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April 12 - April 12, 2023
the most unique neurons in our brains, the recently evolved and slow-developing von Economo neurons, are predominantly housed in the anterior cingulate and insula.
the Hutu and Tutsi Us/Them-ed with a vengeance.
This translated into five times the rate of killing during the Nazi Holocaust. It was mostly ignored by the West.
There was no bureaucratic banality of evil.
How could this have happened? There are many components to the answer. The populace had a long tradition of unquestioning obedience to authority, a helpful trait to develop in a brutally dictatorial nation. Hutu militants had for months before been distributing machetes to the Hutu populace. The government-controlled radio station (the main form of mass media in this marginally literate country) proclaimed that the intent of the invading Tutsi rebels was to kill every Hutu, and that one’s Tutsi neighbors were a fifth column preparing to join in. And there was another meaningful factor. The
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Dehumanization, pseudospeciation. The tools of the propagandists of hate.
The tool of the propagandist is to effectively exploit symbols of revulsion in the service of hate.
Mandela led him to the warm, homey living room, sat beside him on a comfy couch designed to soften the hardest of asses, and spoke to the man in Afrikaans, including small talk about sports, leaping up now and then to get the two of them tea and snacks.
“We’re going to have to make a decision about the skull as a privacy domain.”
Now that’s a liberal reform of the witch justice system, imposing some sound thinking in one tiny corner of an irrational edifice. Much like what scientifically based reform of our current system does, which is why something more extreme is needed.*
Suppose someone convulsing with a grand mal epileptic seizure, flinging their arms around, strikes someone. If you truly believe we freely control our behavior, you must convict them of assault.
in a 1457 trial of a pig and her piglets for eating a child, the pig was convicted and executed, whereas the piglets were found to be too young to have been responsible for their acts. Whether the judge cited the maturational state of their frontal cortices is unknown.
Biological stuff Homuncular grit Destructive sexual urges Resisting acting upon them Delusionally hearing voices Resisting their destructive commands Proclivity toward alcoholism Not drinking Having epileptic seizures Not driving if you didn’t take your meds Not all that bright Getting going when the going gets tough Not the loveliest of faces Resisting getting that huge, hideous nose ring
Bro what
transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques that transiently activate or inactivate a part of the cortex can change someone’s moral decision making, decisions about punishment, or levels of generosity and empathy. That’s causality.
The problem can be summarized in a hypothetical exchange: Prosecutor: So, professor, you’ve told us about the extensive damage that the defendant sustained to his frontal cortex when he was a child. Has every person who has sustained such damage become a multiple murderer, like the defendant? Neuroscientist testifying for the defense: No. Prosecutor: Has every such person at least engaged in some sort of serious criminal behavior? Neuroscientist: No. Prosecutor: Can brain science explain why the same amount of damage produced murderous behavior in the defendant? Neuroscientist: No. The problem
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The biology of the behaviors that interest us is, in all cases, multifactorial—that is the thesis of this book.
Not different amounts of biological causation; different types of causation.
free will as “internal forces I do not understand.”26 People intuitively believe in free will, not just because we have this terrible human need for agency but also because most people know next to nothing about those internal forces.
Shattered bone → inflammation → constricted movement is easy. Neurotransmitters + hormones + childhood + ____ + ____ + isn’t.
Visit bit.ly/2neYFVP for a larger version of this table. Our behaviors are constantly shaped by an array of subterranean forces. What these figures and the table show is that most of these forces involve biology that, not that long ago, we didn’t know existed.
those people in the future will consider us and think, “My God, the things they didn’t know then. The harm that they did.”
People must be protected from individuals who are dangerous. The latter can no more be allowed to walk the streets than you can allow a car whose brakes are faulty to be driven. Rehabilitate such people if you can, send them to the Island of Misfit Toys forever if you can’t and they are destined to remain dangerous.
there is simply no place for the idea that punishment is a virtue. Our dopaminergic pathways will have to find their stimulation elsewhere. I sure don’t know how best to achieve that mind-set. But crucially, I sure do know we can do it—because we have before: Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures “deserves” to be banned
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Many who are viscerally opposed to this view charge that it is dehumanizing to frame damaged humans as broken machines. But as a final, crucial point, doing that is a hell of a lot more humane than demonizing and sermonizing them as sinners.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
After controlling for personality and cognitive abilities, more religious people show less ACC activation when getting news of a negative discrepancy. Other studies show the anxiety-reducing effects of repetitive religious rituals.9
It’s not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it’s being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochial identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds.
“Yes, most Thems are awful, but I hung out with a Them once who was okay.”
as these few are returned home, many are shunned—for their AIDS, for the belief that they’ve been brainwashed into being sleeper terrorists, for the rape-born children they carry. This does not auger well for their being anything other than broken forever.
She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached.
Be careful when our enemies are made to remind us of maggots and cancer and shit.
the memory trace of that learning does not evaporate. Instead it is overlaid with newer learning—“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.”
after Cotton’s release and pardon, Thompson-Cannino said, “If I spent every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of my life telling you that I’m sorry, can you ever forgive me?” And Cotton said, “Jennifer, I forgave you years ago.”
Irrational optimism can be great; it’s why only about 15 percent instead of 99 percent of humans get clinically depressed.
Nahhhhhh
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. Next comes short-range firing with a pistol, then long-range firing, all the way to the easiest, which is bombs and artillery.
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.
took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.45
Good god
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.
trainees no longer fire at bull’s-eyes; instead it’s rapid-fire situations of mobile virtual-reality figures coming at you, where shooting becomes reflexive. In the Korean War, 55 percent of American riflemen fired their weapons; in the Vietnam War, over 90 percent. And this was before the rise of violent, desensitizing video games.
Here’s a measure of it, a picture that, if you’re a baboon-ologist, is more surprising than one showing baboons inventing the wheel—two adult males grooming. That hardly ever happens. Except in this troop.
most of the males who had avoided the TB had died; the troop was filled with males who had transferred in after the TB. In other words, 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.
Anyone who says that our worst behaviors are inevitable knows too little about primates, including us.
But there’s hope for us, with our foibles and inconsistencies and frailties, as we watch Newton slowly lurch his way toward being a moral titan.
One historian records a chilling anecdote concerning a German soldier writing home about the truce, mentioning that not everyone participated—there was one soldier who condemned the others as traitors, an obscure corporal named . . . Hitler.
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.”
A key point of the previous chapter was that those in the future will look back on us and be appalled at what we did amid our scientific ignorance. A key challenge in this chapter is to recognize how likely we are to eventually look back at our current hatreds and find them mysterious.
Not every person activates the amygdala when seeing the face of a Them; not every yeast adheres to another one bearing the same surface protein marker. Instead, on the average, both do.
Brains and cultures coevolve.
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.
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.
