Freud, Jazz, PD, Prions

Freud on ideas without proofs, plus the quote from Aristotle, Kandel’s rehabilitation of Freud 

IDAGIO on Instagram: “‘Classical music is far from boring.’ We couldn’t agree more! Do you often meet people who claim that it is?”

IDAGIO on Instagram: “‘Classical music is far from boring.’ We couldn’t agree more! Do you often meet people who claim that it is?”

Jazz: 

https://www.instagram.com/p/DHlQBKfOq2z/?img_index=3&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

https://www.instagram.com/p/DHaoiUQMGsA/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

https://www.instagram.com/stories/jazzphotoarchives/3595767111227087362?utm_source=ig_story_item_share&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ== 

Gen Z slang : https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHYfoSfK_W1/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

“Anyone can become angry—that is easy,” [Aristotle] wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics. “But to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”

We cannot do without men with the courage to think new things before they can prove them. < Freud.

“We must recollect that all of our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably one day be based on an organic substructure,”14 he wrote. In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, written in 1920, he continued: “The deficiencies in our description would probably vanish if we were already in a position to replace the psychological terms with physiological or chemical ones.… years of questions we have to put to it. They may be of a kind that will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses.”

< Freud

  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197018624000871#preview-section-abstract

> Alpha-syn etc. Great article.

       

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteinopathy

< The site of the brain affected (neurodegeneration) in the PD is not only substantia nigra but also locus coeruleus which is a major norepinephrine nucleus. Noradrenaline induces α-syn oligomers formation which is responsible for neurodegeneration in locus coeruleus. α-syn oligomerization is dependent on oxidation of noradrenaline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birefringence#Optical_devices

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-%CE%B1-synuclein_drug

 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22743090/

<  The gap between symptoms and pathology in Alzheimer’s disease has been explained by the hypothetical construct of “cognitive reserve”–a set of variables including education, intelligence, and mental stimulation which putatively allow the brain to adapt to-and hence mask–underlying pathologies by maintaining cognitive function despite underlying neural changes

     

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteostasis

        

Resources for PD https://www.perplexity.ai/search/fd7da171-50ab-40fa-8802-ef5ae0891f30

