Seconds to Minutes Before

No brain is an island.

ethology, the science of interviewing an animal in its own language.

UNIVERSAL RULES VERSUS KNOBBY KNEES

stimulus and response: rewarding an organism for a behavior makes the organism more likely to repeat that behavior, while failure to get rewarded or, worse, punishment for it, makes the organism less likely to repeat it.

operant conditioning - controlling the rewards and punishments in the organism’s environment.

Basically, ethology is all about finding the true behaviour of a species in its natural habitat.
You cannot judge the behaviour of dolphin in a bathtub.

Sensory Triggers of Behavior in Some Other Species

Animals vocalize to intimidate, proclaim, and seduce.

There are also visual triggers of behavior. Dogs crouch to invite play, birds strut their plumage, monkeys display their canines menacingly with “threat yawns.”

there are visual cues of cute baby–ness (big eyes, shortened muzzle, round forehead) that drive mammals crazy, motivating them to care for the kid

Basically, there are visual, vocal and many other ways in which these species communicate. And these communication mechanism includes ways which are beyond human sensory interpretation.

Under the Radar: Subliminal and Unconscious Cuing

Your brain reacts to color of skin in one-tenth of the second.

depending on the race of the face (as shown with neuroimaging). First, in a widely replicated finding, the amygdala activates

The more resist a person is the more is the activation in amygdala.

"fear conditioning” occurs faster for other-race than same-race faces. This is basically showing a face and giving a shock. For same race, the activation of amygdala is less as compared to cross race pictures.

people judge neutral other-race faces as angrier than neutral same-race faces.

But if the face is shown long enough for conscious processing, the anterior cingulate and the “cognitive” dlPFC then activate and inhibit the amygdala

It’s the Frontal Cortex exerting executive control over the deeper, darker amygdaloid response.

subliminal signaling of race also affects the fusiform face area. You are dependent on race input to recognize faces.

white Americans remember white better than black faces

mixed-race faces are remembered better if described as being of a white rather than a black person.

Show a video of someone’s hand being poked with a needle, and subjects have an “isomorphic sensorimotor” response—hands tense in empathy. Among both whites and blacks, the response is blunted for other-race hands;

Threatening faces produce a distinctive change (called the P200 component) in the ERP waveform in under two hundred milliseconds

Among white subjects, viewing someone black evokes a stronger P200 waveform than viewing someone white, regardless of whether the person is armed.

Then, a few milliseconds later, a second, inhibitory waveform (the N200 component) appears, originating from the frontal cortex—“Let’s think a sec about what we’re seeing before we shoot.”

Basically, first the brain flags the person as threat and after some amount of time Frontal Cortex sends the signal saying it is not a threat.
For a person of different race, the intensity of threat is very high and the intensity of not a threat signal is low.

P200/N200 ratio (i.e., the greater the ratio of I’m-feeling-threatened to Hold-on-a-sec), the greater the likelihood of shooting an unarmed black individual

If a music belonging to black people is heard by white people, it triggers amygdala fear response

If you are around people who smell feared, your brain assumes you are feared too. This was evident from armpit sweat experiment. This is because human brain can recognize fear from the pheremones present in the sweat.

Interoceptive Information

you subliminally note the lion, speeding up your heart; then your conscious brain gets this interoceptive information, concluding, “Wow, my heart is racing; I must be terrified.”

Forcing depressed people to smile makes them feel better. If you are smiling then it means something good has happened.

Changing your posture to confident posture reduced anxiety.

processing social emotions—the PFC, insular cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala—receive lots of interoceptive information

Pain activates most of these regions. Pain amplifies aggression.

Unconscious Language Effects

Words have power. They can save, cure, uplift, devastate, deflate, and kill

One person's freedom fighter is another's terrorist

Doctor recommends meds labeled 95% survival chance and not those with 5% death chance

Even Subtler Types of Unconscious Cuing

emergency requiring brave intervention, the more people present, the less likely anyone is to help—“There’s lots of people here; someone else will step forward.”

the presence of women makes men more prosocial

A Wonderfully Complicating Piece of the Story

the brain can alter the sensitivity of those sensory modalities, making some stimuli more influential

Urbach-Wiethe disease, which selectively destroys the amygdala. It was seen that the absence of amygdala, reduces the number of times you look at the eye of someone. And eyes are the cues that help human understand anger. These patients fails to recognise anger. But if asked to focus on eyes, their anger identifying improves. This indicates amygdala, tells us where to look for information as well.

not only does the amygdala detect fearful faces, but it also biases us toward obtaining information about fearful faces.

culture literally shapes how and where you look at the world

Hours to Days Before

TESTOSTERONE’S BUM RAP

high levels of testosterone receptors in the amygdala

even when testosterone and androgens are completely eliminated, some aggression remains. Thus, some male aggression is testosterone independent.

the more experience a male had being aggressive prior to castration, the more aggression continues afterward.

