Potent quotables
When you explain a behavior with one of these disciplines, you are implicitly invoking all the disciplines—any given type of explanation is the end product of the influences that preceded it. It has to work this way. If you say, “The behavior occurred because of the release of neurochemical Y in the brain,” you are also saying, “The behavior occurred because the heavy secretion of hormone X this morning increased the levels of neurochemical Y.” You’re also saying, “The behavior occurred because the environment in which that person was raised made her brain more likely to release neurochemical Y in response to certain types of stimuli.” And you’re also saying, “. . . because of the gene that codes for the particular version of neurochemical Y.” And if you’ve so much as whispered the word “gene,” you’re also saying, “. . . and because of the millennia of factors that shaped the evolution of that particular gene.” And so on. There are not different disciplinary buckets. Instead, each one is the end product of all the biological influences that came before it and will influence all the factors that follow it. Thus, it is impossible to conclude that a behavior is caused by a gene, a hormone, a childhood trauma, because the second you invoke one type of explanation, you are de facto invoking them all.
The frontal cortex. When we stop fearing something, it isn’t because some amygdaloid neurons have lost their excitability. We don’t passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn’t anymore… the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.
Because nothing fuels dopamine release like the “maybe” of intermittent reinforcement. In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It’s about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.
A hugely unsettling sensory cue concerns race. Our brains are incredibly attuned to skin color. Flash a face for less than a tenth of a second (one hundred milliseconds), so short a time that people aren’t even sure they’ve seen something. Have them guess the race of the pictured face, and there’s a better-than-even chance of accuracy. We may claim to judge someone by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. But our brains sure as hell note the color, real fast. By one hundred milliseconds, brain function already differs in two depressing ways, depending on the race of the face (as shown with neuroimaging). First, in a widely replicated finding, the amygdala activates. Moreover, the more racist someone is in an implicit test of race bias (stay tuned), the more activation there is.
The amygdala thinks it knows what it’s seeing before the frontal cortex slams on the brakes; an innocent man reaches for his wallet and dies.
As Woody Guthrie wrote in “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “I love a good man outside the law, just as much as I hate a bad man inside the law.”
Starting in the 1990s, crime rates plummeted across the United States. Why? For liberals the answer was the thriving economy. For conservatives it was the larger budgets for policing, expanded prisons, and three-strikes sentencing laws. Meanwhile, a partial explanation was provided by legal scholar John Donohue of Stanford and economist Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago—it was the legalization of abortions. The authors’ state-by-state analysis of the liberalization of abortion laws and the demographics of the crime drop showed that when abortions become readily available in an area, rates of crime by young adults decline about twenty years later. Surprise—this was highly controversial, but it makes perfect, depressing sense to me. What majorly predicts a life of crime? Being born to a mother who, if she could, would have chosen that you not be. What’s the most basic thing provided by a mother? Knowing that she is happy that you exist.
Yes, childhood abuse increases the odds of being an abusive adult; witnessing violence raises the risk for PTSD; loss of a parent to death means more chance of adult depression. Nevertheless, many, maybe even most victims of such adversity turn into reasonably functional adults. There is a shadow over childhood, demons lurk in corners of the mind, but overall things are okay. What explains such resilience? As we’ll see, genes and fetal environment are relevant. But most important, recall the logic of collapsing different types of trauma into a single category. What counts is the sheer number of times a child is bludgeoned by life and the number of protective factors.
it’s not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment. This is summarized wonderfully by the neurobiologist Donald Hebb: “It is no more appropriate to say things like characteristic A is more influenced by nature than nurture than . . . to say that the area of a rectangle is more influenced by its length than its width.”
is the most striking thing about the array of human cultures the similarities or the differences? Depends on your taste. If the similarities seem most interesting, there are plenty—after all, multiple groups of humans independently invented agriculture, writing, pottery, embalming, astronomy, and coinage. At the extreme of similarities are human universals, and numerous scholars have proposed lists of them. One of the lengthiest and most cited comes from the anthropologist Donald Brown. Here’s a partial list of his proposed cultural universals: the existence of and concern with aesthetics, magic, males and females seen as having different natures, baby talk, gods, induction of altered states, marriage, body adornment, murder, prohibition of some type of murder, kinship terms, numbers, cooking, private sex, names, dance, play, distinctions between right and wrong, nepotism, prohibitions on certain types of sex, empathy, reciprocity, rituals, concepts of fairness, myths about afterlife, music, color terms, prohibitions, gossip, binary sex terms, in-group favoritism, language, humor, lying, symbolism, the linguistic concept of “and,” tools, trade, and toilet training. And that’s a partial list.
In other words, when times are tough, the unequal access to wealth becomes the unequal distribution of misery and death.