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28/01/2024

Notes to Neuroscience For Dummies

Neuroscience For Dummies

Amthor, Frank

Citation (Chicago Style): Amthor, Frank. Neuroscience For Dummies. Wiley, 2023. Kindle edition.

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Part 1: Introducing the Nervous System

Bookmark – Understanding the Evolution of the Nervous System > Page 9 · Location 646

Highlight(blue) – Understanding the Evolution of the Nervous System > Page 10 · Location 668

The human brain consumes about 20 percent of the body’s metabolism despite being only about 5 percent of body weight.

Highlight(blue) – Revolutionizing the Future: Advancements in Various Fields > Page 21 · Location 936

Humans are now beginning to augment ourselves.

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Most of the volume of the brain is axonal wiring, not cells.

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the corpus callosum, which contains 200 million fibers.

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This “motor map” (called a homunculus)

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Primates, on the other hand, have complex male and female hierarchies and may hatch plots against each other that span years of planning.

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The major sensory inputs from the skin (touch, temperature, and pain receptors) relay through the thalamus to the gyrus just posterior to the central fissure, where a map of the skin exists.

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The skin homunculus map closely resembles the primary motor cortex map.

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The fact that the visual system gets an entire lobe for processing emphasizes the importance of high visual acuity and processing among our senses.

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The root of the word thalamus comes from a Greek word (tholos) related to the entrance room to a building, so you can think of the thalamus as the gateway to the cortex.

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So, what does the thalamus do, exactly? It functions like a command center that controls what information goes between different parts of the neocortex and the rest of the brain.

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Memory modifies behavior in such animals via what we think of as emotions.

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one brain structure within this system, the hippocampus, is now known to have a crucial function in the creation of memory.

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primarily involved with emotional processing, the amygdala.

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the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia consist of five major nuclei: the caudate, putamen, globus palladus, substantia nigra, and subthalamic nucleus

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Parkinson’s disease, which is caused by the death of dopaminergic neurons in this nucleus. Without these neurons, initiating voluntary movement or changing an ongoing movement sequence becomes difficult.

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The major visual area in the midbrain is the superior colliculus, which controls eye movements called saccades.

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(called the tectum in frogs and other non-mammals)

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The reticular formation is not so much a defined structure as it is a continuous network that extends through and interacts with numerous brain areas.

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trigeminal cranial nerve V.

Bookmark – How We Know What We Know about Neural Activity > Page 48 · Location 1491

Bookmark – Chapter 3: Understanding How Neurons Work > Page 51 · Location 1536

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cytoplasm

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dendrites receive inputs

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axon sends the output of the cell to other cells.

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learning. Learning occurs when experiences modify the strength and identity of the interconnections between neurons and thus create memory.

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electrical pulses, called spikes,

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synaptic cleft.

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Motor neurons output their neurotransmitter (acetylcholine) onto muscle cells that contract when receptors in the muscle cells receive it. The control of voluntary striated muscle generally occurs after the brain has done a

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Postsynaptic receptor channels that are activated by neurotransmitters released by a presynaptic neuron are generally referred to as ligand-gated ion channels.

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neurotransmitter molecules.

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All voluntary muscle contractions are caused by the release of acetylcholine by motor neurons onto muscle cells.

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fast inhibitory neurotransmitters gamma amino butyric acid (GABA)

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Slow neuromodulators that include both excitatory and inhibitory types: Most of the fast neurotransmitters are amino acids (other than acetylcholine). Modulating neurotransmitters include biogenic amines, such as the catecholamines (dopamine,

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Highlight(blue) – How Shocking! Neurons as Electrical Signaling Devices > Page 58 · Location 1689

cation is positively charged (attracted to a negative cathode); an anion is negatively charged (attracted to a positive anode).

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Highlight(blue) – Non-neuronal Cells: Glial Cells > Page 65 · Location 1821

astrocyte

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cancer treatment protocols effectively involve using toxic chemicals and radiation to wipe out the vast majority of dividing cancer cells, hoping the immune system can mop up the last few percent.

Part 2: Translating the Internal and External Worlds through Your Senses

Bookmark – How Do You Feel? The Lowdown on the Skin and Its Sensory Neurons > Page 74 · Location 1994

Highlight(blue) – Skin Receptors, Local Spinal Circuits, and Projections to the Brain > Page 81 · Location 2125

because some neural projections from the face invade the cortical area once stimulated by the limb and cause sensations to be perceived as being located in the limb, even when the limb is gone. Receptor densities

Highlight(blue) – Understanding the Complex Aspects of Pain > Page 82 · Location 2159

endorphins (a term which is an abbreviation of endogenous morphines).

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it turns out that the drug naloxone not only reduces the effects of opioids, such as heroin, but it also reduces the placebo effect. What this means is that the placebo effect isn’t just psychological; it actually has a physiological component, involving the cognitive stimulation, from belief, of the body’s internal endorphin production that objectively and measurably reduces pain by binding the endorphin receptors.

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(red, green, and blue).

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apraxis, the inability to skillfully execute tasks requiring visual guidance.

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Unlike the preceding retinopathies, glaucoma involves a primary death of retinal ganglion cells, most commonly due to inherited excessive pressure within the eye. One glaucoma subtype, closed-angle glaucoma, is treatable with laser surgery. The other form, open-angle glaucoma, can often be controlled with medication.

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Amblyopia,

Highlight(blue) – The Ear: Capturing and Decoding Sound Waves > Page 113 · Location 2776

they also are apparently derived evolutionarily from motor type cilia, such as used by some single-celled organisms to move.

Highlight(blue) – Making Sense of Sounds: Central Auditory Projections > Page 118 · Location 2873

of attended auditory input

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deliberately try to hear—is mediated in multiple brain areas that

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22 results in an inability to process prosody in language—the changes in tonality and rhythm—that conveys meaning. Patients with this damage, for example, have trouble distinguishing sarcastic versus questioning versus other tones of voice, and in particular, don’t “get” jokes and other forms of humor.

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However, its processing relies more on the right than the left side of the brain, indicated by the fact that most people recognize melodies better with their left ear (right brain).

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age-related decline in high frequency sensitivity (presbycusis, which occurs in almost everyone, particularly males),

Bookmark – Chapter 7: Odors and Taste > Page 127 · Location 3029

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This pathway is concerned with memory associations of very universal smells such as something rotting, rather than sophisticated smells such as hazelnut coffee and dark chocolate, which require higher order cortical processing to establish their identity prior to being stored in memory.