Aggression is learned from society. Testosterone add to the aggression but is not responsible to generate aggression.

Subtleties of Testosterone Effects

When looking at faces expressing strong emotions, we tend to make microexpressions that mimic them; testosterone decreases such empathic mimicry

Testosterone makes strangers less trustworthy. It activates the amygdala more for strangers.

After winning a fight, testosterone is secreted.
Testosterone increases glucose delivery and metabolism. And this makes pheremones smell scarier.

Winning also increases testosterone receptors in bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. It becomes more sensitive to the hormone.

Testosterone decreases thePrefrontal cortex activity.

testosterone’s effects are hugely context dependent.

Contingent Testosterone Effects

rather than causing X, testosterone amplifies the power of something else to cause X.

Testosterone did not create new social patterns of aggression; it exaggerated preexisting ones.

testosterone didn’t raise baseline activity in the amygdala; it boosted the amygdala’s response and heart-rate reactivity to angry faces (but not to happy or neutral ones)

A Key Synthesis: The Challenge Hypothesis

it prompts whatever behaviors are needed to maintain status. This changes things enormously.

subjects were given testosterone beforehand? People made more generous offers in situations which required generosity

OXYTOCIN AND VASOPRESSIN: A MARKETING DREAM

Oxytocin prepares the body of a female mammal for birth and lactation

oxytocin also facilitates maternal behavior

lots of grooming and physical contact predicted high oxytocin levels in female members of a pair. What predicted high levels of oxytocin in males? Lots of sex.

circulating oxytocin levels are elevated in couples when they’ve first hooked up

the higher the levels, the more physical affection, the more behaviors are synchronized, the more long-lasting the relationship

oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate bonding between parent and child and between couples.

This evolved in such a way that human can tame dogs and oxytocin is secreted by dog.
Increases oxytocin makes a dog stare at its owner longer. And in human gazing increases oxytocin and this creates a parent child relation within different species

oxytocin inoculated betrayal aversion among investors

oxytocin is released when we experience prosocial behavior

Prosociality Versus Sociality

Oxytocin increases the accuracy of assessments of other people’s thoughts, with a gender twist—women improve at detecting kinship relations, while men improve at detecting dominance relations

Oxytocin increases accuracy in detecting faces

When playing against strangers, oxytocin decreases cooperation, enhances envy when luck is bad, and enhances gloating when it’s good.

oxytocin makes you more prosocial to people like you but spontaneously lousy to others

THE ENDOCRINOLOGY OF AGGRESSION IN FEMALES

During late pregnancy, estrogen and progesterone increase maternal aggression by increasing oxytocin release in certain brain regions

Estrogen contributes to maternal aggression. But estrogen can also reduce aggression and enhance empathy and emotional recognition. There are different receptors for estrogen in brain.

progesterone, working with estrogen, promotes maternal aggression. However, on its own it decreases aggression and anxiety

STRESS AND IMPRUDENT BRAIN FUNCTION

The Basic Dichotomy of the Acute and the Chronic Stress Response

Glucocorticoids plus the sympathetic nervous system enable an organism to survive a physical stressor by activating the classical “fight or flight” response. Whether you are that zebra or that lion, you’ll need energy for your muscles, and the stress response rapidly mobilizes energy into circulation from storage sites in your body. Furthermore, heart rate and blood pressure increase, delivering that circulating energy to exercising muscles faster. Moreover, during stress, long-term building projects—growth, tissue repair, and reproduction—are postponed until after the crisis; after all, if a lion is chasing you, you have better things to do with your energy than, say, thicken your uterine walls

Stress involves physical stress and the thinking that your homeostatis will become imbalanced

Sustained Stress and the Neurobiology of Fear

stress or glucocorticoid administration decreases accuracy when rapidly assessing emotions of faces

stress makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into a long-term memory.

stress weakens the PFC’s hold over the amygdala

Stress also makes it harder to unlearn fear

Sustained Stress, Executive Function, and Judgment

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

Stress impairs the ability to switch between tasks
stress weakens frontal connections with the hippocampus, shifting to me strategies becomes hard

major stressors make people of both genders more risk taking

moderate stressors bias men toward, and women away from, risk taking

Stated most broadly, sustained stress impairs risk assessment

Sustained Stress and Pro- and Antisociality

There’s an additional depressing reason why stress fosters aggression—because it reduces stress.

guess that lashing out activates dopaminergic reward pathways, a surefire way to inhibit CRH release.*

stress biases us toward selfishness.