 https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/vpn-dutch-tv-abroad/

Notes on Kandel, Age of Insight

The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
Kandel, Eric R.
Citation (APA): Kandel, E. R. (2012). The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Part One: A Psychoanalytic Psychology and Art of Unconscious Emotion
Bookmark – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 40 · Location 434
Bookmark – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 41 · Location 446
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 44 · Location 498
Van Swieten formed what is now known as the First Vienna School of Medicine, a school that began to transform Viennese medicine from the practice of therapeutic quackery based on humanist philosophy and the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen into a practice based on natural science.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 47 · Location 519
This development had two roots. First, as noted, every patient who died in the Vienna General Hospital was autopsied under the supervision of a single, highly trained person, the head pathologist.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 47 · Location 521
During a career spanning over thirty years, he and his associates carried out some sixty thousand autopsies,
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 47 · Location 528
The process gave rise to a new understanding of the clinical-pathological correlation that has characterized modern medicine ever since.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 47 · Location 530
contrary to the teachings of Galen, clinical symptoms arise from disorders of individual organs: symptoms are the cries of suffering organs. To understand disease, one must first find where in the body the disease originates.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 48 · Location 545
Skoda became not only a skilled listener to the heart’s sounds, but also a remarkable interpreter of their anatomical and pathological significance, setting the standard for current medical practice.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 50 · Location 565
In fact several of the founders of academic medicine in the United States—William Osler, William Halsted, and Harvey Cushing—studied medicine in Vienna before assuming their leadership roles.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 50 · Location 572
disease, Rokitansky and Skoda also provided the scientific basis for the concept of the disease process, the idea that each disease has a natural history and progresses through a series of steps from its onset to its termination.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 51 · Location 577
“The phenomena are a visible expression of that which is hidden.”
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 3. Viennese Artists, Writers, and Scientists Meet in the Zuckerkandl Salon > Page 58 · Location 663
both fields appear repeatedly in the background ornamentation of Klimt’s paintings. In fact, his radical portrayals of the nude female figure are seen by the art historian Emily Braun as reflecting a naturalistic, post-Darwinian perspective: “After Darwin, the body in painting stands nakedly for itself: a biological species subject to the same procreative laws as every other organism.”
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 64 · Location 706
His linking of psychology and brain biology led him to a second idea that is central to the biology of mind: the brain—and particularly its outer covering, the cerebral cortex—does not function as a single organ; therefore, different mental functions can be localized to different regions.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 67 · Location 733
Broca and Wernicke each conducted postmortem examinations of the brains of people with speech defects and found that specific disorders of language are associated with damage to specific regions of the brain. Thus, language can indeed be localized. The understanding of language is located
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 68 · Location 735
in the back of the cortex (in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus), the expression of language is located in the front of the cortex (in the left posterior frontal lobe), and the two sites are connected by a bundle of nerve fibers.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 70 · Location 750
damage to the hypothalamus produces stress that can cause what we now call “stress ulcers” in the stomach. Subsequent work by other scientists showed that the hypothalamus controls the pituitary gland and the autonomic nervous system and therefore plays a central role in mediating sexual, aggressive, and defensive behavior and in controlling hunger, thirst, and other homeostatic functions.
Bookmark – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 73 · Location 796
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 77 · Location 851
Encouraged by Brücke to study the nervous system, Freud completed one study of the lamprey, a simple vertebrate animal, and another study of the crayfish, a simple invertebrate animal. He found that the cells of the invertebrate nervous system
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 77 · Location 853
are not fundamentally different from those of the vertebrate nervous system.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 78 · Location 864
During this period, Freud made several contributions to research on the neuroanatomy of the medulla oblongata (the part of the nervous system that contains the centers for breathing and heart rhythms), and carried out several important clinical neurological studies on cerebral palsy and aphasias.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 81 · Location 900
We cannot do without men with the courage to think new things before they can prove them.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 94 · Location 1052
He therefore concluded that his patients’ reports were based not on real events but were “only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them.” 11 This led him to alter his seduction theory. He now saw the traumatic seduction experienced by the patient not as an actual physical act, but as an imagined physical experience with the patient’s parent, a fantasy that he concluded was universal.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 95 · Location 1073
Rather, he saw the decision as a necessary and, he hoped, temporary separation that would allow time for both the psychology of mind and the biology of the brain to mature before any ultimate unification of the two was attempted—a radical idea at that time.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 97 · Location 1094