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trigeminal

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alliesthesia (“ changed taste”), and it’s a brain mechanism that indicates you’re getting full. The mechanism for

Part 3: Moving Right Along: Motor Systems

Bookmark – Chapter 8: Movement Basics > Page 145 · Location 3369

Highlight(blue) – Identifying Types of Movement > Page 147 · Location 3420

Proprioception

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kinesthesis

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Some researchers have argued that language itself, the ultimate separator of humans from animals, evolved literally hand in hand with manual dexterity. This argument suggests that the left side of the brain regions that enable language production also makes most of us right-handed for motion sequence production.

Highlight(blue) – Pulling the Load: Muscle Cells and Their Action Potentials > Page 153 · Location 3565

cells. The nicotinic acetylcholine receptor is an excitatory ionotropic receptor (refer to Chapter 3).

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cholinesterases)

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myosin myofilaments

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ATP (adenosine triphosphate) as an energy source. ATP is the universal energy “currency” within cells for conducting

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Myasthenia gravis

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Motor neuron viral diseases: Rabies and polio

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One focus is based on the fact that the myelin wrapping around peripheral nerves is from cells called Schwann cells, but the myelin wrapping around central nervous system axons is from cells called oligodendrocytes.

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The beginning of the withdrawal reflex can also be described as being ballistic, in the sense that once launched, its trajectory is not controlled

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Patients with tremor, such as Parkinson’s, have defective overshoot control systems so their limbs oscillate at what should have been the endpoint of a planned movement.

Highlight(blue) – The Modulating Reflexes: Balance and Locomotion > Page 165 · Location 3788

The basics of locomotion

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central

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pattern generator, which alternates the two legs and two arms with each

Highlight(blue) – Correcting Errors without Feedback: The Cerebellum > Page 167 · Location 3829

So the question is, how does repetition make us better at doing something?

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 10: Planning and Executing Actions > Page 174 · Location 3923

Does consciousness emerge from just having a large enough brain? Or is consciousness not real, not a cause of anything, but a result, an illusion that goes along for the ride with complex brain activity, what some philosophers call an epiphenomenon? This chapter considers some of the more relevant data.

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an orderly map, referred to as the motor homunculus (this is very similar to the sensory homunculus in the primary somatosensory area;

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items that humans can hold in memory (which memory researchers call chunks)

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Selection: How the basal ganglia function as a circuit is one of the least understood areas of system neuroscience, despite their importance in diseases such as Parkinson’s

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the basal ganglia structures called the caudate and putamen, which together are referred to as the striatum. The striatum projects to three interconnected nuclei within the core of the basal ganglia, called the globus pallidus, subthalamic nucleus, and substantia nigra (in the midbrain). The output of these three nuclei, particularly the globus pallidus, inhibits motor areas through the thalamus.

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our apparent multitasking is really a case of cyclic time sharing.

Highlight(blue) – Where Are the Free Will Neurons? > Page 184 · Location 4125

Here’s what the data very reliably showed: Deflections of the EEG traces occurred typically one-half second before the subjects indicated they’d decided to move their hands (this deflection is typically now called a readiness potential,

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abnormalities in the frontal lobe, particularly the orbitofrontal cortex, seem to reduce a person’s capacity to make wise choices without reducing the capacity to do the mental calculation of the costs and benefits of the choices.

Highlight(blue) – Discovering New (and Strange) Neurons > Page 186 · Location 4178

Mirror neurons are visual neurons that fire not only when an animal, such as a monkey, is performing a task requiring visual feedback, but also when the monkey observes a human (or presumably another monkey) performing the same task.

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L-dopa treatments eventually cease working because the cells that convert L-dopa to dopamine cease working or die.

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deep brain stimulation (DBS).

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homeostasis, the active maintenance of various aspects of the internal state of our bodies.

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The autonomic nervous system is actually a dual system because it has two components, called the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches, which act in opposition to each other.

Highlight(blue) – Sweet Dreams: Sleep and Circadian Rhythms > Page 200 · Location 4490

suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which means “nucleus above the chiasm.” Although the activity of these cells controls the overall circadian rhythm in humans and all other vertebrates, circadian cells also exist in primitive organisms and circadian rhythms exist in single-celled entities such as algae.

Part 4: Intelligence: The Thinking Brain and Consciousness

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learning and its result, memory.

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Researchers conjecture that memory for navigation may have been the original evolutionary function of

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the hippocampus, after which it became involved in other kinds of memory, including particularly episodic memory

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Stroop task,

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(the “singularity”) should be reached around 2030,

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consciousness as “the remembered present.”

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few of us remember anything from our lives before the age of 2 is suggested to result from the profound reorganization of our brains that occurs after we learn language,

Bookmark – Chapter 13: How the Brain Processes Thoughts > Page 239 · Location 5291

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whether it enables complex functions like language and consciousness simply because it has crossed some size threshold, or whether its structure and organization is somehow unique.

Highlight(blue) – All about the Neocortex > Page 245 · Location 5399

The small “communities” in the cortex are called minicolumns.

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passing through six synapses or less, the six degrees of separation.

Highlight(blue) – Controlling the Content of Thought: Sensory Pathways and Hierarchies > Page 248 · Location 5475

Past stimuli have left their trace in memory not only as recallable objects and events, but also as paths in the brain through which current stimuli are processed. Stimuli received by the senses are transformed into a universal neural currency of action potentials bombarding the thalamus.

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areas is a central executive processing nucleus within the thalamus itself called the pulvinar.

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Remembering involves activation of many of the same brain structures (visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortices) that processed the original sensory input, organized or activated by the hippocampus,

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and represented in the firing of working memory neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex.

Highlight(blue) – Dividing and Conquering: Language, Vision, and the Brain Hemispheres > Page 253 · Location 5572

Beyond this basic crossed-innervation scheme, the two sides appear to have different styles of processing that are particularly evident in some high-level cognitive tasks. These include a left-side specialization for grammatical aspects of language and a right side specialization for holistic aspects of visuo-spatial processing.

Highlight(blue) – Dividing and Conquering: Language, Vision, and the Brain Hemispheres > Page 253 · Location 5587

In virtually all right-handers and about half of left-handers, language depends far more on structures in the left hemisphere than the right (the homologous areas in the right hemisphere have far weaker roles in the same functions).

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stylistic

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manners of processing by the two hemispheres: The left brain tends to be sequential and rule-based, whereas the right brain tends to do pattern matching.

