Max' Notizen

Behave

📝 Zuletzt geändert: (vor 1 Monat)📊 16048 Wörter

Behave; The Biology of our Humans Best and Worst

Behave Thoughts

Unsere Verhaltensweisen werden von vielen Faktoren bestimmt und keiner dieser Faktoren ist für ein Verhalten alleine zuständig. Man muss immer den Kontext und die Umgebung dazu betrachten.

The biology of the behaviors that interest us is, in all cases, multifactorial—that is the thesis of this book. (Location 9702)

The Book in 3 sentences

“It’s complicated” Every gene and hormone interacts within other factors and always in context of the environment . Gene, hormones and the environment always create tendencies and not solely invent behaviors.
Both our best and worst behaviors come from the biology which lies in us for hundreds of thousands of years.

What I learned from the book

It is probably the book with the most intakes for me. I learned so much about why humans do what they do. I know can better judge people around me and forgive them easier. We are all stuck with the set of genes, the experiences we gained in live and our environment . It makes us to who we are and it is very hard for us to change the way we are wired. This is why it is always easy to do the (in our sense) right thing, because it consumes less energy.

Who should read the book

Anyone who is interested in why humans do what they do and what actually happens in our brain when we act in very bad and very good ways.
Anyone who wants to start in the field of neurobiology.

My valuation

This is one of the best books i have ever read. So dense information and written in a very entertaining manner. This is definitely a 5/5 for me.

There is so much to learn about live and the world we live in. This book gives a huge insight of how our world works. It gets us closer to getting to know each other and better understand other people. It makes forgiving easier.

Important content

Chapter 1 The Behavior

“The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference.”
(p.22)

Chapter 2 One Second Before

The Limbic System

Three Metaphorical (but not literal) Layers

The Autonomic Nervous System and the Ancient Core Regions of the Brain

The Interface Between the Limbic System and the Cortex

The Frontal Cortex

Frontal Cortex

Frontal Metabolism and an Implicit Vulnerability

dorsolateral PFC

Ventromedial PFC

The mesolimbic/mesocortical Dopamine System

nulceus accumbens circuitry

Reward

Pursuit

Serotonin (5-HT)

Chapter 3 Seconds to Minutes Before

Reward

Under the Radar, Subliminal and Unconscious Cuing

Interoceptive Information

Chapter 4 Hours to Days Before

from Behave

Important

Subtleties of Testosterone Effects

Contingent Testosterone Effects

Oxytocin and Vasopressin: A Marketing Dream

Basics of Oxytocin and Vasopressin

von Behave

Stress and Imprudent Brain Function

Chapter 5 Days to Months Before

Nonlinear excitation

”AHA” versus actually remembering

LTP - long term potentiation

Rescued from the Trash

aus Chapter 5

Phobias, stress and hippocampus

Axonal Plasticity

Neurogenesis

Some other Domains of Neuroplasticity

PTSD, PTBS

von Chapter 5

from Behave

Chapter 6 Adolescence; or, Dude, Where’s My Frontal Cortex?

Frontal Cortex

Frontal Cortical Maturation

Frontal Cortical Changes in Cognition in Adolescence

Adolescent Risk Taking

Peers, Social Acceptance, and Social Exclusion

Empathy, Sympathy, and Moral Reasoning

Chapter 7 Back to the Crib, Back to the Womb

four stages of cognitive development

Feeling someone else’s pain

Chapter 7

Let’s start at the very Beginning The Importance of Mothers

Any Kind of Mother in a Storm

childhood adversity

What are the roots of fascism?
Seite 167 · Position 3335

Depression

Die USA

Testosterone

aus Behave

131 ❓unbeantwortete Fragen

Partnerwahl

Gleichberechtigung

congential adrenal hyerplasia (CAH)

androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS)

male and female ratios

prenatal environment

aus Behave

adult behavior

Chapter 8 Back to When You Were Just a Fertilized Egg

Do Genes know what they are doing

The construction of genes, exons and introns

genes and twins

Heritability

5HTT

aus Behave

monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A)

7R

COMT

Basics of Oxytocin and Vasopressin

Gene

Chapter 9 Centuries to Millennia Before

Gleichberechtigung

aus Behave

kollektivistische Kultur

Gleichberechtigung

society in large populations

religions in society

diseases in societies

societies compared

Lästern, gossiping

Landwirtschaft, Agriculture

societies compared

Chapter 10 The Evolution of Behavior

033 🐣Evolution

Fortpflanzen, Procreation

The demise of group selection

Kin Selection

Recognize Relatives

Reciprocal Altruism

Cooperation Strategy

Pair-Bonding vs Tournament Species

Parent-Offspring Conflict

Intersexual Genetic Conflict

Multilevel Selection

Chapter 12 Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance

religions in society

Chapter 13 Morality and Doing the Right Thing, Once You’ve Figured Out What That Is

Applying the Findings of the Science of Morality

moral decision making

Us versus Them

Veracity and Mendacity

Chapter 14 Feeling Someone’s Pain, Understanding Someone’s Pain, Alleviating Someone’s Pain

feeling it

aus Behave

Reconciliation

aus Chapter 14

aus Behave Chapter 14

Affect or Cognition

aus Chapter 14

aus Behave

wealthy people and empathy

One vs Millions

Thinking to the Muscles

Mirror Neurons (MN)

Actually doing Something

Are there ever any bloody altruists

Loving money

Chapter 15 Metaphors We Kill By

metaphors and literal meaning

Chapter 15

literal and psychic pain

Disgust and Purity

washing your hands and lying

real versus metaphorical sensation

Enemy’s Symbols

Chapter 16 Biology, the Criminal Justice System, and (Oh, Why Not) Free Will

free will, youth and law

praise Kids for hard work

Chapter 17 war and Peace

Somewhat better angels

See also

Behave Thoughts
when did I read it: June 2021 - February 2022
Status: offen
Tags: buch neurobiology science
Superlink:
Type:
Author: Robert Sapolsky
132 📝Reviews
Created: 08-11-21 19:26

Buch-Tipp:

Greene’s superb 2014 book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.
Seite 421 · Position 8194

Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think - George Lakoff of UC Berkeley
Seite 461 · Position 9008

Referenzen

the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.

Behave

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

alt

  • we don’t hate violence. We hate and fear the wrong kind of violence, violence in the wrong context. (Location 126)

  • A behavior has just occurred. Why did it happen? (Location 186)

  • “The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference.” (Location 368)

  • THREE METAPHORICAL (BUT NOT LITERAL) LAYERS (Location 399)

  • Read a scary passage of a book, and layer 3 signals layer 2 to make you feel frightened, prompting layer 1 to initiate shivering. (Location 411)

  • if someone is holding a cold drink (temperature is processed in layer 1), they’re more likely to judge someone they meet as having a cold personality (layer 3). (Location 419)

  • The hypothalamus, a limbic structure, is the interface between layers 1 and 2, between core regulatory and emotional parts of the brain. (Location 451)

  • The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) mediates the body’s response to arousing circumstances, (Location 467)

  • The SNS speeds up the heart; the PNS slows it down. (Location 475)

  • While the hypothalamus dwells at the interface of layers 1 and 2, it is the incredibly interesting frontal cortex that is the interface between layers 2 and 3. (Location 499)

  • “Texas Tower” sniper (Location 559)

  • glioblastoma tumor (Location 565)

  • In one study subjects in a brain scanner played a Ms. Pac-Man–from–hell video game where they were pursued in a maze by a dot; if caught, they’d be shocked.11 When people were evading the dot, the amygdala was silent. However, its activity increased as the dot approached; the stronger the shocks, the farther away the dot would be when first activating the amygdala, the stronger the activation, and the larger the self-reported feeling of panic. (Location 580)

  • In PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in calming down after being activated. (Location 588)

  • a subject is part of a group (where, secretly, the rest are confederates); they are shown “X,” then asked, “What did you see?” Everyone else says “Y.” Does the subject lie and say “Y” also? Often. Subjects who stuck to their guns with “X” showed amygdala activation. (Location 605)

  • The amygdala also plays a logical role in social and emotional decision making. In the Ultimatum Game, (Location 653)

  • In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust. (Location 666)

  • It’s about the uncertain, unsettled yearning for a potential pleasure, the anxiety and fear and anger that the reward may be smaller than anticipated, or may not even happen. It’s about how many of our pleasures and our pursuits of them contain a corrosive vein of disease.fn22,24 (Location 676)

  • the amygdala can be informed about something scary before the cortex has a clue. (Location 689)

  • The hippocampus decides whether a factoid is worth filing away, (Location 723)

    • Tags: blue
    • Note: kann es sein, dass das der Grund Ist, warum Menschen von gemeinsam erlebten Ereignissen verschiedene Dinge behalten? Je nach dem, was das Individuum als relevant erachtet

  • But if sufficiently aroused, the amygdala talks directly to subcortical, reflexive motor pathways. Again, there’s a trade-off—increased speed by by-passing the cortex, but decreased accuracy. (Location 728)

  • Fear typically increases aggression only in those already prone to it; among the subordinate who lack the option of expressing aggression safely, fear does the opposite. (Location 753)

  • the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do. (Location 770)

  • Once it has decided, the PFC sends orders via projections to the rest of the frontal cortex, sitting just behind it. Those neurons then talk to the “premotor cortex,” sitting just behind it, which then passes it to the “motor cortex,” which talks to your muscles. And a behavior ensues.fn27 (Location 796)

  • Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource. (Location 843)

  • Importantly, increase cognitive load on the frontal cortex, and afterward subjects become less prosocialfn30—less charitable or helpful, more likely to lie.46 (Location 849)

  • Or increase cognitive load with a task requiring difficult emotional regulation, and subjects cheat more on their diets afterward.fn31,47 (Location 851)

  • For example, you’re learning a piece of music on the piano, there’s a difficult trill, and each time as you approach it, you think, “Here it comes. (Location 856)

  • criminal psychopaths have decreased activity in the frontal cortex and less coupling of the PFC to other brain regions (Location 917)

  • “dorsal” or “dorsolateral”; it’s just jargon.fn34 (Location 923)

  • is it okay to kill one innocent person to save five? (Location 933)

  • Monkeys with dlPFC lesions can’t switch strategies in a task when the rewards given for each strategy shift—they perseverate with the strategy offering the most immediate reward. (Location 935)

  • poor executive control over their behavior.fn36 (Location 937)

  • When the dlPFC was silenced, subjects playing an economic game impulsively accepted lousy offers that they’d normally reject in the hopes of getting better offers in the future. (Location 940)

  • What are the functions of the emotional vmPFC? (Location 944)

  • In an inspired study where a keyboard was provided to jazz pianists inside a brain scanner, the vmPFC became more active and the dlPFC less so when subjects improvised. (Location 975)

  • And what if you do the same to someone whose frontal cortex is not fully functional? (Location 1011)

  • The amygdala is increasingly activated; the person feels increasingly distressed. What neurological disease is involved? None. This is a typical teenager. (Location 1011)