“We must recollect that all of our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably one day be based on an organic substructure,” 14 he wrote. In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, written in 1920, he continued:
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 97 · Location 1097
The deficiencies in our description would probably vanish if we were already in a position to replace the psychological terms with physiological or chemical ones.…
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 97 · Location 1098
We may expect [physiology and chemistry] to give the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 97 · Location 1099
years of questions we have to put to it. They may be of a kind that will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 98 · Location 1114
His determination was based on the remarkable insight that unlike many neurological disorders, psychiatric disorders—and psychopathology in general—are extensions and distortions of normal mental processes.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 99 · Location 1116
cognitive psychology,
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 99 · Location 1118
The term “cognition” refers to all processes by which a sensory stimulus is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations.… Given such sweeping definition it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do, that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. 16
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 106 · Location 1219
The subjective experience which appears in consciousness during sleep and which, after waking, is referred to by the sleeper as a dream is only the end result of unconscious mental activity during sleep which, by its nature or its intensity, threatens to interfere with sleep itself. Instead of waking, the sleeper dreams. We call the conscious experience during sleep, which the sleeper may or may not recall after waking, the manifest dream. Its various elements are referred to as the manifest dream content. The unconscious thoughts and wishes which threaten to waken the sleeper we call the latent dream content. The unconscious mental operations by which the latent dream content is transformed into the manifest dream we call the dream work. 8
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 107 · Location 1236
Freud also continues an earlier line of thought—namely, that to understand a person’s present, one must turn inward and understand that person’s earliest experiences in childhood, both real and imagined.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 108 · Location 1247
First, mental processes operate primarily unconsciously; conscious thought and emotion are the exception rather than the rule.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 108 · Location 1249
Second, no aspect of mental activity is simply noise in the machinery of the brain. Mental events do not occur by chance, but adhere to scientific laws.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 108 · Location 1253
Third, and critical to unlocking the secrets of the human unconscious, Freud
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 108 · Location 1254
argued that irrationality per se is not abnormal: it is the universal language of the
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 108 · Location 1255
Fourth, normal and abnormal mental function lie on a continuum. Every neurotic symptom, no matter how strange it may seem to the patient, is not strange to the unconscious mind, because it is related to earlier mental processes.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 109 · Location 1266
What proved to be Freud’s most original and influential idea is that mental activity adheres to scientific laws.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 113 · Location 1299
The superego is the unconscious moral agency, the embodiment of our aspirations.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 113 · Location 1305
the implicit unconscious. The implicit unconscious, which we now realize is a much larger part of our unconscious mental life than Freud thought, is not concerned with instinctual drives or conflicts. Instead, it is concerned with habits and perceptual and motor skills, which involve procedural (implicit) memory. Even though it is not repressed, the implicit unconscious is never accessible to consciousness.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 114 · Location 1310
Freud used the term unconscious in a broader sense—the preconscious unconscious—
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 114 · Location 1312
access to it by an effort of attention.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 114 · Location 1312
unconscious much of the time; it becomes conscious only as sensory percepts—words, images, and emotions.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 114 · Location 1315
consciousness is Darwinian: it allows us to experience thought, emotion, and the states of pleasure and pain that are essential for the propagation of the species.
Bookmark – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 115 · Location 1329
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 116 · Location 1342
book Darwin points out that emotions are part of a primitive, virtually universal approach-avoidance system designed to seek out pleasure and decrease exposure to pain.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 119 · Location 1382
The patients in his five major case studies—Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, Schreber, the Wolf Man—have become characters as indelible in the canon of modern literature as those of Dostoevsky.
Bookmark – Chapter 8. The Depiction of Modern Women’s Sexuality in Art > Page 143 · Location 1661
Bookmark – Chapter 9. The Depiction of the Psyche in Art > Page 193 · Location 2070
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 9. The Depiction of the Psyche in Art > Page 196 · Location 2116
Die Träumenden Knaben
Bookmark – Chapter 10. The Fusion of Eroticism, Aggression, and Anxiety in Art > Page 245 · Location 2562
Bookmark – Chapter 10. The Fusion of Eroticism, Aggression, and Anxiety in Art > Page 274 · Location 2774
Part Three: Biology of the Beholder’s Visual Response to Art
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 14. The Brain’s Processing of Visual Images > Page 348 · Location 3404
The ventral tegmental area of the midbrain also contains neurons that release dopamine, a chemical that serves to command attention and anticipate reward.
Highlight(blue) – Chapter 14. The Brain’s Processing of Visual Images > Page 350 · Location 3431
Computers are better than the human brain at processing and manipulating large amounts of data, but they lack the hypothesis-testing, creative, and inferential capabilities of our visual system.
Part Five: An Evolving Dialogue Between Visual Art and Science
Bookmark – Chapter 30. Brain Circuits for Creativity > Page 688 ·