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Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area.

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If you heard Wernicke’s aphasics speak in a language you did not know, you might have difficulty discerning that there was anything wrong.

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The right fusiform face area, a very anterior and medial part of the visual identity processing stream in the infero-temporal cortex, is more important for face recognition than the equivalent area on the left.

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According to this idea, humans are unique in that we have a system in the sequential, rule-based left side of the brain that constantly tries to make sense of the world by using language. This left side interpreter is constantly making up a verbal story about reality that includes salient events and the role of the person and their actions in those events.

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Does a car simulate a person walking?

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 14: The Executive Brain > Page 263 · Location 5772

Evolution has occurred in the mammalian brain mostly by adding the neocortex to ancestral structures. This is something like the addition of numerous microcomputers and controllers to a modern car engine.

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Despite the fact that humans have much larger brains than many other animals, the capacity of seven short-term memory items doesn’t appear to be much greater than that of many other animals, such as crows!

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 14: The Executive Brain > Page 268 · Location 5897

Lateral prefrontal damage is associated with a phenomenon called perseveration.

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Wise people with intact frontal lobes make this change in priorities; teenagers with not yet fully developed frontal lobe myelination, and people with compromised frontal lobe function, often do not.

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On the other hand, intuition can lead to stereotypes and rigidity in behavior.

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The orbitofrontal cortex informs us when we contemplate socially

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embarrassing actions by provoking feelings of fear and embarrassment through the action of the autonomic nervous system.

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Highlight(blue) – Are We There Yet? The Anterior Cingulate Cortex > Page 272 · Location 5969

practiced sequences to be executed with higher precision and speed than is possible under explicit conscious control. Because such sequences

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are executed faster than they can be consciously controlled, they are executed with only high level awareness of their progress, without knowledge of the motor details.

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(called voxels)

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The anterior cingulate is activated when you do things that are difficult or novel, when you make errors, or when you must overcome habitual behavior patterns. It is at the center of a supervisory control system that mediates goal selection

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In normal human development, the frontal lobes mature last. For example, myelination of axons is not complete in the frontal lobes until late adolescence.

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Adolescence is a developmental period notoriously characterized by high raw intelligence but poor judgment typical of inadequate frontal lobe function. One of the oft-stated goals of education is to instill enough good habits and rational thinking capabilities to get adolescents through adolescence without doing harm to themselves or others.

Highlight(blue) – Chapter 15: Learning and Memory > Page 275 · Location 6045

During embryonic growth and the first years of life, the human brain develops by growing and changing its large-scale organization. Starting during early development but continuing throughout later life, nervous system activity from experience causes changes in synaptic strengths that mediate changes in behavior.

Highlight(blue) – Learning and Memory: One More Way to Adapt to the Environment > Page 276 · Location 6056

at least three kinds of adaptation to the environment are possible: evolutionary adaptation, developmental adaptation, and classical learning.

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A crucial brain area for consolidating learning from short-to long-term memory is the hippocampus in the medial temporal lobe.

Highlight(blue) – Sending More or Fewer Signals: Adaptation versus Facilitation > Page 278 · Location 6103

There are two low-order mechanisms by which neural responses change: adaptation (or habituation in the case of repeated stimuli) and facilitation (sensitization in the case of repeated stimuli):

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neural circuits also appear to operate like analog computers, so the brain is a mixture of both).

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How does a synapse change its strength? What and where are these synapses?

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What signal controls this change that is associated with learning?

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glutamate. However, unlike most ligand-(neurotransmitter-binding) activated receptors, the NMDA receptor is blocked by a magnesium ion in the mouth of the pore when the neuron is at its normal resting potential with the inside about–56 millivolts with respect to the outside extracellular fluid. In this case, binding glutamate from a presynaptic terminal is not sufficient to open the NMDA ion channel. The magnesium ion is removed, however, if an adjacent non-NMDA glutamate ion channel (typically those called AMPA and kainate channels) is also activated and depolarizes the neural

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Highlight(blue) – Exploring What Happens during Learning: Changing Synapses > Page 288 · Location 6305

called long-term potentiation. (There is also long-term depression, which balances things out so that all synapses do not become stronger only.)

Highlight(blue) – The Role of the Hippocampus in Learning and Memory > Page 289 · Location 6322

Cognitive neuroscience seeks to locate where in the brain these memories exist and what processes they use. The hippocampus, as it turns out, is crucial for moving memory from the short-term form to the long-term.

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Short-term memory exists in two places, the lateral prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.

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coincidence detector for that thing. So seeing a green frog activates the cortical areas for green and frog, which activates the hippocampal green frog cell whose synapses get strengthened.

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This means you can re-create in your cortex a version of the pattern of activity that occurred when you actually experienced something.

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When you continue to think about, or rehearse, the memory of some experience, the activity reverberates between hippocampus and cortex. If you rehearse enough (which happens during REM sleep, particularly), modifiable synapses in the cortex are changed so that the cortex itself can reproduce the neural activity associated with an experience.

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The hippocampus is a scratchpad for maintaining rehearsal to form the long-term memory.

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their hippocampi played back the correct maze traversal sequence by activating, in sequence,

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playback occurred at about seven times the actual speed that the rats ran the mazes. If the rats were prevented from having REM sleep, they did not consolidate the day’s training well and did not learn the mazes as well.

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The name for contextual memory is episodic memory, that is, memory associated with an event or episode. General memory about facts is called semantic memory.

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Remember also that the projections from neocortex to hippocampus include both low (realistic, detailed) and high

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(abstract) meaning associated levels, so that the context for any memory can be quite elaborate and specific.

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too weak (the synapses are not sufficiently strengthened)

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scuba divers who learned a list of words underwater and then were asked to recall the terms later, both on the surface and underwater. The results? The underwater performance was better.

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soap opera syndrome of temporary memory loss, known clinically as transient global amnesia (TGA).

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transient ischemia,

Highlight(blue) – Getting Brainier: Improving Your Learning > Page 297 · Location 6491

Learning has a lifespan trajectory. It’s easy when you’re very young, difficult after adolescence, and very hard for most elderly. We can’t do much about the process of aging other than taking care of ourselves, but we can maintain and even increase the ability to learn by engaging in intellectually challenging activities.

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Cognitive dysfunctions such as dyslexia and dysgraphia are not believed by most scientists to be based on any specific dysfunction in learning mechanisms. Rather, they are almost certainly the result of a dysfunction in some aspect of the central representation of the relevant sensory input that becomes evident during learning.