  • group is instructed to hide their emotions (Location 1025)

  • Antecedent reappraisal is why placebos work. (Location 1033)

  • function of the frontal cortex vary enormously among individuals; for example, resting metabolic rate in the PFC (Location 1072)

  • pathological liars have atypically large amounts of white matter in the PFC, (Location 1079)

  • For humans, just thinking about sex suffices.fn45,79 (Location 1112)

  • Punishing norm violations is satisfying. (Location 1129)

  • Not winning the lottery is bad luck; not winning an auction is social subordination. (Location 1134)

  • Thus there’s dopaminergic activation during schadenfreude— (Location 1138)

  • nothing is ever as good as that first time. (Location 1145)

  • An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. (Location 1176)

  • But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. (Location 1181)

  • pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating.fn48 (Location 1194)

  • Can a reliable cue of an impending reward eventually become rewarding itself? (Location 1202)

  • Because nothing fuels dopamine release like the “maybe” of intermittent reinforcement.95 (Location 1213)

  • And the secondary rise of dopamine for a 25 or 75 percent likelihood of reward is smaller than for 50 percent. (Location 1222)

  • a near miss activated the dopamine system like crazy. (Location 1233)

  • Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; (Location 1243)

  • impatient people with steep temporal discounting curves; their accumbens, in effect, underestimates the magnitude of the delayed reward, and their dlPFC overestimates the length of the delay.103 (Location 1264)

  • we delay gratification for insanely long times. (Location 1274)

  • low levels of serotonin in the brain were shown to be associated with elevated levels of human aggression, (Location 1284)

  • while failure to get rewarded or, worse, punishment for it, makes the organism less likely to repeat it. (Location 1364)

  • We like a neutral stimulus more if, just before seeing it, a picture of a smiling face is flashed for a twentieth of a second. (Location 1407)

  • The more expensive a supposed (placebo) painkiller, the more effective people report the placebo to be. (Location 1408)

  • the more racist someone is in an implicit test of race bias (stay tuned), the more activation there is.8 (Location 1417)

  • Amygdalae are prepared to learn to associate something bad with Them. (Location 1421)

  • tense in empathy. Among both whites and blacks, the response is blunted for other-race hands; (Location 1436)

  • This is so depressing—are we hardwired to fear the face of someone of another race, to process their face less as a face, to feel less empathy? (Location 1456)

  • There’s also subliminal cuing about beauty. (Location 1473)

  • What emotion is detected? (Location 1485)

  • Post a picture of eyes in a workplace coffee (Location 1489)

  • If people around you smell scared, your brain tilts toward concluding that you are too. (Location 1509)

  • the PFC, insular cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala—receive lots of interoceptive information. (Location 1529)

  • pain does not cause aggression; it amplifies preexisting tendencies toward aggression. (Location 1530)

  • when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest. (Location 1535)

  • During frontally demanding tasks, blood glucose levels drop, and frontal function improves if subjects are given a sugary drink (Location 1538)

  • Moreover, when people are hungry, they become less charitable and more aggressive (e.g., choosing more severe punishment for an opponent in a game). (Location 1539)

  • he received more help than when he wore a neutral sweatshirt (Location 1573)

  • the presence of women makes men more prosocial. (Location 1598)

  • signs of disarray, leading to increased crime. (Location 1603)

  • there are particularly high levels of testosterone receptors in the amygdala, (Location 1665)

  • castrate a male. Do levels of aggression decrease? (Location 1668)

  • some male aggression is testosterone independent.fn1 (Location 1674)

  • If one person has higher testosterone levels than another, or higher levels this week than last, are they more likely to be aggressive? (Location 1684)

  • being aggressive stimulates testosterone secretion; (Location 1687)

  • bodybuilders abusing high-dose testosterone-like anabolic steroids; (Location 1696)

  • testosterone makes people less adept at identifying emotions (Location 1704)

  • Testosterone also increases confidence and optimism, while decreasing fear and anxiety. (Location 1706)

  • winning stimulates testosterone secretion, (Location 1709)

  • winning increases the number of testosterone receptors in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (Location 1710)

  • testosterone makes people overconfident and overly optimistic, with bad consequences. (Location 1713)

  • Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic.6 (Location 1715)

  • Testosterone does this by decreasing activity in the prefrontal cortex (Location 1718)

  • Dopamine is needed for place-preference conditioning to occur, (Location 1724)

  • When a rat wins a fight, the number of testosterone receptors increases in the ventral tegmentum and accumbens, increasing sensitivity to the hormone’s feel-good effects. (Location 1727)

  • Testosterone did not create new social patterns of aggression; it exaggerated preexisting ones. (Location 1740)

  • So is testosterone causing action potentials in these neurons? (Location 1749)

  • testosterone’s actions are contingent and amplifying, exacerbating preexisting tendencies toward aggression rather than creating aggression out of thin air. (Location 1753)

  • rising testosterone levels increase aggression only at the time of a challenge. (Location 1757)

  • When testosterone rises after a challenge, it doesn’t prompt aggression. Instead it prompts whatever behaviors are needed to maintain status. (Location 1772)

  • People made more generous offers. (Location 1781)

  • under circumstances where someone’s sense of pride rides on honesty, testosterone decreased men’s cheating in a game. (Location 1788)

  • Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status. And the key point is what it takes. Engineer social circumstances right, and boosting testosterone levels during a challenge would make people compete like crazy to do the most acts of random kindness. In our world riddled with male violence, the problem isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression. (Location 1791)

  • Oxytocin prepares the body of a female mammal for birth and lactation; logically, oxytocin also facilitates maternal behavior. (Location 1818)

  • Infuse oxytocin into the brain of a virgin rat, and she’ll act maternally— (Location 1821)

  • circulating oxytocin levels are elevated in couples when they’ve first hooked up. Furthermore, the higher the levels, the more physical affection, the more behaviors are synchronized, the more long-lasting the relationship, and the happier interviewers rate couples to be. (Location 1860)

  • Among men in stable relationships, oxytocin increased their distance from the woman an average of four to six inches. (Location 1865)

  • Give dogs oxytocin, and they gaze longer at their humans … which raises the humans’ oxytocin levels. (Location 1874)

  • oxytocin inhibits the central amygdala, suppresses fear and anxiety, and activates the “calm, vegetative” parasympathetic nervous system. (Location 1876)

  • people rate faces as more trustworthy, and are more trusting in economic games, when given oxytocin (Location 1881)

  • So oxytocin elicits prosocial behavior, and oxytocin is released when we experience prosocial behavior (Location 1893)

  • oxytocin makes you more prosocial to people like you (i.e., your teammates) but spontaneously lousy to Others who are a threat. (Location 1954)

  • oxytocin made subjects less likely to sacrifice good ol’ Dirk or Peter, rather than Helmut or Ahmed. (Location 1961)

  • what causes PMS/PMDD, and how is it relevant to aggression? (Location 2043)

  • The amygdala also mediates the other main branch of the stress response, activating the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) in the hypothalamus. And the PVN sends projections to the base of the hypothalamus, where it secretes corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH); this triggers the pituitary to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which stimulates glucocorticoid secretion from the adrenals. (Location 2099)

  • during stress, long-term building projects—growth, tissue repair, and reproduction—are postponed until after the crisis; (Location 2105)

  • We love the right amount of stress, would wither without it. But back now to sustained stress and the right side of the inverted U. (Location 2144)

  • glucocorticoids don’t cause action potentials in amygdaloid neurons, don’t invent excitation. Instead they amplify preexisting excitation. (Location 2154)

  • stress makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into a long-term memory. (Location 2161)

  • stress weakens the PFC’s hold over the amygdala.72 (Location 2165)

  • Stress compromises other aspects of frontal cortical function. Working memory is disrupted; in one study, prolonged administration of high glucocorticoid levels to healthy subjects impaired working memory into the range seen after frontal cortical damage. Glucocorticoids accomplish this by enhancing norepinephrine signaling in the PFC so much that, instead of causing aroused focus, it induces chicken-with-its-head-cut-off cognitive tumult, and by enhancing disruptive signaling from the amygdala to the PFC. (Location 2171)

  • During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and disrupts frontocortical function; (Location 2191)

  • (a) rather than creating aggression, stress and glucocorticoids increase sensitivity to social triggers of aggression; (b) this occurs most readily in individuals already predisposed toward aggression. (Location 2195)

  • the more a baboon tends to displace aggression after losing a fight, the lower his glucocorticoid levels.78 (Location 2203)

  • stress biases us toward selfishness. (Location 2212)

  • Does stress decrease empathy? (Location 2224)

  • the female stress response involving a stronger component of oxytocin secretion. (Location 2238)

  • the more an organism has been aggressive, the less testosterone is needed for future aggression. (Location 2259)

  • Hormones don’t determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains. (Location 2278)

  • How do synapses “remember”? (Location 2294)

  • an action potential in neuron A more readily triggers one in neuron B. They are more tightly coupled; they “remember.” (Location 2305)

  • How else can octogenarians remember kindergarten? (Location 2347)

  • LTP underlies the frontal cortex learning to control the amygdala. (Location 2355)

  • how addicts come to associate a location with a drug, feeling cravings when in that setting. (Location 2357)

  • the good, stimulatory stress) promotes hippocampal LTP, while prolonged stress disrupts it and promotes LTD— (Location 2359)

  • Moreover, sustained stress and glucocorticoid exposure enhance LTP and suppress LTD in the amygdala, boosting fear conditioning, and suppress LTP in the frontal cortex. (Location 2361)

  • calcium rushing into the spine can diffuse and trigger the formation of a new spine in the adjacent stretch of the dendritic branch. (Location 2371)

  • chronic stress increases spine number in frontal-motor connections and decreases it in frontal-hippocampal ones.9 (Location 2385)

  • the central amygdala is more involved in innate phobias. Interestingly, stress seems not to increase the force of phobias or spine number in the central amygdala. (Location 2390)

  • When a rat secretes tons of glucocorticoids because it’s terrified, dendrites atrophy in the hippocampus. However, if it secretes the same amount by voluntarily running on a running wheel, dendrites expand. (Location 2392)

  • Whether the amygdala is also activated seems to determine whether the hippocampus interprets the glucocorticoids as good or bad stress.11 (Location 2394)

  • Remarkably, the size of neurons’ dendritic trees in the hippocampus expands and contracts like an accordion throughout a female rat’s ovulatory cycle, with the size (and her cognitive skills) peaking when estrogen peaks.fn6 (Location 2396)

  • One extraordinary case concerned a congenitally blind woman, adept at Braille, who had a stroke in her visual cortex. And as a result, she lost the ability to read Braille— (Location 2405)

  • When these individuals would “read with sound,” they’d activate the part of the visual cortex activated in sighted individuals when reading. (Location 2408)

  • Suppose there is stroke damage to the part of your cortex that receives tactile information from your hand. The tactile receptors in your hand work fine but have no neurons to talk to; thus you lose sensation in your hand. (Location 2412)