The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

Notebook Export
The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves
Kandel, Eric R.
Citation (Chicago Style): Kandel, Eric R.. The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. Kindle edition.

1. What Brain Disorders Can Tell Us About Ourselves
Highlight(blue) – Page 22 · Location 237
The fourth principle, which derives from the first three, is that information flows in one direction only—from the dendrites to the cell body to the axon, then along the axon to the synapse. We now call this flow of information in the brain the principle of dynamic polarization.
Highlight(blue) – Page 24 · Location 253
immediately began to hear clicking noises, a fast rapping similar to Morse code. The clicking noise was an electrical signal, an action potential, the fundamental unit of neural communication. Adrian was listening in on the language of neurons. What produced the action
Highlight(blue) – Page 30 · Location 315
Descartes’s mind-body dualism has proved hard to shake because it reflects the way we experience ourselves.
Highlight(blue) – Page 32 · Location 341
Each gene encodes—that is, issues the instructions for making—a particular protein. Proteins determine the structure, function, and other biological characteristics of every cell in our body.
Bookmark – Page 35 · Location 378
Bookmark – Page 39 · Location 420
Highlight(blue) – Page 40 · Location 443
For example, Alzheimer’s disease, which primarily affects memory; Parkinson’s disease, which primarily affects movement; and Huntington’s disease, which affects movement, mood, and cognition, are all thought to involve faulty protein folding, as we shall see in later chapters. The three disorders produce strikingly different symptoms because the abnormal folding affects different proteins and different regions of the brain. We will undoubtedly discover common mechanisms in other diseases as well.
Highlight(blue) – Page 42 · Location 469
Because of neurology’s traditional emphasis on anatomy, we know a great deal more about the neural circuitry of neurological disorders than of psychiatric disorders. In addition, the underlying neural circuitry of psychiatric disorders is more complex than that of neurological disorders. Scientists have only recently begun to explore the brain regions involved in thought, planning, and motivation, the
2. Our Intensely Social Nature: The Autism Spectrum
Highlight(blue) – Page 45 · Location 503
other people have a mind of their own, that they have their own beliefs, aspirations, desires, and intentions. This innate understanding is different from a shared emotion. A very young child will smile when you smile or frown when you frown. But realizing that the person you’re looking at may be thinking about something different from what you’re thinking about is a profound skill that arises only later in normal development, around the age of three or four.
Highlight(blue) – Page 49 · Location 540
Thus, one of the reasons people with autism have difficulty with social interactions is that they have limited capacity to read socially meaningful biological actions such as reaching to shake hands.
Highlight(blue) – Page 75 · Location 837
while a mutation in a single gene is responsible for some disorders, such as Huntington’s disease, single mutations do not cause most other brain disorders, including autism, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
5. Memory, the Storehouse of the Self: Dementia
Highlight(blue) – Page 150 · Location 1762
Rather than relying on higher, cognitive regions such as the medial region of the temporal lobe, implicit memory depends more on regions of the brain that respond to stimuli, for example the amygdala, the cerebellum, and the basal ganglia, or, in the simplest instances, the reflex pathways themselves.
Highlight(blue) – Page 152 · Location 1800
Short-term memory results from strengthening existing synaptic connections, making them function better, whereas long-term memory results from the growth of new synapses. Put another way, long-term memory leads to anatomical changes in the brain, whereas short-term memory does not. When synaptic connections weaken or disappear over time, memory fades or is lost.
Highlight(blue) – Page 153 · Location 1808
benign senescent forgetfulness,
Bookmark – Page 155 · Location 1826
Highlight(blue) – Page 155 · Location 1826
found that age-related memory loss involves the dentate gyrus, a structure within the hippocampus.
Highlight(blue) – Page 156 · Location 1842
that bone is an endocrine organ and that it releases a hormone called osteocalcin. Karsenty found that osteocalcin acts on many organs of the body and also gets into the brain, where it promotes spatial memory and learning by influencing the production of serotonin, dopamine, GABA, and other neurotransmitters. 8
6. Our Innate Creativity: Brain Disorders and Art
Highlight(blue) – Page 177 · Location 2053
ability to recognize faces resides in the right fusiform gyrus of the inferior medial temporal lobe of the brain. People with damage to the front of that region are face-blind,
Highlight(blue) – Page 182 · Location 2097
similar in nature, although more modest in scope, to the creative process of the artist. This creative process is known as the beholder’s share.
Highlight(blue) – Page 184 · Location 2129
experience moments in their work in which they undergo, in a controlled manner, a relatively free communication between the unconscious and conscious parts of their mind. He calls this controlled access to our unconscious “regression in the service of the ego.”
Highlight(blue) – Page 200 · Location 2294
Max Ernst, a leader first of Dada and later of Surrealist art, bought a copy of Prinzhorn’s book and took it to Paris, where it became the “Picture Bible” of the Surrealists.
7. Movement: Parkinson’s and Huntington’s Diseases
Bookmark – Page 216 · Location 2485
Bookmark – Page 218 · Location 2511
Highlight(blue) – Page 219 · Location 2526
organizational logic of the brain as a whole. In the broadest sense, the task of every circuit in the nervous system is to add up the total excitatory and inhibitory information it receives and determine
Highlight(blue) – Page 219 · Location 2528
whether to pass that information along. Sherrington called this principle “the integrative action of the nervous system.”
Highlight(blue) – Page 222 · Location 2565
the disease worsens, other areas of the brain besides the substantia nigra become involved.
Highlight(blue) – Page 222 · Location 2572
Initially, L-dopa was viewed as a cure, but after a honeymoon of several years, it fell out of favor because it was only effective as long as there were dopamine-producing cells in the substantia nigra. It turned out that as more dopamine-producing cells died, the drug’s beneficial effects wore off abruptly, leaving patients with involuntary movements, called dyskinesias. Clearly, an alternative treatment was needed.
Highlight(blue) – Page 223 · Location 2580
found that a particular area of the basal ganglia, the subthalamic nucleus, is also rich in dopamine-producing nerve cells and plays an essential role in the control of movement.