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enough time for the hippocampal-cortex reverberation system to consolidate learning over several evenings of sleep.

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Failure is a signal to change synaptic weights, while success means that some subset should be enhanced.

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One of the functions of the dopamine system in the brain is to provide reward/ punishment feedback for adapting the brain to activities in which you are engaged.

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glial

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genome codes for rules by which several hundred brain areas will come into existence. A few other rules specify the approximate location of these areas, about how large they are, and about what kinds of connections they will have. This constitutes a general program for development.

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This developmental fine tuning is called plasticity.

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cell type, such as a pyramidal cell. This migrating cell is called a migratory precursor cell.

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are pluripotent stem cells, meaning that they can differentiate into any cell type. As development proceeds, they become committed to being endoderm, mesoderm, or ectoderm cell types, then to specialized types within those divisions, and so on, until they differentiate into a final cell type and remain so for the life of the organism, never dividing again (with a few exceptions).

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Some researchers believe that subtle errors in laying out these standard minicolumns properly may underlie some disorders such as autism.

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A major question in neuroscience concerns how axons know where to go and what to connect to when they reach their target areas.

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What the genetic code really codes for is a set of cellular responses that comprise rules or procedures that cells follow when responding to their environments, which they do through the manufacture of proteins.

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Tests have shown that at birth, infants are already familiar with their mother’s voice from hearing it in the womb, for example. This is possible because neurons in newborns’ auditory cortices already respond better to the speech sounds of their mother in her language than to other voices in that language or to the mother speaking a different language she did not use while they were in the womb.

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RNA contains the sugar ribose instead of the deoxyribose in DNA. The complementary base to adenine in RNA is uracil rather than the thymine in DNA. RNA is single stranded while DNA is double stranded.

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Another process, called reverse transcription, uses RNA from a virus that has entered the cell to make DNA in the cell nucleus. Reverse transcription occurs in retroviruses such as HIV and is a common feature of the replication cycle for many viruses by which they hijack the cell’s transcription machinery to make copies of themselves.

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The first part of the experiment is whether this new genome can control the development of a viable fetus that will progress to full term and birth.

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genotype)

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phenotype).

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elucidation of the CRISPR-Cas9

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degeneracy.

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the developing embryo. The general term for substances that cause birth defects is teratogen.

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axon myelination,

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continues until nearly the end of adolescence.

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telomeres at the end of chromosomes inside the nucleus of cells may only be capable of a finite number of divisions. Each time a cell divides,

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At the whole organism level, joints wear out and blood vessels harden or get clogged with deposits.

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accumulation of more or less random degeneration in multiple tissues

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telomere shortening

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In cognition, the accumulation of knowledge and experience tend to compensate in later years for slightly slower reactions and short-term memory capacity.

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Fluid intelligence

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Crystallized intelligence

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tennis, which seems to have benefits over and above simpler kinds of exercise, such as jogging.

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choline

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nootropics)

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Aging is a major risk factor for many neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and vascular disease that affects the brain,

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The neurons that die in the initial stages of Alzheimer’s disease are primarily cholinergic (they use acetylcholine as a neurotransmitter),

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Parkinson’s disease is associated with death of dopaminergic cells in a specific basal ganglia nucleus called the substantia nigra (which is actually in the midbrain). The death of these cells interferes with the patient’s ability to make voluntary movements or voluntary corrections during walking, such as stepping over an obstacle.

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Researchers have had difficulty telling whether this disease is due to a genetic deficiency that simply takes a long time to play out or a combination of a genetic susceptibility plus an environmental trigger.

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(MPTP)

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Ischemic strokes in which vessel blockages produce loss of nutrient and waste transport. Hemorrhagic strokes in which blood vessels leak blood into the brain.

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psychology

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psychiatry

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The main reason for this division is the former’s fundamental belief in the causality of mental states.

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therapy is used to assess the effectiveness and progress of the pharmacological treatment rather than as the primary treatment tool itself. The most sophisticated approaches may use pharmacological therapy to potentiate cognitive or behavioral therapy.

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Traumatic events cause an overactive adrenaline response, which persists after the event, making an individual hyper-responsive to future fearful situations.

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Most anti-depressants (particularly recent ones like Prozac) are designed to elevate serotonin levels; many also tend to elevate the levels of norepinephrine and dopamine.

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DBS stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus has produced immediate symptom relief in thousands of such Parkinson’s patients (the subthalamic nucleus is part of the neural circuit in the basal ganglia that also includes the substantia nigra, the brain areas primarily affected by Parkinson’s disease).

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retrograde

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anterograde

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GABA transmission (GABA is the most important and ubiquitous fast inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain).

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some internal source in the brain is generating activity in auditory areas that the schizophrenic cannot distinguish from actual hearing.

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anhedonia

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Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts that lead to repetitive behaviors in order to alleviate the anxiety related to the thought.

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OCD has been linked to an abnormality in the serotonin neurotransmitter system and is sometimes successfully treated with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors).

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typical antipsychotic

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atypical antipsychotic

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medications,

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(GABA is the key inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain).

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serotonin enhancers

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Attempts to supply dopamine to make up for its loss in the substantia nigra, as in Parkinson’s disease, failed because dopamine does not cross the blood–brain barrier if administered into the blood stream. However, its precursor in the pathway for its synthesis in cells, L-dopa, does. L-dopa injections can mitigate Parkinson’s symptoms for several years but eventually becomes ineffective.

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dyskinesias.

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Cannabinoids found in marijuana activate receptors called CB1 and CB2 that are involved in the brain’s pain and immune control systems.

Part 5: The Part of Tens

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Thalamus,

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The function of the cerebellum is to modulate and coordinate motor behavior.

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process has become programmed within your cerebellum and its connections to motor cortex.

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The hippocampus can play back a sequence of events in context and activate the cortical areas that were activated by the event itself. This playback occurs typically during sleep, especially during REM sleep. The result of the playback is that the memories that were stored for a short term in the hippocampus cause long-term storage back in the neocortical areas that were activated during the original episode.

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area on the right side of the brain corresponding to Wernicke’s on the left processes tone of voice indicating irony, humor, and other aspects of what is called prosody.

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The fusiform face area (FFA) is a region of the medial temporal lobe that underlies our learned ability to recognize faces or even, in some cases, discriminate models of cars or species of birds that are similar in appearance.