  • pseudoinjury: after merely five days of subjects being blindfolded, auditory projections start to remap into the visual cortex (and retract once the blindfolds come off).14 (Location 2420)

  • How do those tactile neurons “know” (a) that there’s vacant property in the visual cortex; (b) that hooking up with those unoccupied neurons helps turn fingertip information into “reading”; and (c) how to send axonal projections to this new cortical continent? All are matters of ongoing research. (Location 2423)

  • Nonmusician volunteers learned a five-finger exercise on the piano, which they practiced for two hours a day. Within a few days the amount of motor cortex devoted to the movement of that hand expanded, but the expansion lasted less than a day without further practice. (Location 2433)

  • Thus, experience alters the number and strength of synapses, the extent of dendritic arbor, and the projection targets of axons. Time for the biggest revolution in neuroscience in years. (Location 2442)

  • Hippocampal neurogenesis, for example, is enhanced by learning, exercise, estrogen, antidepressants, environmental enrichment, and brain injuryfn9 and inhibited by various stressors.fn10,23 (Location 2478)

  • Adult neurogenesis is the trendiest topic in neuroscience. (Location 2485)

  • Why did it take so long for adult neurogenesis to be accepted? (Location 2489)

  • post-traumatic stress disorder is associated with increased volume (and, as we know, hyperreactivity) of the amygdala. (Location 2507)

  • One cool example of the size of a brain region changing with experience concerns the back part of the hippocampus, which plays a role in memory of spatial maps. (Location 2510)

  • if a rodent wins a fight on his home territory, there are long-lasting increases in levels of testosterone receptors in the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmentum, enhancing testosterone’s pleasurable effects. (Location 2520)

  • the final brain region to fully mature (in terms of synapse number, myelination, and metabolism) is the frontal cortex, not going fully online until the midtwenties.1 (Location 2562)

  • no part of the adult brain is more shaped by adolescence than the frontal cortex. Second, nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation. (Location 2565)

  • During late fetal development, there is a dramatic competition in much of the brain, with winning neurons being the ones that migrate to the correct location and maximize synaptic connections to other neurons. (Location 2591)

  • over the next decade, gray-matter thickness declines as less optimal dendritic processes and connections are pruned away.fn3,3 (Location 2597)

  • The longer the period of packing on gray-matter cortical thickness in early adolescence before the pruning started, the higher the adult IQ. (Location 2601)

  • adults have more executive control over behavior during some tasks than do adolescents and show more frontal cortical activation at the time. (Location 2604)

  • other parts of the adolescent brain seem to help out the underdeveloped frontal cortex, taking on some roles that it’s not yet ready for. (Location 2621)

  • Meanwhile, while adolescent males don’t have equivalent hormonal gyrations, it can’t help that their frontal cortex keeps getting hypoxic from the priapic blood flow to the crotch. (Location 2633)

  • The improvement in detecting irony reflects improvement in abstract cognitive perspective taking. (Location 2645)

  • Reappraisal strategies get better during adolescence, (Location 2656)

  • Bringing the striatum into the picture brings up dopamine and reward, thus bringing up the predilection of adolescents for bungee jumping. (Location 2661)

  • during risky decision making, adolescents activate the prefrontal cortex less than do adults; (Location 2666)

  • Adolescents update their estimates as adults do for good news, but feedback about bad news barely makes a dent. (Location 2671)

  • Thus, adolescence is about risk taking and novelty seeking. Where does the dopamine reward system fit in? (Location 2696)

  • adolescents experience bigger-than-expected rewards more positively than do adults and smaller-than-expected rewards as aversive. (Location 2713)

  • The immature frontal cortex hasn’t a prayer to counteract a dopamine system like this. (Location 2715)

  • Adding two peers to egg them on had no effect on adults but tripled risk taking in adolescents. (Location 2722)

  • peers egging subjects on (by intercom) lessens vmPFC activity and enhances ventral striatal activity in adolescents but not adults. (Location 2723)

  • What’s this delayed vlPFC activation about? “Why am I getting upset? (Location 2748)

  • Rejection hurts adolescents more, producing that stronger need to fit in. (Location 2753)

  • kids who are more sensitive to peer pressure are more prepared to imitate someone else’s emotionality. (Location 2759)

  • young adolescents most resistant to peer influence had the strongest such ventral striatal responses. (Location 2764)

  • adolescents mostly make meritocratic decisions (with a smattering of utilitarian and libertarian viewpoints thrown in); (Location 2773)

  • they increasingly distinguish between intentional and accidental harm, viewing the former as worse.28 When contemplating the latter, there is now less activation of three brain regions related to pain processing, namely the amygdala, the insula, and the premotor areas (the last reflecting the tendency to cringe when hearing about pain being inflicted). Meanwhile, there is increasing dlPFC and vmPFC activation when contemplating intentional harm. In other words, it is a frontal task to appreciate the painfulness of someone’s being harmed intentionally. (Location 2777)

  • there is less differentiation between recommended punishment for intentional and unintentional damage to objects. (Location 2783)

  • Feeling someone else’s pain is painful, and people who do so most strongly, with the most pronounced arousal and anxiety, are actually less likely to act prosocially. (Location 2801)

  • Related to that, if a distressing, empathy-evoking circumstance increases your heart rate, you’re less likely to act prosocially than if it decreases it. Thus, one predictor of who actually acts is the ability to gain some detachment, to ride, rather than be submerged, by the wave of empathy. (Location 2805)

  • First, [as everyone knows, a] lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility are found in youth more often than in adults and are more understandable among the young. These qualities often result in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions. (Location 2834)

  • Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. (Location 2867)

  • For example, the cortical region central to language comprehension myelinates a few months earlier than that for language production—kids understand language before producing it. (Location 2886)

  • four stages of cognitive development:4 (Location 2897)

  • by ToM deficits if these regions are damaged (autistic individuals, who have limited ToM, have decreased gray matter and activity in the superior temporal sulcus); and by the fact that if you temporarily inactivate the TPJ, people don’t consider someone’s intentions when judging them morally.8 (Location 2927)

  • Humans understand logical operations between individuals earlier than between objects.10 (Location 2938)

  • Empathy is shifting from the concrete world of “Her finger must hurt, I’m suddenly conscious of my own finger” to ToM-ish focusing on the pokee’s emotions and experience. (Location 2968)

  • by around age seven, kids are expressing their empathy. By ages ten through twelve, empathy is more generalized and abstracted—empathy for “poor people,” rather than one individual (downside: this is also when kids first negatively stereotype categories of people). (Location 2974)

  • By adolescence, boys tend to accept inequality more than girls do, on utilitarian grounds. And both sexes are acquiescing to inequality as social convention—“ (Location 2989)

  • Concern arises when aggression, particularly if callous and remorseless, doesn’t wane around these ages—this predicts an increased risk of adult sociopathy (aka antisocial personality). (Location 3008)

  • “I love a good man outside the law, just as much as I hate a bad man inside the law.” (Location 3031)

  • Are moral judgments more the outcome of reasoning or of intuition and emotion? (Location 3048)

  • does moral reasoning predict moral action? (Location 3057)

  • Five-year-old champs at marshmallow patience averaged higher SAT scores in high school (compared with those who couldn’t wait), with more social success and resilience and less aggressivefn9 and oppositional behavior. (Location 3082)

  • a child is raised by cold, inexpressive parents and, as an adult, feels unlovable. (Location 3092)

  • separate rat pups from Mom a few hours daily and, as adults, they have elevated glucocorticoid levels and poor cognitive skills, are anxious, and, if male, are more aggressive. (Location 3103)

  • “What do children need from their mothers?”: love, warmth, affection, responsiveness, stimulation, consistency, reliability. What is produced in their absence? Anxious, depressed, and/or poorly attached adults.fn11 (Location 3124)

  • when abortions become readily available in an area, rates of crime by young adults decline about twenty years later. (Location 3139)

  • This was her first lesson about her place in that world. “You see her? She’s much higher ranking than you, so you don’t just go and hang with her. If she’s around, you sit still and avoid eye contact and hope she doesn’t take whatever you’re eating.” (Location 3158)

  • Infant monkeys were raised with chicken-wire surrogates with air jets in the middle of their torsos. When an infant clung, she’d receive an aversive blast of air. What would a behaviorist predict that the monkey would do when faced with such punishment? Flee. But, as in the world of abused children and battered partners, infants held harder. (Location 3163)

  • Why do we ever love the wrong person, get abused, and return for more? (Location 3167)

  • If a pup that had been conditioned at ten days of age or older (“older pups”) was exposed to that odor, logical things happened—amygdala activation, glucocorticoid secretion, and avoidance of the odor. But do the same to a younger pup and none of that would occur; remarkably, the pup would be attracted to the odor. (Location 3172)

  • block glucocorticoid secretion in older pups during conditioning, and they’d become attracted to the odor. (Location 3184)

  • If this applies to humans, it helps explain why individuals abused as kids are as adults prone toward relationships in which they are abused by their partner. (Location 3188)

  • what specific biological changes did each cause in children that increased the odds of specific adult behaviors? (Location 3197)

  • Basically, childhood adversity increases the odds of an adult having (a) depression, anxiety, and/or substance abuse; (b) impaired cognitive capabilities, particularly related to frontocortical function; (c) impaired impulse control and emotion regulation; (d) antisocial behavior, including violence; and (e) relationships that replicate the adversities of childhood (Location 3201)

  • abused children who develop PTSD have decreased volume of the hippocampus in adulthood. (Location 3216)

  • As a likely cause, glucocorticoids decrease hippocampal production of the growth factor BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). (Location 3217)

  • childhood adversity impairs learning and memory. Crucially, it also impairs maturation and function of the frontal cortex; again, glucocorticoids, via inhibiting BDNF, are likely culprits. (Location 3218)

  • achieve equivalent frontal regulation, lower-SES kids must activate more frontal cortex than do higher-SES kids. (Location 3224)

  • Childhood adversity accelerates amygdaloid maturation in a particular way. (Location 3237)

  • Childhood adversity also damages the dopamine system (with its role in reward, anticipation, and goal-directed behavior) in two ways. (Location 3240)

  • Exposing children to a violent TV or film clip increases their odds of aggression soon after. (Location 3265)

  • in one study, watching violent music videos increased adolescent girls’ acceptance of dating violence. (Location 3268)

  • The link between exposure to childhood media violence and increased adult aggression is stronger than the link between lead exposure and IQ, calcium intake and bone mass, or asbestos and laryngeal cancer. (Location 3273)

  • What are the roots of fascism? (Location 3335)

  • extreme conformity, submission to and belief in authority, aggressiveness, and hostility toward intellectualism and introspection—traits typically rooted in childhood.48 (Location 3338)

  • authoritative parenting. (Location 3342)

  • authoritarian parenting. (Location 3346)

  • is permissive parenting, (Location 3350)

  • neglectful parenting. (Location 3353)

  • authoritative (high demand, high responsiveness), authoritarian (high demand, low responsiveness), permissive (low demand, high responsiveness), or neglectful (low demand, low responsiveness). (Location 3354)