Highlight(blue) – Page 224 · Location 2593
1990 he published the amazing result: damaging the subthalamic nucleus in one side of the brain of a monkey with Parkinson’s disease caused the tremor and muscular rigidity on the other side of the body to vanish. 9
Highlight(blue) – Page 238 · Location 2729
As we have seen, the death of dopamine-producing neurons, caused by misfolded proteins, leads to Parkinson’s disease.
8. The Interplay of Conscious and Unconscious Emotion: Anxiety, Post-Traumatic Stress, and Faulty Decision Making
Highlight(blue) – Page 244 · Location 2781
restrict the word “emotion” to the observable, unconscious behavioral component and use “feeling” to refer to the subjective experience of emotion.
Highlight(blue) – Page 245 · Location 2792
Many structures in the brain are involved in emotion, but four of them are particularly important: the hypothalamus, which is the executor of emotion; the amygdala, which orchestrates emotion; the striatum, which comes into play when
Highlight(blue) – Page 245 · Location 2794
we form habits, including addictions; and the prefrontal cortex, which evaluates whether a particular emotional response is appropriate to the situation at hand (fig. 8.4). The prefrontal cortex interacts with, and in part controls, the amygdala and striatum.
Highlight(blue) – Page 247 · Location 2805
“Anyone can become angry—that is easy,” he wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics. “But to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
Highlight(blue) – Page 247 · Location 2805
“Anyone can become angry—that is easy,” he wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics. “But to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for
Highlight(blue) – Page 248 · Location 2820
ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This structure is also important for what we would call moral emotions—indignation, compassion, embarrassment, and shame.
Highlight(blue) – Page 248 · Location 2822
dorsal prefrontal cortex, is actually the point at which our conscious mind—our volition, or will—can impose itself on the way emotion is being carried out.
Highlight(blue) – Page 255 · Location 2897
epigenetic changes, that is, molecular changes in reaction to the environment that do not alter the DNA of a gene but do affect the expression of that gene.
Highlight(blue) – Page 257 · Location 2930
People in the treatment group were given propranolol, a drug that blocks the action of
Highlight(blue) – Page 257 · Location 2931
noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter released in response to stress that triggers our fight, flight, or freeze response.
9. The Pleasure Principle and Freedom of Choice: Addictions
Highlight(blue) – Page 272 · Location 3103
Swedish pharmacologist Arvid Carlsson, dopamine is released primarily by neurons in two regions of the brain: the ventral tegmental area and the substantia nigra (fig.
Highlight(blue) – Page 272 · Location 3107
communications network, known as the mesolimbic pathway, is the major network in the brain’s reward system. It puts dopamine-producing neurons in a position to broadcast information widely, including to regions throughout the cerebral cortex.
Highlight(blue) – Page 274 · Location 3130
Activation of dopamine signaling, along with activation of several other important reward signals that vary from drug to drug, is responsible for the initial high that people experience on drugs.
Highlight(blue) – Page 275 · Location 3140
Adaptive habits are promoted by the release of dopamine into the prefrontal cortex and the striatum, the areas of the
Highlight(blue) – Page 275 · Location 3141
brain involved with control and with reward and motivation.
Highlight(blue) – Page 275 · Location 3151
brain imaging reveals that cocaine, a highly addictive drug, interferes with the removal of dopamine from the synapse. As a result, dopamine lingers there and continues to produce pleasurable feelings that persist beyond those produced by ordinary physiological stimuli. In this way cocaine hijacks the brain’s reward system.
Highlight(blue) – Page 276 · Location 3161
series of imaging
Highlight(blue) – Page 277 · Location 3170
involves Vietnam veterans who had become hooked on very high quality heroin while overseas. Amazingly, most of them were able to conquer their addiction when they returned to the United States because none of the cues that had encouraged them to use heroin in Vietnam were present at home. 4
Highlight(blue) – Page 282 · Location 3243
to nicotine modifies their dopamine-receiving neurons in such a way that they respond more powerfully to cocaine. In contrast, giving the animals cocaine first has no effect on their subsequent response to nicotine. 13 Thus, nicotine primes the brain for cocaine addiction.
Highlight(blue) – Page 284 · Location 3271
obesity seemed to spread through a social network like a virus. In fact, if one person became obese, the likelihood that a friend would follow suit increased by 171 percent.
Highlight(blue) – Page 285 · Location 3287
As we have seen, drug addiction is a form of long-term memory. The brain becomes conditioned to associate certain environmental cues with pleasure, and encountering those cues can trigger an urge to use the drug.
Highlight(blue) – Page 286 · Location 3295
Unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies have devoted very little effort to developing drugs to treat addiction. One reason is their perception that they cannot recover their research costs from addicted people.
10. Sexual Differentiation of the Brain and Gender Identity
Highlight(blue) – Page 290 · Location 3336
Gender identity is not the same thing as sexual orientation, a person’s romantic attraction to the opposite sex, the same sex, or both sexes. At present, we know too little about the biology of sexual orientation to discuss it here.
Highlight(blue) – Page 298 · Location 3424
Does our brain contain neural circuits for both male and female behavior, like the mouse brain, or does it have separate neural circuits for men and for women?
11. Consciousness: The Great Remaining Mystery of the Brain
Highlight(blue) – Page 313 · Location 3612
About 20 percent of the neurons located on the border between the two populations can be active during either mating or aggression.
Highlight(blue) – Page 316 · Location 3644
brain contains a system—which they
Highlight(blue) – Page 316 · Location 3644
called the reticular activating system—that extends from the brain stem and midbrain to the thalamus, and from the thalamus to the cortex.
Highlight(blue) – Page 318 · Location 3669
In theory, we should be able to determine whether neural correlates cause consciousness by the usual methods: see if consciousness can be turned on by turning on the neural correlates of consciousness, and see if consciousness can be turned off by turning off the neural correlates of consciousness. We’re not quite able to do that yet.
Highlight(blue) – Page 333 · Location 3857
they discovered the anterior insular cortex, or insula, a little island in the cortex located between the parietal and temporal lobes. The insula is where our feelings are represented—
Newsletter Sign-up