Does stress decrease empathy? Seemingly yes

a mouse’s pain threshold is lowered when it is near another mouse in pain, but only if the other mouse is its cagemate

The presence of a strange mouse triggers a stress response. But when glucocorticoid secretion is temporarily blocked, mice show the same “pain empathy” for a strange mouse as for a cagemate

glucocorticoid creates a huge difference between us and them

“male = fight/flight and female = tend/befriend.”

SOME IMPORTANT DEBUNKING: ALCOHOL

alcohol only evokes aggression only in (a) individuals prone to aggression

b) those who believe that alcohol makes you more aggressive, once more showing the power of social learning to shape biology

Days to Months Before

NONLINEAR EXCITATION

a new memory requires the formation of a new synapse

Forming memories doesn’t require new synapses (let alone new branches or neurons); it requires the strengthening of preexisting synapses.

repeated firing across a synapse “strengthens” it, with a key role played by the neurotransmitter glutamate.

LTP—“long-term potentiation.”

NMDA receptors finally activate and open their channels, it is calcium, rather than sodium, that flows in.

calcium tidal wave causes more copies of glutamate receptors

calcium also alters glutamate receptors that are already on the front lines of that dendritic spine; each will now be more sensitive to glutamate signals

causes the synthesis of peculiar neurotransmitters in the dendritic spine, which are released

presynaptic axon terminal yelling “glutamate” more loudly and the postsynaptic dendritic spine listening more attentively

LTD—long-term “depression

LTD is not the functional opposite of LTP either—rather than being the basis of generic forgetting, it sharpens a signal by erasing what’s extraneous.

one mechanism underlying LTP is an alteration in glutamate receptors so that they are more responsive to glutamate

All this is cool, but LTP and LDP are what happens in the hippocampus when you learn explicit facts, like someone’s phone number

Rescued from the Trash

Whether the amygdala is also activated seems to determine whether the hippocampus interprets the glucocorticoids as good or bad stress

Axonal Plasticity

DIGGING DEEPER IN THE ASH HEAP OF HISTORY

Brain changes and hence people change

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

it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex.

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF FRONTAL CORTICAL MATURATION

The delayed maturation of the frontal cortex suggests an obvious scenario, namely that early in adolescence the frontal cortex has fewer neurons, dendritic branches, and synapses than in adulthood, and that levels increase into the midtwenties. Instead, levels decrease.

frontal cortical maturation during adolescence is about a more efficient brain, not more brain

Frontal Cortical Changes in Cognition in Adolescence

Frontal Cortical Changes in Emotional Regulation

In adolescence, though, the vmPFC response is less; thus the amygdaloid response keeps growing.

Reappraisal strategies get better during adolescence, with logical neurobiological underpinnings

ADOLESCENT RISK TAKING

during risky decision making, adolescents activate the prefrontal cortex less than do adults;the less activity, the poorer the risk assessment.

During adolescence, dopamine projection density and signaling steadily increase in both pathways (although novelty seeking itself peaks at midadolescence, probably reflecting the emerging frontal regulation after that).

In adults, small, medium, and large rewards caused small, medium, and large increases in accumbens activity

PEERS, SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE, AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION

Adolescent vulnerability to peer pressure from friends, especially peers they want to accept them as friends, is storied

adolescents are more social and more complexly social than children or adults

kids who are more sensitive to peer pressure are more prepared to imitate someone else’s emotionality

harm to people increasingly activates the amygdala, while the opposite occurs for harm to objects

By preadolescence, egalitarianism gives way to acceptance of inequality because of merit or effort or for a greater good

By adolescence, boys tend to accept inequality more than girls do

Moral Development

three stages of moral

kids reconcile more readily when the relationship matters to them.

Preconventional Reasoning

Stage 1

Should I eat the cookie?
How likely am I to get punished? Being punished is unpleasant

Aggression typically peaks around ages two through four, after which kids are reined in by adults’ punishment

Stage 2

It depends. If I refrain, will I get rewarded?

kids reconcile more readily when the relationship matters to them.

Conventional Reasoning

Stage 3

What will people think of me for eating the cookie?

Stage 4

What’s the law? Are laws sacrosanct? What if everyone broke this law?

Postconventional Reasoning

Stage 5

What circumstances placed the cookie there? Who decided that I shouldn’t take it?

Stage 6

Is my moral stance regarding this more vital than some law, a stance for which I’d pay the ultimate price if need be?

THE IMPORTANCE OF MOTHERS

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

when abortions become readily available in an area, rates of crime by young adults decline about twenty years later

ANY KIND OF MOTHER IN A STORM

Why do we often become attached to a source of negative reinforcement?