  • the opposite of play is not work—it’s depression. (Location 3383)

  • Moreover, exposing Japanese kids to media violence boosts aggression less than in American kids.56 Why the difference? (Location 3412)

  • prefer those stimuli after birth. (Location 3468)

  • Thus testosterone has much of its masculinizing effect in the brain by becoming estrogen. (Location 3501)

  • Thus fetal life produces a hypothalamus that is more complexly wired in females. (Location 3509)

  • how much of male aggression is due to prenatal masculinizing of the brain? (Location 3511)

  • This challenged dogma that sexual identity is due to social, not biological, influences. (Location 3519)

  • in one study, adult male rhesus monkeys were far more interested in playing with “masculine” human toys (e.g., wheeled toys) than “feminine” ones (stuffed animals), while females had a slight preference for feminine.66 (Location 3528)

  • treating pregnant monkeys with testosterone and examining their female offspring. (Location 3539)

  • The authors noted the relevance of this to transgender individuals—the external appearance of one sex but the brain, if you will, of the other.fn28 (Location 3546)

  • congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). (Location 3550)

  • And what about the excessive androgens in CAH girls (who are typically born with ambiguous genitals and are infertile as adults)? (Location 3552)

  • CAH women are more likely to be gay or bisexual or have a transgender sexual identity.fn29 (Location 3562)

  • androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS, historically called “testicular feminization syndrome”). (Location 3566)

  • But a mutation in the androgen receptor makes it insensitive to testosterone. Thus the testes can secrete testosterone till the cows come home but there won’t be any masculinization. (Location 3568)

  • AIS individuals raised female have higher-than-expected rates of being gay, and of having an other-than-female or neither-female-nor-male-sex/gender self-identification. (Location 3584)

  • prenatal testosterone exposure influences digit length. (Location 3589)

  • Moreover, CAH females have a more masculine ratio, as do females who shared their fetal environment (and thus some testosterone) with a male twin, while AIS males have a more feminine ratio. (Location 3592)

  • Men with more “masculine” 2D:4D ratios tend toward higher levels of aggression and math scores; more assertive personalities; higher rates of ADHD and autism (diseases with strong male biases); and decreased risk of depression and anxiety (disorders with a female skew). The faces and handwriting of such men are judged to be more “masculine.” Furthermore, some reports show a decreased likelihood of being gay. (Location 3598)

  • Women having a more “feminine” ratio have less chance of autism and more of anorexia (a female-biased disease). They’re less likely to be left-handed (a male-skewed trait). Moreover, they exhibit less athletic ability and more attraction to highly masculine faces. And they’re more likely to be straight or, if lesbian, more likely to take stereotypical female sexual roles.72 (Location 3601)

  • Prenatal endocrine environment is destiny. (Location 3608)

  • At an extreme, maternal malnutrition broadly impairs fetal brain development.fn32,74 (Location 3615)

  • Most important, stressed mothers secrete glucocorticoids, which enter fetal circulation and basically have the same bad consequences as in stressed infants and children. (Location 3622)

  • Just as prenatal testosterone exposure generates an adult brain that is more sensitive to environmental triggers of aggression, excessive prenatal glucocorticoid exposure produces an adult brain more sensitive to environmental triggers of depression and anxiety. (Location 3624)

  • testosterone-activating genes related to increased growth in muscle cells). (Location 3633)

  • offspring of more “attentive” rat mothers (those that frequently nurse, groom, and lick their pups) become adults with lower glucocorticoid levels, less anxiety, better learning, and delayed brain aging. (Location 3638)

  • mothering style alters gene regulation in pups’ brains. (Location 3641)

  • adult behavior produces persistent molecular brain changes in offspring, “programming” them to be likely to replicate that distinctive behavior in adulthood.76 (Location 3644)

  • Childhood abuse, for example, causes epigenetic changes in hundreds of genes in the human hippocampus. (Location 3650)

  • our approximately twenty thousand genes. (Location 3687)

  • Suppose a hardworking neuron is low on energy. This state activates a particular transcription factor, which binds to a specific promoter, which activates the next gene in line (the “downstream” gene). This gene codes for a glucose transporter; more glucose transporter proteins are made and inserted into the cell membrane, improving the neuron’s ability to access circulating glucose. (Location 3730)

  • the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment. (Location 3759)

  • the evolution of genes is less important than the evolution of regulatory sequences upstream of genes (Location 3762)

  • when females and males first mate, there are epigenetic changes in regulation of oxytocin and vasopressin receptor genes in the nucleus accumbens, that target of mesolimbic dopamine projection.6 (Location 3777)

  • It turns out that most genes are not coded for by a continuous stretch of DNA. (Location 3794)

  • an enzyme removes the intronic parts and splices together the exons. (Location 3798)

  • The only possibility, she concluded, was that stretches of DNA had been copied, with the copy then randomly inserted into another stretch of DNA. (Location 3811)

  • In humans transpositional events occur in stem cells in the brain when they are becoming neurons, making the brain a mosaic of neurons with different DNA sequences. (Location 3828)

  • genetics plays a major role in a gamut of domains of behavior, including IQ and its subcomponents (Location 3889)

  • genetic influences on behavior often work through very indirect routes, (Location 3910)

  • the assumption of MZs sharing more environment than do DZs doesn’t significantly reduce the size of genetic influences.fn15,23 (Location 3925)

  • third-trimester malnutrition increased the risk of some adult diseases more than tenfold. (Location 3940)

  • 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 trait? (Location 3977)

  • Then how much do genes have to do with one person scoring higher than another? (Location 3979)

  • How much in explaining why people like different flavors? (Location 3981)

  • (things would be easier if heritability were called something like “gene tendency”), (Location 3986)

  • it’s more interesting to consider why some people are smarter than others than why humans are smarter than turnips. (Location 3989)

  • Study a gene in only one environment and, by definition, you’ve eliminated the ability to see if it works differently in other environments (in other words, if other environments regulate the gene differently). (Location 4025)

  • This inflates heritability scores, because you’ve prevented yourself from ever discovering that some extraneous environmental factor isn’t actually extraneous.fn22 (Location 4030)

  • Now, instead, in environment A it’s 1, 2, and 3, while in environment B it’s also 1, 2, and 3. Heritability is 100 percent, with all variability in height explained by genetic variation. (Location 4049)

  • 5HTT codes for a transporter that removes serotonin from the synapse; (Location 4065)

  • higher SES allows the full range of genetic influences on cognition to flourish, whereas lower-SES settings restrict them. (Location 4111)

  • In other words, genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you’re growing up in awful poverty—poverty’s adverse effects trump the genetics.fn24 (Location 4112)

  • MAO-A, say high serotonin = aggression. (Location 4165)

  • low-activity MAO-A variant being referred to as the “warrior gene” (Location 4175)

  • The effects of MAO-A variants are tiny. (Location 4181)

  • “In a healthy environment, increased threat sensitivity, poor emotion control and enhanced fear memory in MAOA-L [i.e., the “warrior” variant] men might only manifest as variation in temperament within a ‘normal’ or subclinical range. However, these same characteristics in an abusive childhood environment—one typified by persistent uncertainty, unpredictable threat, poor behavioral modeling and social referencing, and inconsistent reinforcement for prosocial decision making—might predispose toward frank aggression and impulsive violence in the adult.” (Location 4199)

  • activity individuals were more aggressive than others—but only in circumstances of social exclusion. (Location 4212)

  • the D4 dopamine receptor (Location 4222)

  • kids with the 7R variant are less generous than average. But only if they show insecure attachment to their parents. Secure-attachment 7Rs show more generosity than average. (Location 4229)

  • 7Rs are worse at gratification-postponement tasks, but only if they grew up poor. (Location 4233)

  • differences between collectivist and individualist cultures. (Location 4236)

  • the COMT gene is one associated with a more efficient enzyme. “More efficient” = better at degrading dopamine = less dopamine in the synapse = less dopamine signaling. The highly efficient COMT variant is associated with higher rates of extroversion, aggression, criminality, and conduct disorder. (Location 4240)

  • they’re drawn more than average to happy faces, are more repelled by angry faces, and have more positive parenting styles. (Location 4248)

  • Oxytocin and vasopressin are involved in prosociality, ranging from parent/offspring bonds to monogamous bonds to trust, empathy, generosity, and social intelligence. Recall the caveats: (a) sometimes these neuropeptides are more about sociality than prosociality (in other words, boosting social information gathering, rather than acting prosocially with that information); (Location 4264)

  • more xenophobic and preemptively aggressive. (Location 4268)

  • higher levels of either the hormones or their receptors tend toward more stable monogamous relationships, (Location 4270)

  • If an SNP that’s implicated occurs in a gene, you’ve just gotten a hint that the gene may be involved in that trait.fn30 (Location 4325)

  • With this “microarray” or “gene chip” approach, you look for genes that are transcriptionally active only in diseased or in healthy muscle, not in both. (Location 4331)

  • Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes (i.e., gene/gene/gene/gene … /environment). (Location 4378)

  • over the course of millennia, earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts gender equality today. (Location 4405)

  • subjects from individualist cultures strongly activate the (emotional) mPFC when looking at a picture of themselves, compared to looking at a picture of a relative or friend; in contrast, the activation is far less for East Asian subjects. (Location 4501)

  • East Asians, unlike Americans, don’t have to puff up their own group to view others as inferior.14 (Location 4517)

  • East Asian cultural collectivism coevolved with selection against the 7R variant. (Location 4609)

  • Why have stratified cultures dominated the planet, generally replacing more egalitarian ones? (Location 4742)

  • In other words, when times are tough, the unequal access to wealth becomes the unequal distribution of misery and death. (Location 4746)

  • cultures with more income inequality have less social capital.35 Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry. Moreover, a culture highly unequal in material resources is almost always also unequal in the ability to pull the strings of power, to have efficacy, to be visible. (Location 4756)

  • in unequal societies, people on top generate justifications for their status. (Location 4769)

  • inequality means more secession of the wealthy from contributing to the public good. (Location 4808)

  • conservative nightmare of class warfare, of the poor rising up to slaughter the wealthy, when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor. (Location 4814)

  • the larger the population where someone lived, the more reactive their amygdala was during that stressor.fn14,43 (Location 4830)

  • Societies with frequent anonymous interactions tend to outsource punishment to gods. (Location 4844)

  • the more informed and punitive people consider their moralistic gods to be, the more generous they are to coreligionist strangers in a financial allocation game. (Location 4847)

  • inner cities breed violence, pathology, and social deviance. (Location 4867)

  • High-density living doesn’t make rats more aggressive. Instead it makes aggressive rats more aggressive. (Location 4868)

  • crowding makes unaggressive individuals more timid. In other words, it exaggerates preexisting social tendencies. (Location 4870)

  • Elbonians and Kerplakis. (Location 4888)

    • Note: Was hat es mit diesen völkern auf sich?

