptor protein that is sparse in the cortex and relatively unresponsive to...
One last bit of bad news. We’ve been focusing on the stress-related consequences of activating the cardiovascular system too often. What about turning it off at the end of each psychological stressor?...
Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views...
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...