The Cannibal Cookbook

Although humans obviously need to be treated in special ways when they become food, the consumption of human flesh and the gourmet use of other parts of our fellow beings can be determined to some extent by the same principles that guide us in the everyday preparation and production of food. 

The prey or products brought to market through scientific conservation or so-called human economy, as well as all other ingredients, must be carefully selected and procured, appropriate tools used,  suitable cooking techniques applied. In cases where the meat is soft or juicy enough to be enjoyed uncooked – as the Japanese prefer seafood and certain fish dishes – special cutting tools and lengthy artistic training are necessary. A whole lifetime would not be  enough to master this demanding art. Fortunately, one does not necessarily have to climb all the peaks of culinary cannibalism.  As everywhere, the best cuisine is that which we have prepared for ourselves, be it in the open fireplace of a fixed household or on a stove in front of the tents of a short-term camp. 

There is only one absolute taboo: one must only eat the meat of strangers. That is why we call this dietary custom “cannibalism”, not human eating. Nevertheless, tasting and tasting humans are perfectly acceptable. As a result, the trend of so-called locavore cuisine followed by too many gastronomic trendies should only be followed with caution. Most often, the people closest to us are not strangers: they are often blood relatives or in-laws. Hence the consequence that in order to enjoy human flesh freely and without embarrassment, we usually had to travel far and wide, conquer many countries, conquer many peoples. At least, that was usually the case in ancient times. 

Of course, from time to time, small bands of strangers invade our territories. Under such favorable conditions, we could eat to our satisfaction without having to endure the strenuous exertion of an unpleasant journey. 

Recently, globalization has offered taste lovers something previously unimagined in this area. The selection of genetically modified and systematically selected frozen human food available in specialized butchers will soon amaze us. These shops must now, by law, display an accompanying sign, the badge of a human face — another advantage of globalization that is presented as having a human face.