  • implicit cues about infectious disease make people more xenophobic. (Location 4925)

  • historical prevalence of infectious disease predicts a culture’s openness to outsiders. (Location 4925)

  • one reason for Europe’s historical success, relative to Africa, has been the weather—Western-style planning ahead arose from the annual reality of winter coming. (Location 4930)

  • every three degree increase in temperature, there was a 4 percent increase in interpersonal violence and 14 percent in group violence. (Location 4950)

  • Why does religion arise? Because it makes in-groups more cooperative and viable (Location 4958)

  • What norms do nomadic HGs value most? Fairness, indirect reciprocity, and avoidance of despotism. (Location 5223)

  • an HG’s best investment against future hunger is to put meat in other people’s stomachs now. (Location 5237)

  • Gossiping serves numerous purposes. It helps for reality testing (“Is it just me, or was he being a total jerk?”), passing news (“Two guesses who just happened to get a foot cramp during the hairiest part of the hunt today”), and building consensus (“Something needs to be done about this guy”). Gossip is the weapon of norm enforcement. (Location 5245)

  • I think that its invention was one of the all-time human blunders, up there with, say, the New Coke debacle and the Edsel. Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. (Location 5265)

  • coevolution in the technical sense—where there are significant differences between different cultures in the distribution of gene variants pertinent to behavior. But those influences are pretty small. Instead what is most consequential is childhood, the time when cultures inculcate individuals into further propagating their culture. In that regard, probably the most important fact about genetics and culture is the delayed maturation of the frontal cortex (Location 5277)

  • “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” (Location 5297)

  • enhanced fertility; downside: increased risk of prostate cancer. (Location 5307)

  • Which wins—transient but major reproductive success, or persistent but minor success? An intermediate form.fn2 (Location 5335)

  • Animals don’t behave for the good of the species. They behave to maximize the number of copies of their genes passed into the next generation.fn4 (Location 5374)

  • pregnant females miscarry if they smell a new male.10 (Location 5410)

  • What about a full sibling who isn’t an identical twin? Recall from chapter 8 that you’d share 50 percent of your genes with him. (Location 5423)

  • “I’ll gladly lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.” (Location 5427)

  • The extent to which a male primate cares for infants reflects his certainty of paternity. (Location 5441)

  • if animal A is crummy to animal B, afterward, B is more likely to be crummy to A’s relatives. And if A is lousy to B, B’s relatives are more likely to be crummy to A. Furthermore, if A is lousy to B, B’s relatives are more likely to be crummy to A’s relatives.16 (Location 5452)

  • major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This is a super variable gene cluster that produces unique proteins that form a signature for an individual. (Location 5500)

  • invaders—“self” and “nonself”—and attacks the latter. All your cells carry your unique MHC-derived protein, and surveillance immune cells attack any cell lacking this protein password. And MHC-derived proteins also wind up in pheromones, producing a distinctive olfactory signature. (Location 5502)

  • pregnancy triggers neurogenesis in the olfactory system. Why there? So that olfactory recognition is in top form when it’s time to recognize your newborn; (Location 5511)

  • Would rocks want to bash every scissors into extinction? No way. Because then all those papers would enwrap the rocks into extinction. Each participant has an incentive for restraint, producing an equilibrium. (Location 5538)

  • “reciprocal altruism”—incurring a fitness cost to enhance a nonrelative’s fitness, with the expectation of reciprocation.32 (Location 5560)

  • Cooperate in the first round. After that, you do whatever the other player did in the previous round. It was called Tit for Tat. More details: (Location 5602)

  • Thus, when there are signal errors, differing costs to different strategies, and the existence of mutations, a cycle emerges: a heterogeneous population of strategies, including exploitative, noncooperative ones, are replaced by Tit for Tat, then replaced by Forgiving Tit for Tat, then by Always Cooperate (Location 5664)

  • Researchers noted some workers who never worked and were considerably fatter than the rest. (Location 5693)

  • Consider two Tit for Tat–ers amid ninety-eight Always Defect–ers. Both will crash and burn … unless they find each other and form a stable cooperative core, where the Always Defect–ers either must switch to Tit for Tat or go extinct. A nidus of cooperation crystallizes outward through the population. (Location 5708)

  • How picky are males about whom they mate with? In species B, males mate with anyone, anywhere, anytime—it only costs the price of some sperm. In contrast, males of species A, with its rule of “You get her pregnant, you do child care,” (Location 5739)

  • in species A, females compete aggressively to pair-bond with a particularly desirable (i.e., paternal) male. (Location 5750)

  • Interestingly, as females age, with decreasing likelihood of a future child, they become less forceful in weaning. (Location 5778)

  • The fetus releases a hormone that makes Mom’s cells unresponsive to insulin (i.e., “insulin resistant”), as well as an enzyme that degrades Mom’s insulin. Thus Mom absorbs less glucose from her bloodstream, leaving more for the fetus. (Location 5783)

  • Paternal imprinted genes bias toward more fetal growth, while maternal imprinted genes counter this. (Location 5793)

  • A paternally derived gene expressed in the brain makes newborns more avid nursers; the maternally derived version counters this. (Location 5795)

  • “a chicken is just an egg’s way of making another egg”—the organism is just a vehicle for the genome to be replicated in the next generation, and behavior is just this wispy epiphenomenon that facilitates the replication. (Location 5821)

  • “No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing he cannot give them—direct visibility to natural selection.” (Location 5829)

  • Why was each superstar the egg queen in her original group? Because she would aggressively peck subordinates enough to stress them into reduced fertility. (Location 5855)

  • What about human sexual dimorphism? Men are roughly 10 percent taller and 20 percent heavier than women, need 20 percent more calories, and have life spans 6 percent shorter—more dimorphic than monogamous species, less than polygamous ones. (Location 5898)

  • We aren’t classically monogamous or polygamous. As everyone from poets to divorce attorneys can attest, we are by nature profoundly confused—mildly polygynous, floating somewhere in between.fn28 (Location 5904)

  • the most common cause of individual human violence is male-male competition for direct or indirect reproductive access to females. And then there is the dizzyingly common male violence against females for coercive sex or as a response to rejection. (Location 5915)

  • a child is far more likely to be abused or killed by a stepparent than by a parent. This is readily framed as parallel to competitive infanticide. (Location 5923)

  • when humans have damage to the (emotional) vmPFC, they become so unemotionally utilitarian that they would choose to harm family members in order to save strangers. (Location 5943)

  • 46 percent of women would save their dog over a foreign tourist. (Location 5992)

  • we can be manipulated into feeling more or less related to someone than we actually are. (Location 5996)

  • One of the tools of the propagandist and ideologue drumming up hatred of the out-group—blacks, Jews, Muslims, Tutsis, Armenians, Roma—is to characterize them as animals, vermin, cockroaches, pathogens. So different that they hardly count as human. It’s called pseudospeciation, (Location 5998)

  • Lactase persistence evolved and spread in a fraction of a geologic blink of an eye—in the last ten thousand years or so, coevolving with domestication of dairy animals. (Location 6105)

  • we use the same circuitry in the orbitofrontal PFC when we evaluate the moral goodness of an act and the beauty of a face. (Location 7130)

  • When deontologism and consequentialism contemplate trolleys, the former is about moral intuitions rooted in the vmPFC, amygdala, and insula, while the latter is the domain of the dlPFC and moral reasoning. (Location 8135)

  • “Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.” (Location 8137)

  • approximately 30 percent of subjects were consistently deontologists, unwilling to either pull a lever or push a person, even at the cost of those five lives. Another 30 percent were always utilitarian, willing to pull or push. And for everyone else, moral philosophies were context dependent. (Location 8139)

  • (“Intentionally kill one to save five—that obviously increases collective happiness”) turns out not to be so in the long run. “Sure, that healthy person’s involuntary organ donation just saved five lives, but who else is going to get dissected that way? What if they come for me? I kinda like my liver. (Location 8162)

  • longer-viewed version (what they call “strategic” consequentialism and what Greene calls “pragmatic utilitarianism”), you get better outcomes. (Location 8166)

  • guys can’t have lots of blood flow to their crotch and their brain at the same time; they have to choose. (Location 8168)

  • when we are making decisions, we are running not only thought experiments but somatic feeling experiments as well—how is it going to feel if this happens?—and this combination is the goal in moral decision making. (Location 8176)

  • “No way I’d push someone onto the trolley tracks; it’s just wrong” is about the amygdala, insula, and vmPFC. “Sacrifice one life to save five, sure” is the dlPFC. But do long-term strategic consequentialism, and all those regions are engaged. (Location 8178)

  • If you’re a fan of moral intuitions, you’d frame them as being foundational and primordial. If you don’t like them, you’d present them as simplistic, reflexive, and primitive. (Location 8184)

  • They are the end products of learning; they are cognitive conclusions to which we have been exposed so often that they have become automatic, (Location 8186)

  • Our guts learn their intuitions. (Location 8191)

  • Greene’s superb 2014 book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. (Location 8194)

  • most intergroup conflicts on our planet ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose “right” is righter. (Location 8214)

  • And it takes a locomotive’s worth of effort for me to admit that I can’t justify that hatred and contempt, that mine is a mere moral intuition, that there are things that I do that would evoke the same response in some distant person whose humanity and morality are certainly no less than mine, and that but for the randomness of where I happen to have been born, I could have readily had their views instead. (Location 8225)

  • Subjects were given differing lengths of time to decide how much money they would contribute to a common pot (versus keeping it for themselves, to everyone else’s detriment). And the faster the decision required, the more cooperative people were. (Location 8236)

  • moving it from the realm of intuition to that of cogitation) can even be counterproductive, a point emphasized by Samuel Bowles.fn12 (Location 8248)

    • Note: Interessante fußnote

  • when doing moral decision making during Us-versus-Them scenarios, keep intuitions as far away as possible. Instead, think, reason, and question; be deeply pragmatic and strategically utilitarian; take their perspective, try to think what they think, try to feel what they feel. Take a deep breath, and then do it all again. (Location 8250)

  • sometimes being honest is the harder thing—telling an unpleasant truth about another person activates the medial PFC (along with the insula).fn14,36 (Location 8264)

  • if a low-ranking capuchin knows where food has been hidden and there is a dominant animal around, he will move away from the hiding place; if it’s a subordinate animal, no problem. (Location 8275)

  • across primate species, a larger neocortex predicts higher rates of deception, independent of group size. (Location 8279)

  • higher rates of corruption, tax evasion, and political fraud in a subject’s country predicted higher rates of lying. (Location 8291)

  • people rarely made up a high-paying number. Instead they simply reported the higher roll of the two. (Location 8296)

  • lying most often included rationalizing that made it feel less dishonest (Location 8299)

  • dlPFC and related frontal regions are central to a neural circuit of deception. (Location 8302)

  • Thus activation of the dlPFC will reflect both the struggle to resist temptation and the executive effort to wallow effectively in the temptation, once you’ve lost that struggle. “Don’t do it” + “if you’re going to do it, do it right.” (Location 8309)

