More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.
Amigdala involved in fear and agression
In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.
Humans are naturaly trusting
Fear typically increases aggression only in those already prone to it;
the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.
Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource.
Choosing among options can involve a cerebral cost-benefit analysis. But it also involves “somatic markers,” internal simulations of what each outcome would feel like, run in the limbic system and reported to the vmPFC. The process is not a thought experiment; it’s an emotion experiment, in effect an emotional memory of a possible future.
The limbic system is used in decisikn makingbto evaluate how valuable different optikns are
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.
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.
stress facilitates learning fear associations but impairs learning fear extinction.
These stress effects on frontal function also make us perseverative—in a rut, set in our ways, running on automatic, being habitual.
moderate stressors bias men toward, and women away from, risk taking.
We have another contingent endocrine effect: stress makes people more egoistic, but only in the most emotionally intense and personal circumstances.
Stress can disrupt cognition, impulse control, emotional regulation, decision making, empathy, and prosociality.
Exposing children to a violent TV or film clip increases their odds of aggression soon after.41
the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.