Because of poor self-esteem, believing you’ll never do better

“stress hyporesponsive period” (SHRP)

Glucocorticoids have so many adverse effects on brain development

SHRP represents a gamble

attachment to the caretaker has evolved to ensure that the infant forms a bond to that caregiver regardless of the quality of care received.” Any kind of mother in a storm.

DIFFERENT ROUTES TO THE SAME PLACE

By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control, and executive decision making;

low-ranking mother predicts elevated glucocorticoids in adulthood in baboons

TWO SIDE TOPICS

Exposing children to a violent TV or film clip increases their odds of aggression soon after.41 Interestingly, the effect is stronger in girls (amid their having lower overall levels of aggression). Effects are stronger when kids are younger or when the violence is more realistic and/or is presented as heroic

effects are strongest on kids already prone toward violence

Bullying

bullying targets aren’t selected at random. Kids with the metaphorical “kick me” signs on their backs are more likely to have personal or family psychiatric issues and poor social and emotional intelligence

The picture of the bullies is no surprise either, starting with their disproportionately coming from families of single moms or younger parents with poor education and employment prospects.

Collectivist Versus Individualist Cultures

On average, mothers in individualist cultures, when compared with those in collectivist ones, speak louder, play music louder, have more animated expressions.54 They view themselves as teachers rather than protectors, abhor a bored child, value high-energy affect

Mothers in collectivist cultures, in contrast, spend more time than individualist mothers soothing their child, maintaining contact, and facilitating contact with other adults. They value low arousal affect and sleep with their child to a later age. Games are about cooperation and fitting in; if playing with her child with, say, a toy car, the point is not exploring what a car does (i.e., being automobile), but the process of sharing (“Thank you for giving me your car; now I’ll give it back to you”). Kids are trained to get along, think of others, accept and adapt, rather than change situations

kids in (collectivist) Japan play more violent video games than do American kids, yet are less aggressive

9 long months

The Cat in the Hat in the Womb

What goes in the mother's amniotic fluid shapes the taste preferences. This might include the spices mother ate.

A pregnant woman’s voice is audible in the womb, and newborns recognize and prefer the sound of their mother’s voice

BOY AND GIRL BRAINS, WHATEVER THAT MIGHT MEAN

testosterone has much of its masculinizing effect in the brain by becoming estrogen.

Testosterone exposure throughout pregnancy produced daughters who were “pseudohermaphrodites”—looked like males on the outside but had female gonads on the

stressed mothers secrete glucocorticoids, which enter fetal circulation and basically have the same bad consequences as in stressed infants and children.

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

Back to When You Were Just a Fertilized Egg

Routines, do everything. But genes don't decide when a protein is made.

There are stretches of DNA which do not code. They are non coding in DNA. 95% of the DNA is non coding DNA

transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment

Genes don't make sense outside of the environment

Promoters and transcription factors are like if-else blocks of genes

Transposable Genetic Elements, the Stability of the Genome, and Neurogenesis

Transposable Genetic Elements, the Stability of the Genome, and Neurogenesis

stretches of DNA had been copied, with the copy then randomly inserted into another stretch of DNA

jumping genes, transposons

GENES FROM THE TOP DOWN—BEHAVIOR GENETICS

Roughly half your genes come from each parent, but prenatal environment comes from Momprenatal effects aren’t big.

75 percent of MZ twins share one placenta (i.e., are “monochorionic”).* Thus most MZ twin fetuses share maternal blood flow more than do DZ twins, and thus are exposed to more similar levels of maternal hormones and nutrients

Dutch Hunger Winter phenomenon showed that third-trimester malnutrition increased the risk of some adult diseases more than tenfold.

Roughly half your genes come from each parent, but prenatal environment comes from Mom

The Fragile Nature of Heritability Estimates

If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited

If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.

heritability score indicates the percentage of total variation attributable to genetics.

The Difference Between a Trait Being Inherited and Having a High Degree of Heritability

If a person has 4 fingers, it is most likely due to an accident. And if we're told that a person has four fingers, what might be the reason? You'll more likely to give a correct answer based on the information that he made an accident rather than what were the genes responsible for or hereditary settings were responsible for 4 fingers. This means having four fingers, it's not a hereditary trait.

Another example is women wearing earrings. You can convert to a better answer if you know the genes of a person. Just knowing that a person is carrying 2 X-chromosome, you can give a high degree of estimate that person will wear earring. And if at the two Y chromosomes, the person carries a white chromosome, it is more likely that he will not wear any earring.

The more environments in which you study a genetic trait, the more novel environmental effects will be revealed, decreasing the heritability score.

Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood . . . but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse

effects of this genetic variant can be understood only by considering other, nongenetic factors in individuals’ lives, such as childhood adversity and adult provocation.