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salient

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The main brain area responsible for working memory is the lateral prefrontal cortex.

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The basal ganglia are a complex, interconnected set of subcortical nuclei that control behavior at the level below the neocortex. The substantia nigra performs a crucial modulatory role in this system. One reason that the basal ganglia have become relatively well known is Parkinson’s disease, which is caused by a degeneration of dopamine producing neurons in the substantia nigra.

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you can think of the lateral prefrontal cortex as holding the content of thought and the ACC as selecting that content.

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Neurons are cells.

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This specialization evolved because it allowed organisms to increase their survival chances by moving within their environment based on sensing things like food, toxins, temperature, and predators.

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Neurons receive information via synapses.

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Synapses are either electrical or chemical.

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cause action potentials

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When ion channels are open and allow sodium ions to flow through, the neuron is excited. It is inhibited when potassium or chloride channels are open.

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electrophysiologists

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The effort to uncover principles of learning and memory used to be called the search for the engram, the memory trace in the brain that constituted a memory.

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Learning in the hippocampus is unique because it consists first of changes in synaptic strength, followed by growth of new neural connections, and then new neurons.

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Retroviruses can be engineered with sequences that knock out host genes or insert new genes into the host.

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how to grow a larger human neocortex in the next few years.

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Neural stem cells transplanted into a brain area where the patient’s own cells have died, such as the Subtantia Nigra in Parkinson’s disease, may produce replacement cells as the stem cells sense their local environment and differentiate into the needed neural types.

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Some Parkinson’s patients, for example, can be seen to exhibit the typical stooped posture and shuffling gate with the device off, but, as soon as the current is turned on, they are able to walk and engage in sports like basketball.

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Experiments have demonstrated that humans (and monkeys) can use electrode arrays implanted in their motor cortices to move computer cursors and artificial arms just by thinking about doing

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the techniques for brain-computer interfacing are already here, already being used, and rapidly improving.

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Highly proficient computer tutors are being embodied in avatars, computer simulations of teaching characters with whom the student interacts.

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Nanotechnology

Glossary

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afferent:

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ageusia:

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amygdala:

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limbic

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apraxia:

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associative memory:

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The ability to remember a relationship between two different things, usually by modifying synapses so that particular neurons fire to the constellation of associated items.

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basal ganglia: A set of subcortical nuclei that control movement sequences via their output to the thalamus.

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biogenic amines:

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catecholamines

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central pattern generator:

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descriptive term for the neural organization within the spinal cord that coordinates four-or two-limbed movement without the necessity for cortical input.

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notochord.

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codon:

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Cortisol is the primary stress hormone

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dopamine: A

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biogenic amine neurotransmitter.

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efferent:

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glial

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hippocampus: A limbic system structure involved in converting short-term memories to long-term memories.

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macular degeneration:

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metabotropic (receptor):

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myelin:

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Almost all neural regions in the occipital lobe are involved in vision.

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temporal lobe

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somatic

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autonomic

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enteric

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pinna:

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postsynaptic: The receiving side of a synapse,

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presbycusis: The decline in hearing sensitivity as a function of age,

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presynaptic:

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nucleic acid

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protein.

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semantic memory:

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serotonin: A biogenic amine neurotransmitter.

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episodic memory.

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spinocerebellar tract:

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substantia nigra:

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temporal lobe: The area of the neocortex on each side of the brain.

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trigeminal nerve: The cranial nerve V that sends touch, temperature, and pain information from the face to the brain. It consists of three divisions: ophthalmic, maxillary, and mandibular.

About the Author

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20/01/202420/01/2024

Translation

https://alteritas.net/GXL/?p=1783

To read a poem in translation is to pledge troth to a ghost, a wispy, intangible presence residing in another world you can never touch without crossing over to it. At the same time for a poet, translation comes down to writing one poem about another. We call the absolute right to put what we want into our own poems poetic license.

https://alteritas.net/GXL/?p=4228

This remembrance of a trip in 1994 to the Essequibo region in #Guyana deserves a repost, given the threat of invasion by neighbouring #Venezuela

As you can read, there is nothing Venezuelan about #Essequibo, where the most widely spoken language is #Creolese and much of the scattered population is distinctly Hindu.

Cornstarch carnstorch

For reviews of these two “easy” topics, see M. Winklhofer, “An Avian Magnetometer,” Sci 336 (2012): 991; and L. Kow and D. Pfaff, “Mapping of Neural and Signal Transduction Pathways for Lordosis in the Search for Estrogen Actions on the Central Nervous System,” BBR 92 (1998): 169. 3. J. Watson, Behaviorism, 2nd ed.

Language . Smoking. Violence.

Archimboldo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Arcimboldo

Maintenir une seconde langue est une stratégie importante dans le ….

Exercize for beginners : https://www.instagram.com/reel/C19jCf7ucsU/?igsh=ZDE1MWVjZGVmZQ==

Nou sèlmen 16 jou endan 2024 épi mô ja gin nan lour ????. 16 JOU! Vwayé mwin a lòt péyi vit vit vit pou vakans.

20/01/202420/01/2024

Real Chinese

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0eFmjMrMkj/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng%3D%3D

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2KOUoOvFvY/?igsh=ZDE1MWVjZGVmZQ==

19/01/2024

Highlights and Notes on Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Sapolsky, Robert M.

Notebook Export

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Sapolsky, Robert M.

Citation (Chicago Style): Sapolsky, Robert M.. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin Publishing Group, 2017. Kindle edition.

One: THE BEHAVIOR

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the most context-savvy part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.

Two: ONE SECOND BEFORE

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to first-year medical students, the SNS mediates the “four Fs—fear, fight, flight, and sex.”

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The fuzzy distinction between innate and learned fear maps nicely onto the amygdala’s structure.

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basolateral amygdala (BLA),

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the BLA that learns fear and then sends the news to the central amygdala.

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“periaqueductal gray” (PAG);

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bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST).

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locus coeruleus,

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But autonomic feedback influences the intensity of what is felt.

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the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.

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it’s not fully online until people are in their midtwenties. You’d better bet this factoid will be relevant to the chapter about adolescence.

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von Economo neurons (aka spindle neurons).

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prefrontal cortex (PFC),

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Just think how around age three, our frontal cortices learned a rule followed for the rest of our lives—don’t pee whenever you feel like it—and gained the means to enact that rule by increasing their influence over neurons regulating the bladder.