  • compulsive liars have increased amounts of white matter (i.e., the axonal cables connecting neurons) in the frontal cortex, but lesser amounts of gray matter (i.e., the cell bodies of the neurons). It’s not possible to know if there’s causality in these neuroimaging/behavior correlates. (Location 8316)

  • lying is most consistently associated with activation of the dlPFC (along with the nearby and related ventrolateral PFC). (Location 8323)

  • activation of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as well. As introduced in chapter 2, the ACC responds to circumstances of conflicting choices. This occurs for conflict in an emotional sense, as well as in a cognitive sense (e.g., having to choose between two answers when both seem to work). (Location 8325)

  • inactivate the dlPFC in people during instructed-lying tasks. Result? Subjects were slower and less successful in lying (Location 8340)

  • this most eggheady, cognitive part of the PFC is central to both resisting lying and, once having decided to lie, doing it well. (Location 8343)

  • Some subjects who promised to always cooperate broke their promise at least once. At such times there was activation of the dlPFC, the ACC, and, of course, the amygdala. (Location 8350)

  • along with predictable activation of the ACC, there’d be activation of the insula. (Location 8353)

  • for people capable of cheating, the occasional resistance seems to be the outcome of major neurobiological Sturm und Drang. (Location 8368)

  • In those who were always honest, the dlPFC, vlPFC, and ACC were in veritable comas when the chance to cheat arose. There’s no conflict. There’s no working hard to do the right thing. You simply don’t cheat. (Location 8373)

  • Doing the right thing is the easier thing. (Location 8391)

  • you see a hand poked with a needle, and the part of your sensory cortex that maps onto your hand activates, sensitizing you to the imagined sensation. Perhaps your motor cortex will also activate, causing you to compress your own hand. (Location 8404)

  • “sympathy” means you feel sorry for someone else’s pain without understanding it. In contrast, “empathy” contains the cognitive component of understanding the cause of someone’s pain, taking his perspective, walking in his shoes. (Location 8413)

  • some recent work shows that when you help someone out of empathy, there is a very different profile of brain activation from when you do so out of an obliged sense of reciprocity. (Location 8424)

  • this shared pain only occurred between mice that were cagemates. (Location 8456)

  • numerous species show “reconciliative” behavior, where two individuals, soon after a negative interaction, show higher-than-chance levels of affiliative behaviors (grooming, sitting in contact) between them, and this decreases the odds of subsequent tensions between them. (Location 8461)

  • As compared with unstressed individuals, stressed ones would be licked and groomed more by their partner. Partners would also match the anxiety behaviors and glucocorticoid levels of their stressed pairmate. This didn’t occur for a stressed stranger, nor among polygamous meadow voles. As we’ll see, the neurobiology of this effect is all about oxytocin and the anterior cingulate cortex. (Location 8472)

  • Once emotional pain can evoke an empathic state, the profile is mostly about coupled activation between the (emotional) vmPFC and limbic structures. As the capacity for moral indignation matures, coupling among the vmPFC, the insula, and amygdala emerges. (Location 8500)

  • And as perspective taking comes into play, the vmPFC is increasingly coupled to regions associated with Theory of Mind (like the temporoparietal junction). (Location 8502)

  • When it comes to empathy, all neurobiological roads pass through the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). (Location 8512)

  • The ACC funnels literal gut feelings into intuitions and metaphorical gut feelings influencing frontal function. (Location 8518)

  • the ACC is an “all-purpose alarm that signals when ongoing behavior has hit a snag.” (Location 8525)

  • What the ACC cares about is the meaning of the pain. Good news or bad, and of what nature? Thus the ACC’s perception of pain can be manipulated. (Location 8529)

  • But the ACC falls for the placebo effect and stays silent. (Location 8532)

  • You’re being left out, and the ACC activates. Insofar as the ACC cares about the meaning of pain, it’s just as concerned with the abstractions of social and emotional pain—social exclusion, anxiety, disgust, embarrassment (Location 8537)

  • the more painful the other person’s situation seems to be, the more ACC activation. (Location 8545)

  • Recall the study in which prairie voles are observed consoling their stressed partner. And we’d expect, the effect depends on the actions of oxytocin. Remarkably, the oxytocin works in the ACC—selectively block oxytocin effects in the ACC, and voles don’t console. (Location 8548)

  • the ACC is essential for learning fear and conditioned avoidance by observation alone. (Location 8555)

  • At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about that other person in pain as an add-on. (Location 8558)

  • and a big chunk of the amygdala texting the frontal cortex is funneled through the ACC. (Location 8562)

  • the more the purity of empathy is clouded with the anger, disgust, and indignation of blame, the harder it is to actually help. (Location 8571)

  • Theory of Mind networks such as the temporoparietal juncture (TPJ) and superior central sulcus (Location 8574)

  • there is more engagement of the dmPFC when observing someone in emotional pain than physical pain. (Location 8585)

  • Resonating with someone else’s pain is also a cognitive task when it is a type of pain that you haven’t experienced. (Location 8587)

  • It is an enormous cognitive task for humans to overcome that, to reach an empathic state for someone who is different, unappealing. A hospital chaplain once described to me how he has to actively make sure that he is not preferentially visiting patients who were “YAVIS”—young, attractive, verbal, intelligent, or social. (Location 8594)

  • where acting morally toward an Us is automatic, while doing so for a Them takes work. (Location 8599)

  • the stronger the discrepancy in patterns of neural activation when observing an in-group versus an out-group person in pain, the lower the chances of helping the latter. (Location 8605)

  • the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act. Moreover, wealthier people are less adept at recognizing other people’s emotions and in experimental settings are greedier and more likely to cheat or steal. (Location 8614)

  • wealthier people (as assessed by the cost of the car they were driving) are less likely than poor people to stop for pedestrians at crosswalks; (Location 8616)

  • telling them that whatever’s left over will be given to some kids—the wealthier take more candy. (Location 8618)

  • Make people feel wealthy, and they take more candy from children. (Location 8621)

  • wealthier people are more likely to endorse greed as being good, to view the class system as fair and meritocratic, and to view their success as an act of independence—all great ways to decide that someone else’s distress is beneath your notice or concern. (Location 8623)

  • remember how their misfortune doesn’t simply fail to activate the ACC but instead it activates mesolimbic dopamine reward pathways. Thus the process of taking their perspective and feeling their pain (as other than grounds for gloating) is a dramatic cognitive challenge rather than something remotely automatic.26 (Location 8626)

  • they become less helpful to strangers but not to family members. “Empathy fatigue” can thus be viewed as the state when the cognitive load of repeated exposure to the pain of Thems whose perspective is challenging to take has exhausted the frontal cortex. (Location 8630)

  • explain why people are more charitable when contemplating one person in need than a group. To quote Mother Teresa, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” (Location 8633)

  • Joseph Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.” (Location 8635)

  • “Executive” neurons in the PFC decide something, passing the news to the rest of the frontal cortex just behind it. Which sends projections to the PMC just behind it. Which sends projections one step further back, to the motor cortex, which then sends commands to muscles. (Location 8648)

  • some of the bring-food-to-mouth neurons would also activate if the monkey observed someone else (monkey or human) making that movement. (Location 8654)

  • everyone looked for mirror neurons in humans, and their existence in roughly the same part of the brain (Location 8658)

    • Note: Fußnote schauen

  • mirror neuron activity was greater when the observed individual was closer.36 But importantly, this isn’t just literal distance but something resembling “social” distance; (Location 8700)

  • An act of implicit automaticity, the product of a childhood in which doing the right thing was ingrained as an automatic, moral imperative, light-years away from the frontal cortex calculating costs and benefits. (Location 8761)

  • The peril of empathy isn’t simply that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good, which can in turn encourage us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than part of a process, a catalyst.46 (Location 8771)

  • Look at someone in pain with the instruction to take a self-oriented perspective, and the amygdala, ACC, and insular cortex activate, along with reports of distress and anxiety. Do the same with an other-oriented perspective, and all are less likely. And the more extreme the former state, the more likely that someone’s focus will be to lessen their own distress, to metaphorically look the other way. (Location 8782)

  • 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. The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decrease; they can hear the sound of someone else’s need instead of the distressed pounding in their own chests. (Location 8786)

  • Thus, if feeling your pain makes me feel awful, I’m likely to just look out for number one, rather than helping you. (Location 8790)

  • when people are hungry, they are less charitable—hey, quit bellyaching about your problems; my belly is aching. Make people feel socially excluded and they become less generous and empathic. (Location 8792)

  • if you feel highly distressed, whether due to resonating with someone else’s problems or because of your own, tending to your own needs readily becomes the priority.49 (Location 8795)

    • Note: Deshalb ist papa so egozentrisch. Weil er durchgehend unter stress steht

  • When instead he did his Buddhist thing, focusing on thoughts of compassion, a totally different picture of activation emerged—the amygdala was silent, and instead there was heavy activation of the mesolimbic dopamine system. He described it as “a warm positive state associated with a strong prosocial motivation.” (Location 8811)

  • In other studies volunteers underwent either empathy training (focusing on feeling the pain of someone in distress) or compassion training (focusing on a feeling of warmth and care toward that distressed person).51 The former would generate the typical neuroimaging profiles, including heavy amygdala activation, and a negative, anxious state. Those with compassion training did not, showing heavy activation instead in the (cognitive) dlPFC, coupling of activation between the dlPFC and dopaminergic regions, more positive emotions, and a greater tendency toward prosociality. (Location 8813)

  • there’s the danger that the empathic pain is so intense that you can only come up with solutions that would work for you, rather than ones that might help the sufferer. (Location 8826)

  • Being charitable activated dopamine “reward” systems—when there was an observer present. When no one was present, dopamine tended to flow most when subjects kept the money for themselves. (Location 8868)

  • The more people’s dopaminergic reward systems activated when they unexpectedly received money, the less activation there was when they were either taxed or asked to donate. In other words, the greater the love of money, the more painfully it is parted with. No surprise there. (Location 8883)

  • when a pair of strangers are openly given unequal amounts of reward, there is typically dopaminergic activation in the one with the good luck when some of the reward is transferred afterward to make things more even. Thus it’s little surprise in the present study that subjects made happy by reducing inequity, even at a cost to themselves, were also the most charitable. (Location 8889)

  • There was more dopaminergic activation (and more self-reports of satisfaction) when people gave voluntarily than when they were taxed. In other words, a component of the charitability was about self-interest—it was more pleasing when those in need were helped by voluntary efforts than when giving was forced. (Location 8894)

  • Yet, as we’ve seen, a fair degree of detachment is just what is needed to actually act. (Location 8922)

  • We are only metaphorically standing under something when we “understand” it.fn3 (Location 9005)

  • and Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Location 9008)

  • these capacities evolved so recently that our brains are, if you will, winging it and improvising on the fly when dealing with metaphor. As a result, we are actually pretty lousy at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal, at remembering that “it’s only a figure of speech”—with enormous consequences for our best and worst behaviors. (Location 9019)

  • the ACC is heavily involved in “error detection,” noting discrepancies between what is anticipated and what occurs. (Location 9030)