The Dopamine System

there are at least five kinds (found in different parts of the brain, binding dopamine with differing strengths and duration), each coded for by a gene

D4 dopamine receptor (the gene is called DRD4)

kids with the 7R variant are less generous than average. But only if they show insecure attachment to their parents

don’t ask what a gene does; ask what it does in a particular context.

The Neuropeptides Oxytocin and Vasopressin

making generous people more generous, while having no effect on ungenerous people

Knowing what variant of a candidate gene someone has (or even what variants of a collection of genes) doesn’t help much in predicting their behavior.

Centuries to Millennia Before

chimps make tools

COLLECTIVIST VERSUS INDIVIDUALIST CULTURES

East Asian cultural collectivism coevolved with selection against the 7R variant

Stratofied vs egalitarianism

In other words, when times are tough, the unequal access to wealth becomes the unequal distribution of misery and death

cultures with more income inequality have less social capital.35 Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry.

Unequal societies may need ambivalence for system stability: Income inequality compensates groups with partially positive social images.

Its not so much being poor that predicts poor health. It’s feeling poor—someone’s subjective SES (e.g., the answer to “How do you feel you’re doing financially when you compare yourself with other people?”) is at least as good a predictor of health as is objective SES.

Poverty is not a predictor of crime as much as poverty amid plenty is

psychosocial angle—inequality means less social capital, less trust, cooperation, and people watching out for one another

neomaterialist angle—inequality means more secession of the wealthy from contributing to the public good

despite the 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.

POPULATION SIZE, POPULATION DENSITY, POPULATION HETEROGENEITY

it is only when societies grow large enough that people regularly encounter strangers that “Big Gods” emerge—deities who are concerned with human morality and punish our transgressions

Societies with frequent anonymous interactions tend to outsource punishment to gods

high-density living produced “deviant” behavior and “social pathology.

High-density living doesn’t make rats more aggressive. Instead it makes aggressive rats more aggressive

In contrast, crowding makes unaggressive individuals more timid. In other words, it exaggerates preexisting social tendencies.

When people of differing ethnicities, races, or religions live together, they experience the similarities rather than the differences and view one another as individuals, transcending stereotypes.

THE RESIDUES OF CULTURAL CRISES

Chagnon published the remarkable report that Yanomamö men who were killers had more wives and offspring than average—thus passing on more copies of their genes. This suggested that if you excel at waging it, war can do wonders for your genetic legacy.

HG societies expend lots of collective effort on enforcing fairness, indirect reciprocity, and avoidance of despotism

Gossip is the weapon of norm enforcement.

The evolution of behaviour

Kin selection

in terms of the genes being passed on to the next generation, it doesn’t matter if you reproduce or sacrifice yourself so that your twin reproduces.

I’ll gladly lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.

sperm in a female’s vaginal tract can aggregate, allowing them to swim faster.

Among a deer mouse species where females mate with multiple males, sperm aggregate only with sperm from the same individual or a close relative.

Most cultures have historically allowed polygyny, with monogamy as the rarer beast. Even rarer is polyandry—multiple men married to one woman. This occurs in northern India, Tibet, and Nepal, where the polyandry is “adelphic” (aka “fraternal”)—a woman marries all the brothers of one family, from the strapping young man to his infant brother

dangers of inbreeding counter the kin-selection advantages

optimal balance is third-cousin matings

Women prefer the smell of moderately related over unrelated men.

the highest reproductive success arose from third- and fourth-cousin marriages

Some species have innate recognition.

Rodents produce pheromonal odors with individual signatures, derived from genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This is a super variable gene cluster that produces unique proteins that form a signature for an individual.

MHC is signature.
Your immune system recognises itself and attack foreign things.

MHC of close relatives are similar, less attack.

Olfactory is sensitive towards own MHC and hence similar MHC leads to less attack from immune system.

Reciprocal Alturism

Paper envelops rock; rock breaks scissors; scissors cut paper. Would rocks want to bash every scissors into extinction? No way. Because then all those papers would enwrap the rocks into extinction

Gigantic Question #1: What Strategy for Cooperating Is Optimal?

Tit for toe is on average the best performer. Not because of gives you advantage but rather because it on average never lets you taken advantage of.

But in real world there can be an error signal. And 2 payers playing tit for toe can stuck in never ending misunderstanding.

What is this transition from hard-assed, punitive Tit for Tat to incorporating forgiveness? Establishing trust.

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—until a mutation reintroduces an exploitative strategy that spreads like wildfire

animals have systems of reciprocity with sensitivity to cheating.

STANDING ON THREE LEGS

Pair-Bonding Versus Tournament Species

Parent-Offspring Conflict

Baboon moms evolved to wean their kids at the age where they can feed themselves, and baboon kids evolved to try to delay that day

fetus and Mom have a metabolic struggle involving insulin, the pancreatic hormone secreted when blood glucose levels rise, which triggers glucose entry into target cells. 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.*

Genotype = someone’s genetic makeup. Phenotype = the traits observable to the outside world produced by that genotype

we treat people like relatives when they feel like relatives.