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And then one day you realize that you’re five measures past the trill, it went fine, and you didn’t have to think about it. And that’s when doing the trill is transferred from the frontal cortex to more reflexive brain regions (e.g., the cerebellum).

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Often the neurobiology of automaticity mediates doing the hardest moral acts, while the neurobiology of the frontal cortex mediates working hard on a term paper about the subject.

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His remaining right frontal cortical tissue had taken on some of the functions lost in the injury. Such malleability of the brain is the focus of chapter

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And there’s another nonpathological circumstance where the PFC silences, producing emotional tsunamis: during orgasm.

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show him a picture of someone of another race for only a tenth of a second. This is too fast for him to be aware of what he saw. But thanks to that anatomical shortcut, the amygdala knows . . . and activates. In contrast, show the picture for a longer time. Again the amygdala activates, but then the cognitive dlPFC does as well,

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is increasingly activated; the person feels increasingly distressed. What neurological disease is involved? None. This is a typical teenager.

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Antecedent reappraisal is why placebos work.

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cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—for the treatment of disorders of emotion regulation.

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Dopamine is synthesized in multiple brain regions. One such region helps initiate movement; damage there produces Parkinson’s disease. Another regulates the release of a pituitary hormone. But the dopaminergic system that concerns us arises from an ancient, evolutionarily conserved region near the brain stem called the ventral tegmental area (henceforth the “tegmentum”).

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brain region to be introduced in this chapter, the nucleus accumbens (henceforth the “accumbens”).

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anhedonia,” the inability to feel pleasure.

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The mesolimbic dopamine system also responds to pleasurable aesthetics.

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Punishing norm violations is satisfying.

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Thus there’s dopaminergic activation during schadenfreude—gloating over an envied person’s fall from grace.

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In order to accommodate the pleasures of both mathematics and orgasms, the system must constantly rescale to accommodate the range of intensity offered by particular stimuli. The response to any reward must habituate with repetition, so that the system can respond over its full range to the next new thing.

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following a reward, the dopamine system codes for discrepancy from expectation—get what you expected, and there’s a steady-state dribble of dopamine. Get more reward and/ or get it sooner than expected, and there’s a big burst; less and/ or later, a decrease. Some tegmental neurons respond to positive discrepancy from expectation, others to negative; appropriately,

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Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world.

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What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.

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Thus, dopamine is about invidious, rapidly habituating reward. But dopamine is more interesting than that.

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Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; dopamine “binds” the value of a reward to the resulting work. It’s about the motivation arising from those dopaminergic projections to the PFC that is needed to do the harder thing (i.e., to work).

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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.*

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Dopamine and the frontal cortex are in the thick of this phenomenon. Discounting curves—a value of ¼ Z instead of ½ Z—are coded in the accumbens, while dlPFC and vmPFC neurons code for time delay. 102

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Collectively these studies show that our dopaminergic system, frontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and other members of the chorus code for differing aspects of reward magnitude, delay, and probability with varying degrees of accuracy, all influencing whether we manage to do the harder, more correct thing. 104

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No gerbil works hard at school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college to get into a good grad school to get a good job to get into a good nursing home.

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Importantly, while increasing serotonin signaling did not lessen impulsiveness in normal subjects, it did in subjects prone toward impulsivity, such as adolescents with conduct disorder. How does serotonin do this? Nearly all serotonin is synthesized in one brain region,*

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was organized around three themes: the hub of fear, aggression, and arousal centered in the amygdala; the hub of reward, anticipation, and motivation of the dopaminergic system; and the hub of frontal cortical regulation and restraint of behavior.

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good neuropsychologist can discern more of what’s happening to someone with subtle but pervasive memory problems than can a gazillion-dollar brain scanner.

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mainly because I think that a term like “forgiveness,” and others related to criminal justice (e.g., “evil,” “soul,” “volition,” and “blame”), are incompatible with science and should be discarded.

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Consider, for example, the fusiform face area.

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it’s about recognizing examples of things from categories that are emotionally salient to each individual.

Three: SECONDS TO MINUTES BEFORE

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field of ethology, the science of interviewing an animal in its own language.

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(“ Studying rat social behavior in a cage is like studying dolphin swimming behavior in a bathtub” is an ethology adage).

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amygdala. It’s the frontal cortex exerting executive control over the deeper, darker amygdaloid response.

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prosopagnosia),

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Remarkably, if mixed-race subjects are told they’ve been assigned to one of the two races for the study, they show less fusiform response to faces of the arbitrarily designated “other” race. 12

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This is so depressing—are we hardwired to fear the face of someone of another race, to process their face less as a face, to feel less empathy? No. For starters, there’s tremendous individual variation—not everyone’s amygdala activates in response to an other-race face, and those exceptions are informative.

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amygdala activation increases if loud rap music—a genre typically associated more with African Americans than with whites—plays in the background. The opposite occurs when evoking negative white stereotypes with death metal music blaring.

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our brains constantly receive “interoceptive” information about the body’s internal state.

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As a repeating theme, pain does not cause aggression; it amplifies preexisting tendencies toward aggression. In other words, pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals.

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“Male generosity as a mating signal.”

Four: HOURS TO DAYS BEFORE

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And testosterone is everyone’s usual suspect when it comes to the hormonal causes of aggression.

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Thus, some male aggression is testosterone independent.*

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the stria terminalis (the way station through which the amygdala communicates with the rest of the brain),

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Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic. 6

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Dopamine is needed for place-preference conditioning to occur, and testosterone increases activity in the ventral tegmentum, the source of those mesolimbic and mesocortical dopamine projections.

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Testosterone did not create new social patterns of aggression; it exaggerated preexisting ones.

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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. In our world riddled with male violence, the problem isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression.

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Oxytocin and vasopressin are chemically similar hormones;

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Things became interesting with the discovery that those hypothalamic neurons that made oxytocin and vasopressin also sent projections throughout the brain, including the dopamine-related ventral tegmentum and nucleus accumbens, hippocampus, amygdala, and frontal cortex,

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neuropeptides;

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Spray oxytocin up a woman’s nose (a way to get the neuropeptide past the blood-brain barrier and into the brain), and she’ll find babies to look more appealing. Moreover, women

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So a hormone that evolved for mother-infant bonding plays a role in this bizarre, unprecedented form of bonding between species.

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stated caustically, oxytocin makes people irrational dupes; stated more angelically, oxytocin makes people turn the other cheek.