  • But as far as those neurons in the ACC are concerned, social and literal pain are the same. (Location 9036)

  • instead watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. Pain-ometer brain regions are silent, but the ACC activates. For those neurons, feeling someone else’s pain isn’t just a figure of speech. (Location 9040)

  • Moreover, the brain intermixes literal and psychic pain. (Location 9042)

  • the brain becomes literal when we do the flip side of empathy.10 It’s painful watching a hated competitor succeed, and we activate the ACC at that time. Conversely, if he fails, we gloat, feel schadenfreude, get pleasure from his pain, and activate dopaminergic reward pathways. Forget “Your pain is my pain.” Your pain is my gain. (Location 9047)

  • insular cortex. If you bite into rancid food, the insula activates, just as in every other mammal. You wrinkle your nose, raise your upper lip, narrow your eyes, all to protect mouth, eyes, and nasal cavities. Your heart slows. You reflexively spit out the food, (Location 9051)

  • Think about rancid food, and the insula activates. Look at faces showing disgust, or subjectively unattractive faces, and the same occurs. And most important, if you think about a truly reprehensible act, the same occurs. The insula mediates visceral responses to norm violations, and the more activation, the more condemnation. (Location 9054)

    • Note: Deshalb mag ich es nicht über eklige sachen beim essen zu reden

  • The insula not only prompts the stomach to purge itself of toxic food; it prompts the stomach to purge the reality of a nightmarish event. The distance between the symbolic message and the meaning disappears. (Location 9059)

  • contemplating a morally disgusting act leaves more than a metaphorical bad taste in your mouth—people eat less immediately afterward, and a neutral-tasting beverage drunk afterward is rated as having a more negative taste (and, conversely, hearing about virtuous moral acts made the drink taste better). (Location 9062)

  • social conservatives have a lower threshold for visceral disgust than do social progressives; (Location 9066)

  • implicitly evoking a sense of visceral disgust (e.g., by sitting in close proximity to a foul odor) makes us more socially conservative. (Location 9067)

  • A socially conservative stance about, say, gay marriage is not just that it is simply wrong in an abstract sense, or even “disgusting,” but that it constitutes a threat—to the sanctity of marriage and family values. (Location 9073)

  • First you’re disgusted by how Others smell, a gateway to then being disgusted by how Others think. (Location 9089)

  • Subjects were then distracted with some other task and then asked to rerank the ten CDs. And they showed a common psychological phenomenon, which was to now overvalue the CD they’d been given, ranking it higher on the list than before. Unless they had just washed their hands (ostensibly to try a new brand of soap), in which case no reranking occurred. Clean hands, clean slate. (Location 9103)

  • the washing decreases emotional arousal, as it decreased the diameter of subjects’ pupils. (Location 9111)

  • when people were instructed to lie, demonstrated that the more adversely consequential the lie was presented as being, the more washing subjects did. (Location 9117)

  • the immoral mouth-ers were more likely to pick a mouthwash sample; the immoral scribes, hand soap. (Location 9123)

  • subjects were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward subjects either did or didn’t have the opportunity to clean their hands. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a subsequent (experimentally staged) request for help. (Location 9131)

  • What these studies show is that if those metaphorically dirtied hands have been unmetaphorically washed in the interim, they’re less likely to reach out to try to balance the scales. (Location 9136)

  • When subjects held the heavier clipboard, they tended to judge candidates as more “serious” (Location 9141)

  • Sit in the former and they were more likely to perceive individuals as stable and unemotional, to be less flexible in economic game play. This is remarkable—haptic sensations in your butt influencing whether you think someone is a hard-ass. (Location 9149)

  • Subjects who held the warm cup rated the individual as having a warmer personality (Location 9153)

  • a major predictor of whether a prisoner would be granted parole was how recently the judge had eaten. Empty stomach, harsher judgment. Other work has shown that when people are hungry, they become less generous with money and show more future discounting (i.e., are more likely to want reward X now, rather than wait for reward 2X). (Location 9157)

  • subjects told that the office was on the other side of the planet tended to view the data points at a macro level of analysis, paying attention to the overall pattern and seeing that downturn as a mere aberration: (Location 9168)

  • moral disgust, feeling someone’s pain, warm and cold personalities. Given how short a time behaviorally modern humans have existed, this has occurred in a blink of an eye. There hasn’t been enough time to evolve completely new brain regions and circuits for handling these novelties. Instead, tinkering occurred—“Hmm, extreme negative affect elicited by violations of shared behavioral norms. Let’s see … Who has any pertinent experience? I know, the insula! (Location 9184)

  • neurodegenerative disease frontotemporal dementia, destined to eventually destroy the entire fancy neocortex, takes out von Economo neurons first (Location 9195)

    • Note: Interessant diese spindle neurons

  • But as propagandists and ideologues have long known, if you want to get someone to feel that an Other hardly counts as human, there’s only one way to do it—engage the insula. And the surest way to do that is with metaphor. (Location 9211)

  • because in recognizing the enemy’s sacred symbols, you are de facto recognizing their humanity, their capacity for pride, unity, and connection to their past and, probably most of all, their capacity for experiencing pain.fn9 (Location 9282)

  • Should Implicit Association Tests be used in jury selection to eliminate people with strong, pertinent biases? (Location 9358)

  • Related to that is the obvious absurdity of implying that something neurobiologically magical happens on the morning of someone’s eighteenth birthday, endowing them with adult levels of self-control. (Location 9487)

  • free will is that our capacity for free will moves to the forefront with decisions that are slow and deliberative, whereas biological factors may push free will aside in split-second-decision situations. (Location 9526)

  • The frontal immaturity of the adolescent brain is more pertinent to split-second issues of impulse control than to slow, deliberative reasoning processes. (Location 9540)

  • your brain “decided” to move before you were even aware of it. (Location 9565)

  • maybe your brain prepares to initiate a behavior before there is conscious awareness of the decision, meaning that your belief that you consciously chose to move is wrong. But in that lag time is the potential to consciously choose to veto that action. (Location 9573)

  • we may not have free will, but we have “free won’t.”19 (Location 9576)

  • When you praise kids for working hard, they tend to work harder the next time, show more resilience, enjoy the process more, and become more likely to value the accomplishment for its own sake (rather than for the grade). Praise kids for being smart, and precisely the opposite occurs. When it becomes all about being smart, effort begins to seem suspect, beneath you—after all, if you’re really so smart, you shouldn’t have to work hard; you glide, you don’t sweat and grunt.20 (Location 9586)

  • Why do “You’re so smart” and “You work so hard” have such different effects? Because they fall on either side of one of the deepest lines drawn by believers in mitigated free will. It is the belief that one assigns aptitude and impulse to biology and effort and resisting impulse to free will. (Location 9592)

  • “One cannot choose to not be a pedophile, but one can choose to not be a child molester.” (Location 9617)

  • Here are just a few of the things we’ve seen in this book that can influence the column on the right: blood glucose levels; the socioeconomic status of your family of birth; a concussive head injury; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress and glucocorticoid levels; whether you’re in pain; if you have Parkinson’s disease and which medication you’ve been prescribed; perinatal hypoxia; your dopamine D4 receptor gene variant; if you have had a stroke in your frontal cortex; if you suffered childhood abuse; how much of a cognitive load you’ve borne in the last few minutes; your MAO-A gene variant; if you’re infected with a particular parasite; if you have the gene for Huntington’s disease; lead levels in your tap water when you were a kid; if you live in an individualist or a collectivist culture; if you’re a heterosexual male and there’s an attractive woman around; if you’ve been smelling the sweat of someone who is frightened. On and on. (Location 9625)

  • we still can’t predict much about behavior. Perhaps at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to individuals. (Location 9677)

  • The biology of the behaviors that interest us is, in all cases, multifactorial—that is the thesis of this book. Let’s see what “multifactorial” means in a practical sense. (Location 9702)

  • Decision making about culpability for the violation correlates with activity in the cognitive dlPFC. But decision making about appropriate punishment activates the emotional vmPFC, along with the amygdala and insula; the more activation, the more punishment.32 The decision to punish, the passionate motivation to do so, is a frothy limbic state. (Location 9805)

  • when subjects punish someone for making a lousy offer in an economic game, there’s activation of dopaminergic reward systems. Punishment that feels just feels good. (Location 9808)

  • And the more dopaminergic activation during no-cost punishment, the more someone would pay to punish in the other condition. (Location 9814)