THE NEXT CHALLENGE: IS EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE CONTINUOUS AND GRADUAL?

In 1972 Stephen Jay Gould and paleontologist Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History proposed an idea that simmered and then caught fire in the 1980s. They argued that evolution isn’t gradual; instead, most of the time nothing happens, and evolution occurs in intermittent rapid, dramatic lurches

Punctuated Equilibrium

Eldredge and Gould focused on there being plenty of fossil records that were complete chronologically (for example, trilobites and snails, Eldredge’s and Gould’s specialties, respectively) and didn’t show gradualism. Instead there were long periods of stasis, of unchanged fossils, and then, in a paleontological blink of an eye, there’d be a rapid transition to a very different form

But with fossils the blink of an eye, a stretch of time unresolvably short in the fossil record, could be 50,000 to 100,000 years

paleontologists study things that are fossilized. Bones, shells, bugs in amber. Not organs—brains, pituitaries, ovaries. Not cells—neurons, endocrine cells, eggs, sperm. Not molecules—neurotransmitters, hormones, enzymes

A final rebuttal from gradualists was to demand real-time evidence of rapid evolutionary change in species

One example was wonderful research by the Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev, who in the 1950s domesticated Siberian silver foxes.65 He bred captive ones for their willingness to be in proximity to humans, and within thirty-five generations he’d generated tame foxes who’d cuddle in your arms.

this is artificial rather than natural selection

The first generations with Westernized diets develop catastrophically high rates of obesity, hypertension, adult-onset diabetes, and death at early ages, thanks to “thrifty” genotypes that are great at storing nutrients, honed by millennia of sparser diets.

diabetes rates begin to subside, as there is an increased prevalence in the population of “sloppier” metabolic genotypes

But mother don't give birth to a new Species

A FINAL CHALLENGE LACED WITH POLITICS: IS EVERYTHING ADAPTIVE?

an adaptationist approach is to determine whether a trait is indeed adaptive and, if so, what the selective forces were that brought it about. Much of sociobiological thinking is adaptationist in flavor.

Observe a behavior, generate a just-so story that assumes adaptation, and the person with the best just-so story wins.

The problem was that sociobiology explained too much and predicted too little

According to Gould, traits often evolve for one reason and are later co-opted for another use

Evolution is a tinkerer, not an inventor.

It works with whatever’s available as selective pressures change, producing a result that may not be the most adaptive but is good enough, given the starting materials

There’s clear empirical evidence for both gradualism and punctuated change, and for molecular mechanisms underlying both

fewer spandrels than touted by spandrelites

Us Versus Them

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.

the brain differentially processes images within milliseconds based on minimal cues about race or gender.

Not only is mimicry pleasing, activating mesolimbic dopamine, but it also made subjects more likely to help the researcher, picking up their dropped pen.

As the association solidifies, is the ringing bell still “just” a marker symbolizing impending pleasure, or does it become pleasurable itself ? -- yes

By age three to four, kids already group people by race and gender, have more negative views of such Thems, and perceive other-race faces as being angrier than same-race faces.

sometimes you help Us by directly helping Us, sometimes by hurting Them

in-group parochialism is often more concerned about Us beating Them than with Us simply doing well.

Consistent with that, priming loyalty strengthens in-group favoritism and identification, while priming equality does the opposite.

we screw up because of special circumstances; They screw up because that’s how They are.

In economic games people implicitly treat members of other races as less trustworthy or reciprocating.

Thems do not solely evoke a sense of menace; sometimes it’s disgust.

Pictures of drug addicts or the homeless typically activate the insula, not the amygdala

Disgust serves as an ethnic or out-group marker

Carlos Navarrete at Michigan State University has shown that white women, when ovulating, have more negative attitudes toward African American men.

Thus the intensity of Us/Them-ing is being modulated by hormones

math performance in Asian American women, built around the stereotypes of Asians being good at math, and women not. Half the subjects were primed to think of themselves as Asian before a math test; their scores improved. Half were primed about gender; scores declined. Moreover, levels of activity in cortical regions involved in math skills changed in parallel

For high warmth, high competence (i.e., Us), there’s pride. Low warmth, high competence—envy. High warmth, low competence—pity. Low warmth, low competence—disgust.

show them pictures of low-warmth/low-competence people, and there’s activation of the amygdala and insula but not of the fusiform face area or the (emotional) vmPFC—a profile evoked by viewing disgusting objects

viewing low-warmth/high-competence or high-warmth/low-competence individuals activates the vmPFC.