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autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (strikingly, people with ASD show blunted fusiform responses to

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As emphasized by De Dreu, perhaps oxytocin evolved to enhance social competence to make us better at identifying who is an Us.

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Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia.

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Is PMS/ PMDD a biological disease or a social construct?

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This view even had room for a socioeconomic critique, with howlers like “PMS [is] a mode for the expression of women’s anger resulting from her oppressed position in American capitalist society.”* 62

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predominate in different populations.

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Thus stress facilitates learning fear associations but impairs learning fear extinction.

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Stated most broadly, sustained stress impairs risk assessment. 76

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Humans excel at stress-induced displacement aggression—consider how economic downturns increase rates of spousal and child abuse.

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make people more cooperative and generous. But this comes with a huge caveat—these hormones increase prosociality only toward an Us. When dealing with Thems, they make us more ethnocentric and xenophobic. Oxytocin is not a universal luv hormone. It’s a parochial one.

Five: DAYS TO MONTHS BEFORE

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Methyl-D-aspartic_acid

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LTP—“ long-term potentiation.”

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how LTP works, and the key is that when NMDA receptors finally activate and open their channels, it is calcium, rather than sodium, that flows in. This causes an array of changes; here are a few:

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This is LTD—long-term “depression”—experience-dependent, long-term decreases in synaptic excitability (and, interestingly, the mechanisms underlying LTD are not merely the opposite of LTP). LTD is not the functional opposite of LTP either—rather than being the basis of generic forgetting, it sharpens a signal by erasing what’s extraneous.

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Somehow LTP-induced changes in the receptor are transferred to the next generation of copies.

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Combining these effects—more excitable synapses in the amygdala, fewer ones in the frontal cortex—helps explain stress-induced impulsivity and poor emotional regulation.

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(the BNST—bed nucleus of the stria terminalis).

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glucocorticoids because it’s terrified, dendrites atrophy in the hippocampus. However, if it secretes

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This expansion probably involved axonal sprouting and the formation of new connections.

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one renowned study showed enlargement of that part of the hippocampus in London taxi drivers.

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Six: ADOLESCENCE; OR, DUDE, WHERE’S MY FRONTAL CORTEX?

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Meanwhile, while adolescent males don’t have equivalent hormonal gyrations, it can’t help that their frontal cortex keeps getting hypoxic from the priapic blood flow to the crotch.

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Novelty craving permeates adolescence; it is when we usually develop our stable tastes in music, food, and fashion, with openness to novelty declining thereafter.

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Recall from chapter 2 how the ventral tegmentum is the source of the mesolimbic dopamine projection to the nucleus accumbens, and of the mesocortical dopamine projection to the frontal cortex. During adolescence, dopamine projection density and

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And the small reward? Accumbens activity declined. In other words, adolescents experience bigger-than-expected rewards more positively than do adults and smaller-than-expected rewards as aversive.

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As has been said, the greatest crime-fighting tool is a thirtieth birthday.

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Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.

Seven: BACK TO THE CRIB, BACK TO THE WOMB

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(downside: this is also when kids first negatively stereotype categories of people).

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But before we get carried away with the generosity of youth, there is already in-group bias; if the other child is a stranger, there is less egalitarianism. 14

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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.”*

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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

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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.

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By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/ or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control, and executive decision making; moreover, to achieve equivalent frontal regulation, lower-SES kids must activate more frontal cortex than do higher-SES kids. In addition, childhood poverty impairs maturation of the corpus callosum, a bundle

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early adversity produces an adult organism more vulnerable to drug and alcohol addiction. The pathway to this vulnerability is probably threefold: (a) effects on the developing

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Chronic stress depletes the mesolimbic system of dopamine, generating anhedonia.*

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Two caveats: (a) there is no evidence that catastrophically violent individuals (e.g., mass shooters) are that way because of childhood exposure to violent media; (b) exposure does not remotely guarantee increased aggression—instead, effects are strongest on kids already prone toward violence.

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What explains such resilience?

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Except for the amygdala. Which is enlarged. That pretty much says it all.

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less effective at eliciting female-typical sexual behavior (i.e., a back-arching reflex called lordosis).

Eight: BACK TO WHEN YOU WERE JUST A FERTILIZED EGG

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before the start of the stretch of DNA coding for that gene is a short stretch called a promoter*—the “on” switch. What turns the promoter switch on? Something called a transcription factor (TF) binds to the promoter. This causes the recruitment of enzymes that transcribe the gene into RNA.

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accumbens, that target of mesolimbic dopamine projection.

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the two separate stretches of coding DNA are called “exons,” separated by an “intron.” Many genes are broken into numerous exons (with, logically, one less intron than the number of exons). How do you produce a protein from an “exonic” gene?

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Even flies evolved such that their neurons are freed from the strict genetic marching orders they inherit.

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extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience (known as the “Big Five” personality traits).

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DZ twins are “dichorionic,” meaning that they have separate placentas. In contrast, 75 percent of MZ twins share one placenta (i.e., are “monochorionic”).*

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Lots of work has examined the genes involved, most broadly showing that variants that produce lowered dopamine signaling (less dopamine in the synapse, fewer dopamine receptors, or lower responsiveness of these receptors) are associated with sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, and extroversion. Such individuals have to seek experiences of greater intensity to compensate for the blunted dopamine signaling.

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after dopamine binds to receptors, it floats off and must be removed from the synapse.

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That still doesn’t tell us why for some people novelty seeking means frequently switching their openings in chess games, while for others it means looking for a new locale because it’s getting stale being a mercenary in the Congo. No gene or handful of genes that we are aware of will tell us much about that.

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The hormone is not a protein (none of the steroid hormones are), meaning there isn’t a testosterone gene.

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Even more appropriately, all behavioral traits are affected to some degree by genetic variability. 65 They have to be, given that they specify the structure of all the proteins pertinent to every neurotransmitter, hormone, receptor, etc. that there is.

Nine: CENTURIES TO MILLENNIA BEFORE

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Frans de Waal: “culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by nongenetic means.

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a school kid in Romania, Bulgaria, or Ukraine, and you’re about ten times more likely to be chronically bullied than a kid in Sweden, Iceland, or Denmark (stay tuned for a closer look at this). 10

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cultures.*

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American individualism is about noncooperation, rather than nonconformity).

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The Southern sense of honor in place is also seen in Robert E. Lee; he opposed Southern secession, even made some ambiguous statements that could be viewed as opposed to slavery.

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Sticks and stones might break your bones, but names will cause you to break the offender’s bones.

