War

by Sebastian Junger

Combat isn’t simply a matter of risk, though; it’s also a matter of mastery. The basic neurological mechanism that induces mammals to do things is called the dopamine reward system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that mimics the effect of cocaine in the brain, and it gets released when a person wins a game or solves a problem or succeeds at a difficult task. The dopamine reward system exists in both sexes but is stronger in men, and as a result, men are more likely to become obsessively involved in such things as hunting, gambling, computer games, and war. When the men of Second Platoon were moping around the outpost hoping for a firefight it was because, among other things, they weren’t getting their accustomed dose of endorphins and dopamine. They played video games instead. Women can master those skills without having pleasure centers in their brains—primarily the mesocorticolimbic center—light up as if they’d just done a line of coke.

I just want to highlight this whole chapter and it's analysis of the psychologyh of combat so I can come back to this later when I have forgotten the details.