Between pride and envy is a desire to associate, to derive benefits from

high-warmth/high-competence (HH)

HH to HL - watching parent to go dementia
HH to LH - business partner betrayal
HH to LL - rare, was successful but became homeless

HL to LL - janitor who you use to greet everyday turned out to think you are a jerk

LL to LH - Earlier Japan goods were considered as low grade plastic, but it changed to high quality after WW 2

LL to HL - Someone went through struggle to return your lost wallet

LH to LL - Nigeria explored its oil reserves and changed its mentality of Britain as they will provide Britain aid with oil

MANIPULATING THE EXTENT OF US/THEM-ING

flash a picture of a hostile and/or aggressive face, and people are subsequently more likely to perceive a Them as the same

perspective taking

Changing the Rank Ordering of Us/Them Categories

Contact

Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance

hierarchies are about a type of relations within groups

our automatic tendency to favor people close in rank to us over those who are distant

THE NATURE AND VARIETIES OF HIERARCHIES

Hierarchies establish a status quo by ritualizing inequalities

RANK AND HIERARCHY IN HUMANS

Dunbar’s number,” the predicted average group size in traditional human cultures. It’s 150 people, and there’s much evidence supporting that prediction.

In other words, countries with more brutal socioeconomic hierarchies produce children who enforce their own hierarchies more brutally

Membership in Multiple Hierarchies

The Specialization of Some Ranking Systems

Internal Standards

internal standards independent of the outside world

THE VIEW FROM THE TOP, THE VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM

The vlPFC and dlPFC activate and become coupled when we figure out dominance relations or look at a dominant face, reflecting the combined affective and cognitive components to the process.

Your Brain and Your Own Status

In macaque monkeys an increase in rank increases mesolimbic dopamine signaling.

in lots of social species, attaining high rank is about sharp teeth and good fighting skills. But maintaining the high rank is about social intelligence and impulse control

Your Body and Your Own Status

If status is maintained aggressively, testosterone fosters aggression; if status were maintained by writing beautiful, delicate haikus, testosterone would foster that.

In general, low-ranking male baboons had elevated basal glucocorticoid levels

in the context of hierarchy, some individuals who are number two care only that they’re not number one, and some individuals who are number nine gain comfort from at least not being number ten

When something stressful did occur, their glucocorticoid stress response was relatively sluggish. When the stressor was over, their levels returned to that elevated baseline more slowly. In other words, too much of the stuff in the bloodstream when you don’t need it, and too little when you do.

For the same high rank, an individual is likely to be less healthy if he (a) is particularly reactive to novelty; (b) sees threats in benign circumstances (e.g., his rival showing up and merely taking a nap nearby); (c) doesn’t take advantage of social control (e.g., letting a rival determine the start of an obvious showdown); (d) doesn’t differentiate between good and bad news (e.g., distinguishing behaviorally between winning and losing a fight); and/or (e) doesn’t have social outlets when frustrated.

for the same low rank, an individual tends to be healthier if (a) he has lots of grooming relationships; and/or (b) there’s someone even lower ranking than him to serve as a target for displaced aggression

And Us

social-dominance orientation (SDO), the measure of how much people value power and prestige

empathy, and disgust at the circumstance that evoked the pain

Higher SDO, low activation

To accrue the full physiological benefits of high status, don’t supervise people; instead, glide through the workplace like a master of the universe while minions whom you never interact with smile obsequiously. It’s not just rank; it’s what rank means and entails.

the psychological stress of low SES is what decreases health.

A Really Odd Thing That We Do Now and Then

Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty.

OH, WHY NOT TAKE THIS ONE ON? POLITICS AND POLITICAL ORIENTATIONS

Machiavellian intelligence, also known as the "social brain hypothesis," refers to the idea that the complex social structures and cognitive abilities of humans, particularly primates, evolved due to intense social competition. It suggests that individuals developed strategies like deception, manipulation, and alliance formation to gain social and reproductive advantages

The Internal Consistency of Political Orientation

conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head

increasing cognitive load* should make people more conservative

Jonathan Haidt of NYU provides a very different view.38 He identifies six foundations of morality—care versus harm; fairness versus cheating; liberty versus oppression; loyalty versus betrayal; authority versus subversion; sanctity versus degradation

liberals preferentially value the first three goals, namely care, fairness, and liberty

In contrast, conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority, and sanctity

Liberalism has been associated with larger amounts of gray matter in the cingulate cortex (with its involvement in empathy), whereas conservatism has been associated with an enlarged amygdala (with, of course, its starring role in threat perception).