neu

  • violence declines when states monopolize force. (Location 9913)
  • After controlling for personality and cognitive abilities, more religious people show less ACC activation when getting news of a negative discrepancy. (Location 10003)
  • religious people tend to inflate reports of their prosociality more than do nonreligious people. (Location 10016)
  • small-band cultures (such as hunter-gatherers) rarely invent moralizing deities. It is not until cultures are large enough that people regularly interact anonymously with strangers that it becomes commonplace to invent a judgmental god—the Judeo-Christian/Muslim deity. (Location 10022)
  • the more punitive the god, the more generosity to an anonymous coreligionist. (Location 10030)
  • Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it. (Location 10033)
  • Napoleon, “people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend,” (Location 10040)
  • Religious primes foster out-group hostility. In a “field study” where people were surveyed in different locations in a cosmopolitan European city, merely walking past a church made Christians express more conservative, negative attitudes toward non-Christians. (Location 10046)
  • that automatic other-race-face amygdala responses can be undone when subjects think of that face as belonging to a person, not a Them. (Location 10110)
  • the forced killing of family members by such children. We are your family now. (Location 10141)
    • Note: Wie in surviving the UN dort rapen sie auch fmily members
  • But also beware when it is our empathic intuitions, rather than our hateful ones, that are manipulated by those who use us for their own goals. (Location 10170)
  • Another solution involves green-beard effects, that poor man’s version of kin selection, where a genetic trait generates a conspicuous marker and a cooperative bent toward bearers of that marker. In that setting the green beard–less will be outcompeted unless they also evolve cooperation. As we saw, green-beard effects occur in various species. (Location 10177)
  • Open-ended play. Two individuals play the Prisoner’s Dilemma, knowing that after a single round, they’ll never meet again. Rationality decrees that you defect; there’ll never be a chance to catch up if you fall behind in that first round. (Location 10184)
  • In other words, playing for a known number of rounds biases against cooperation, and the more rational the players, the more they foresee this. (Location 10188)
  • This is why managers of tense, competitive offices bring in soothing outsiders to lead trust games, hoping that the low-threshold demands for trust there will spill over into work life. (Location 10194)
  • pay-it-forward reciprocity is like money, where the common currency is reputation.27 (Location 10201)
  • Punishment Other animals don’t have reputations or ponder whether their interactions are open-ended. However, punishment to promote cooperation occurs in numerous species—this is shown when a male baboon who is being an aggressive brute to a female is chased out of the troop for a while by the victim and her relatives. Punishment can strongly facilitate cooperation, but its implementation is potentially double-edged in humans. All cultures show some degree of willingness to pay a cost to punish norm violators, and (Location 10202)
  • villages with high average levels of willingness to administer costly punishment in an economic game were the ones with the most patrols to prevent overcutting of trees and the healthiest forests. And as seen in chapter 9, cultures with gods who punish norm violations are atypically prosocial. (Location 10209)
  • Moreover, recent theoretical and empirical work shows that being a conspicuous third-party punisher makes people trust you. But who monitors third-party punishers? Here is where you get people to share and lower the cost by taking sociality to the max—costs are shouldered by everyone, and free riders are punished (e.g., we pay taxes and punish tax (Location 10228)
  • evaders). When the moving parts are balanced, (Location 10230)
  • “Today the bell is not bad news.” As proof, suppose that the day after that, the bell again signals shock. If the initial learning of “bell = shock” had been erased, it would take as long this day to learn the association as it did the first. Instead there is rapid reacquisition: “bell = shock again.” Forgiving someone doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten what he did. (Location 10308)
  • victims who show spontaneous forgiveness, or who have gone through forgiveness therapy (as opposed to “anger validation therapy”) show improvements in general health, cardiovascular function, and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. (Location 10331)
  • we decide if someone is guilty based on reasoning but then decide their punishment based on emotion; (Location 10341)
  • discrepancies between our conscious opinions and what our implicit biases lead us to do. As we saw, Us/Them edges can be softened when implicit biases are made explicit. (Location 10347)
  • Another example to watch out for is the human potential for irrational optimism. For example, while people might accurately assess the risk of a behavior, they tend toward distortive optimism when assessing risk to themselves—“Nah, that couldn’t happen to me.” (Location 10352)
  • in World War II only 15 to 20 percent of riflemen ever fired their guns. The rest? Running messages, helping people load ammunition, tending to buddies—but not aiming a rifle at someone nearby and pulling a trigger. (Location 10378)
  • it’s the pseudokinship of bands of brothers—to protect your buddies, to not let the guys next to you down. But outside those motivations, humans show a strong natural aversion to killing at close range. The most resistance is against hand-to-hand combat with a knife or bayonet. (Location 10381)
  • The resistance can be psychologically modified. It’s easier when you aren’t targeting an identified individual—throwing a grenade into a group rather than shooting at one person. Killing as an individual is harder than in a group—while only that small subset of World War II riflemen fired their weapons, nearly all weapons operated by a team (e.g., machine guns) were fired. (Location 10384)
  • combat PTSD has been framed as a result of the sheer terror of being under attack, of someone trying to kill you and those around you. As we’ve seen, it is an illness where fear conditioning is overgeneralized and pathological, an amygdala grown large, hyperreactive, and convinced that you are never safe. (Location 10389)
  • The deepest trauma is not the fear of being killed. It’s doing the close-up, individuated killing, watching someone for weeks and then turning him the color of the ground. (Location 10410)
  • during World War II there were low rates of psychiatric breakdowns among sailors and medics—people who were just as endangered as infantrymen but killed either impersonally or not at all. (Location 10411)
  • They were unlike any baboon troop documented, exactly like what you’d expect if you eliminated half the adult males, producing a 2:1 female-to-male ratio instead of the typical 1:1, and if the males remaining were particularly unaggressive and affiliative.48 They stayed close together, sat in contact, and groomed more than average. Levels of aggression were lower, and in an informative way. Males still had a dominance hierarchy; (Location 10459)
  • when number three lost a fight, he’d rarely terrorize number ten or a female. Stress hormone levels were low; the neurochemistry of anxiety and benzodiazepines worked differently in these individuals. (Location 10464)
  • adolescent males had grown up in typical baboon troops and then joined this one and adopted the style of low aggression and high affiliation. The troop’s social culture was being transmitted. (Location 10471)
  • in a typical baboon troop it is more than two months before females first groom or sexually solicit new transfer males; in this troop it was a matter of days to weeks. (Location 10476)
  • assimilating into the troop culture in about six months. Thus, when treated in a less aggressive, more affiliative manner, adolescent baboons start doing the same. (Location 10478)
  • Basically, if baboons unexpectedly show this much social plasticity, so can we. Anyone who says that our worst behaviors are inevitable knows too little about primates, including us. (Location 10487)
  • Bouazizi wasn’t thinking about political reform in the Muslim world when he lit the match; instead there was rage with nowhere to go but inward. (Location 10507)
  • Eventually, unarmed soldiers swarmed into no-man’s-land, prayed and caroled together, shared dinner, exchanged gifts. (Location 10654)
  • Troops on both sides ate around the same time, and guns would go silent then—who wants to interrupt dinner in order to kill someone or be killed? The same would occur during awful weather, when everyone’s priority became flooded trenches or avoiding freezing to death. (Location 10678)
  • Wagon trains delivering food were easy artillery targets but were left unharmed, to prevent reciprocal shelling. Similarly, latrines were spared. (Location 10681)
  • Live and Let Live truces could withstand perturbations. Soldiers signaled the other side that they had to shoot for real for a while—officers were coming. The system survived violations. If some gung-ho rookie lobbed a shell into the others’ trenches, the most common convention was two shells back, often aimed at important targets. And then the peace would resume. (Location 10687)
  • And we recognize the modified Tit for Tat in dealing with truce violations, with its propensity toward cooperation, punishment for violations, mechanisms for forgiveness, and clear rules. (Location 10696)
  • First, once any mutual restraint emerged, the enemy had established that they were rational, with incentives to hold fire. This prompted a sense of responsibility in dealing with them; this was initially purely self-serving—don’t violate an agreement because they’ll violate back. (Location 10699)
  • the further from the front, the more hostility. In the words of one frontline soldier, quoted by Ashworth, “At home one abuses the enemy, and draws insulting caricatures. How tired I am of grotesque Kaisers. Out here, one can respect a brave, skillful, and resourceful enemy. They have people they love at home, they too have to endure mud, rain and steel.” (Location 10706)
  • Men up and down hundreds of miles of trenches repeatedly reinvented Live and Let Live, unaware that they were not alone. Imagine texts bouncing along and across the trenches, a million soldiers at death’s door saying, “This is bullshit. None of us here want to fight anymore, and we’ve figured out a way to stop.” (Location 10718)
  • Would pain be less painful if you knew that it would be forgotten? Would the same happen to hatred, if you knew that with time it would fade and the similarities between Us and Them would outweigh the differences? (Location 10737)
  • It’s great if your frontal cortex lets you avoid temptation, allowing you to do the harder, better thing. But it’s usually more effective if doing that better thing has become so automatic that it isn’t hard. And it’s often easiest to avoid temptation with distraction and reappraisal rather than willpower. (Location 10756)
  • Childhood adversity can scar everything from our DNA to our cultures, and effects can be lifelong, even multigenerational. However, more adverse consequences can be reversed than used to be thought. But the longer you wait to intervene, the harder it will be. (Location 10760)
  • Repeatedly, biological factors (e.g., hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it. (Location 10763)
  • Genes have different effects in different environments; a hormone can make you nicer or crummier, depending on your values; we haven’t evolved to be “selfish” or “altruistic” or anything else—we’ve evolved to be particular ways in particular settings. Context, context, context. (Location 10765)
  • Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that’s how we learn—context, context, context. (Location 10768)
  • Often we’re more about the anticipation and pursuit of pleasure than about the experience of it. (Location 10770)
  • You can’t understand aggression without understanding fear (and what the amygdala has to do with both). (Location 10770)
  • It also makes our social lives much more confusing and messy, filled with imperfection and wrong turns. (Location 10777)
  • When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing that hierarchical primates had ever seen before. (Location 10784)
  • The certainty with which we act now might seem ghastly not only to future generations but to our future selves as well. (Location 10789)
  • Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. (Location 10797)
  • Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try. (Location 10800)
  • The Emotional Life of Your Brain (Location 11120)
    • Tags: blue
    • Note: Das Buch will ich eventuell mal lesen
  • D. Moore, The Developing Genome: An Introduction to Behavioral Genetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); H. Wang et al., “Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors Facilitate Partner Preference Formation in Female Prairie Voles,” Nat Nsci 16 (2013): 919. (Location 12314)
  • The resting potential. (Location 14181)
  • Suppose that you have some sort of continuous, throbbing pain—say, an insect bite. How can you stop the throbbing? Briefly stimulate the fast fiber. This adds to the pain for an instant, but by stimulating neuron C, you shut the system down for a while. And that is precisely what we often do in such circumstances. An insect bite throbs unbearably, we scratch hard right around it to dull the pain, and the slow, chronic pain pathway is shut down for up to a few minutes. (Location 14421)
  • a hormone is a chemical messenger released from secretory cells (Location 14502)
  • The number of receptors for a particular hormone in a cell can also change, altering the cell’s sensitivity to that hormone’s effects. (Location 14544)
  • Hormone levels are akin to how loudly someone speaks. Receptor levels are akin to the acuity with which ears detect that voice. (Location 14547)
  • shape of a protein determines its function. (Location 14562)
  • The entire collection of DNA is called the genome, coding for all of the tens of thousands of genes in an organism; (Location 14590)
  • How do you get the DNA information out to where the protein is made? (Location 14595)
  • “central dogma” (Location 14603)
  • point mutation. One single nucleotide is copied incorrectly. (Location 14616)
  • deletion mutation. In this scenario a copying error is made during the inheritance of a gene. (Location 14631)
  • insertion mutations. During copying of the DNA to pass on to the next generation, a nucleotide is inadvertently copied twice, duplicated. (Location 14637)
  • We have 50 percent overlap with siblings at this level of comparison. (Location 14661)
  • over the course of the menstrual cycle in humans, the amount of myelin in the corpus callosum, the massive bundle of axons that connects the two hemispheres, fluctuates as well. (Location 16127)
  • targeting someone just because they’re weak and you’re frustrated, stressed, or pained and need to displace some aggression. Such third-party aggression is ubiquitous—shock a rat and it’s likely to bite the smaller guy nearby; a beta-ranking male baboon loses a fight to the alpha, and he chases the omega male;fn2 (Location 333)

New highlights added September 13, 2022 at 2:03 PM

  • don’t hate violence. We hate and fear the wrong kind of violence, violence in the wrong context. (Location 126)

New highlights added October 30, 2025 at 5:26 PM

  • A small, disheartening literature concerns ex–child soldiers and participants in genocides who are able to hold back their symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder through acts of cruelty: R. Weierstall et al., “When Combat Prevents PTSD Symptoms: Results from a Survey with Former Child Soldiers in Northern Uganda,” BMC Psychiatry 12 (2012): 41; R. Weierstall et al., “The Thrill of Being Violent as an Antidote to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Rwandese Genocide Perpetrators,” Eur J Psychotraumatology 2 (2011): 6345; V. Nell, “Cruelty’s Rewards: The Gratifications of Perpetrators and Spectators,” BBS 29 (2006): 211; T. Elbert et al., “Fascination Violence: On Mind and Brain of Man Hunters,” Eur Arch Psychiatry and Clin Nsci 260 (2010): S100. (Location 10856)