CONFORMITY, DISOBEDIENCE AND NONCONFORMITY

The depths of human conformity and obedience are shown by the speed with which they occur—it takes less than 200 milliseconds for your brain to register that the group has picked a different answer from yours, and less than 380 milliseconds for a profile of activation that predicts changing your opinion

When we imitate someone’s actions, our mesolimbic dopamine system activates.* When we choose incorrectly in a task, the dopaminergic decline is less if we made the decision as part of a group than if we did so as an individual. Belonging is safety.

people are more likely to change their answer if you show them a picture of the person(s) who disagrees with them

in another study this process of conforming was also associated with activation of the occipital cortex, the brain region that does the primary processing of vision—you can almost hear the frontal and limbic parts of the brain trying to convince the occipital cortex that it saw something different from what it actually saw.

In stressful settings rules gain power

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

“When we make a decision regarding morality, is it mostly the outcome of moral reasoning or of moral intuition?”

THE PRIMACY OF REASONING IN MORAL DECISION MAKING

temporoparietal junction (TPJ)

the more the TPJ activation, the more people take intent into account when making moral judgments

we typically judge commission more harshly than omission

we’re better at detecting violations of social contracts that have malevolent rather than benevolent consequences

Haidt views moral decisions as primarily based on intuition and believes reasoning is what we then use to convince everyone, including ourselves, that we’re making sense.

infants have the bias concerning commission versus omission.

Killing someone intentionally as a means to save five feels intuitively wrong, but the intuition is strongest when the killing would occur right here, right now; doing it in more complicated sequences of intentionality doesn’t feel as bad.

“intuitions discount heavily over space and time.”

“when a sacrifice of one requires active, intentional, and local actions, more intuitive brain circuitry is engaged, and ends don’t justify means. And in circumstances where either the harm is unintentional or the intentionality plays out at a psychological distance, different neural circuitry predominates, producing an opposite conclusion about the morality of ends and means”

“moral decision making can be wildly context dependent”

“the child in danger in your hometown is far more of an Us than is this dying child far away”

We use different brain circuits when contemplating our own moral failings (heavy activation of the vmPFC) versus those of others (more of the insula and dlPFC).

we judge ourselves by our internal motives and everyone else by their external actions

with cultures differing as to whether it is framed as “Do only things you’d want done to you” or “Don’t do things you wouldn’t want done to you”

Antisocial punishment is when you punish another player for contributing more than you (i.e., being generous)

the lower the social capital in a country, the higher the rates of antisocial punishment

shame is external judgment by the group, while guilt is internal judgment of yourself

FOOLS RUSH IN: APPLYING THE FINDINGS OF THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY

what is the optimal moral philosophy?

Virtue ethics, with its emphasis on the actor, would answer: because you are a better person than that, because you’ll have to live with yourself afterward, etc.
Deontology, with its emphasis on the act: because it’s not okay to steal.
Consequentialism, with its emphasis on the outcome: what if everyone started acting that way, think about the impact on the person whose money you’ve stolen, etc.

Doing the right thing is the easier thing.

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

When does empathy lead us to actually do something helpful? When we do act, whose benefit is it for?

“FOR” VERSUS “AS IF” AND OTHER DISTINCTIONS

There’s sensorimotor contagion—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

“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.

compassion,” where your resonance with someone’s distress leads you to actually help

EMOTIONALLY CONTAGIOUS, COMPASSIONATE ANIMALS

EMOTIONALLY CONTAGIOUS, COMPASSIONATE CHILDREN

There’s the progression from feeling sorry for an individual (e.g., someone homeless) to feeling sorry for a category (e.g., “homeless people”).

AFFECT AND/OR COGNITION?

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

What the ACC cares about is the meaning of the pain. Good news or bad, and of what nature?

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—as with physical pain

To quote Mother Teresa, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

A MYTHIC LEAP FORWARD

PMC straddles the divide between thinking about and carrying out a movement.

THE CORE ISSUE: ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING

pathological altruism

scenario of someone so consumed with the vicarious pain of a loved one that they endure and facilitate his dysfunction rather than administering tough love

neither the larger amount of money nor the opportunity to spend it on oneself increased happiness

only spending it on someone else did

ACC—evolved to observe and learn from others’ pain for your own benefit

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.

Metaphors We Kill By

Symbols and the meaning we give them

FEELING SOMEONE ELSE’S PAIN

Disgust serves as an ethnic or out-group marker

Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress—just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.

REAL VERSUS METAPHORICAL SENSATION

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

Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it.

However, frequently attending services at a mosque did. The author then polled Indian Hindus, Russian Orthodox adherents, Israeli Jews, Indonesian Muslims, British Protestants, and Mexican Catholics as to whether they’d die for their religion and whether people of other religions caused the world’s troubles. In all cases frequent attendance of religious services, but not frequent prayer, predicted those views. It’s not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it’s being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochial identity, commitment, and shared loves and