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rest of the South? Disproportionately herders from Scotland, Ireland, and northern England.

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Or translated from social science–ese, marked inequality makes people crummier to one another.

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more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be the disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have [available to them] to mount effective political opposition” (e.g., lobbying). Evans notes how this “secession of the wealthy” promotes “private affluence and public squalor.” Meaning worse health for the have-nots. 39

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Turns out there’s a substantial predictor of it: if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage. Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further.

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Nevertheless, some of the highest-density places on earth—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo—have miniscule rates of violence. High-density living is not synonymous with aggression in rats or humans.

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Over the last fifty years El Niños have roughly doubled the likelihood of civil conflict, mostly by stoking the fires of preexisting conflicts.

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“Mickey Mouse has supernatural powers, but no one worships or would fight—or kill—for him. Our social brains may help explain why children the world over are attracted to talking teacups, but religion is much more than

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Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leading humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do, namely living in close proximity to their feces.

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To hark back to a theme from the first pages of this book, it doesn’t take a particularly fancy brain to learn how to motorically, say, throw a punch. But it takes a fancy, environmentally malleable frontal cortex to learn culture-specific rules about when it’s okay to throw punches.

Ten: THE EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR

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Dobzhansky, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Including this book.

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pleiotropy,”

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example, primates’ prostates have high metabolic rates, enhancing sperm motility. Upside: enhanced fertility; downside: increased risk of prostate cancer.

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major histocompatibility complex (MHC).

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In the 1940s “game theory” was founded by the polymath John von Neumann, one of the fathers of computer science. Game theory is the study of strategic decision making. Framed slightly differently, it’s the mathematical study of when to cooperate and when to cheat.

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there are frequently pairs where one human does all the labor, the other doing nothing other than intermittently handing him some green pieces of paper. The point is that animals have systems of reciprocity with sensitivity to cheating.

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Tournament species, where males have minimal investment in a female’s future reproductive success, have numerous imprinted genes, while pair-bonders don’t. 42 What about humans? Stay tuned.

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more radical view, held by Dawkins, is that the most appropriate level is that of individual genes—i.e., selfish genes, rather than selfish genomes.

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The economist Samuel Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute, emphasizes how intergroup conflict like war is the driving force for intragroup cooperation (“ parochial altruism”); he refers to intergroup conflict as “altruism’s midwife.” 46

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called pseudospeciation, and as will be seen in chapter 15, it underpins many of our worst moments.

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five thousand people from thirty-two hunter-gatherer societies from around the world* showed that only around 40 percent of people within bands are blood relatives. 63 In other words, hunter-gatherer cooperativeness, the social building block of 99 percent of hominin history, rests at least as much on reciprocal altruism among nonrelatives as on kin selection

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three major criticisms of sociobiology.

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phyletic gradualism”).

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Instead there were long periods of stasis, of unchanged fossils, and then, in a paleontological blink of an eye, there’d be a rapid transition to a very different form. Maybe

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As we saw in chapter 8, recent decades have provided many possible molecular mechanisms for rapid change. This is the world of macromutations: (a) traditional point, insertion, and deletion mutations in genes whose proteins have amplifying network effects (transcription factors, splicing enzymes, transposes) in an exon expressed in

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Lactase persistence evolved and spread in a fraction of a geologic blink of an eye—in the last ten thousand years or so, coevolving with domestication of dairy animals.

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The first generations with Westernized diets develop catastrophically high rates of obesity, hypertension, adult-onset diabetes, and death at early ages, thanks to “thrifty” genotypes that are great at storing nutrients, honed by millennia of sparser diets. But within a few generations diabetes rates begin to subside, as there is an increased prevalence in the population of “sloppier” metabolic genotypes. 70

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And no matter how rapid the changes, there’s always some degree of gradualism—no female has ever given birth to a member of a new species. 72

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“spandrels”

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In that view, male nipples are spandrels—they serve an adaptive role in females and came along for the ride as baggage in

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contrast, saying, “Sociobiologists imply that when an unfair feature of life is the case, it is because it ought to be.” And the sociobiologists responded by flipping is/ ought around: “We agree that life ought to be fair, but nonetheless, this is reality. Saying that we advocate something just because we report it is like saying oncologists advocate cancer.”

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was a bold assertion that the heuristic of dialectical materialism not only extends beyond the economic world into the naturalistic one, but is ontologically rooted in the essential sameness of both worlds’ dynamic of resolution of irresolvable contradictions.* It is Marx and Engels as trilobite and snail.*

Eleven: US VERSUS THEM

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discussed in chapter 3, fifty-millisecond exposure to the face of someone of another race activates the amygdala, while failing to activate the fusiform face area as much as same-race faces do—all within a few hundred milliseconds.

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The brain’s fault lines dividing Us from Them were shown in chapter 4’ s discussion of oxytocin. Recall how the hormone prompts trust, generosity, and cooperation toward Us but crappier behavior toward Them—

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Twelve: HIERARCHY, OBEDIENCE, AND RESISTANCE

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Humans committed themselves to a unique trajectory when we invented socioeconomic status. In terms of its caustic, scarring impact on minds and

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bodies, nothing in the history of animals being crappy to one another about status differences comes within light-years of our invention of poverty.

Thirteen: MORALITY AND DOING THE RIGHT THING, ONCE YOU’VE FIGURED OUT WHAT THAT IS

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The Kohlbergian emergence of increasingly complex stages of moral development is built on the Piagetian emergence of increasingly complex logical operations. They are similar, neurobiologically.

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People with obsessive-compulsive disorder get mired in both everyday decision making and moral decision making, and their dlPFCs go wild with activity for both.

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“Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.”

Fourteen: FEELING SOMEONE’S PAIN, UNDERSTANDING SOMEONE’S PAIN, ALLEVIATING SOMEONE’S PAIN

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by Gregory Hickok of the University of California at Irvine,

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Dalai Lama, who is famously intrigued by neuroscience and who has said that if his Dalai Lama gig hadn’t come up, he would have wanted to be a scientist or engineer. The most publicized work revolves around the neuroimaging of Matthieu Ricard, a French-born Buddhist monk (who is the Dalai Lama’s French translator and who just happens to have a PhD in molecular biology from the Pasteur Institute—this is one interesting guy). 50

Sixteen: BIOLOGY, THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM, AND (OH, WHY NOT?) FREE WILL

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In response to the latter idea, the pages of this book show how our social world is ultimately as much a product of our determined, materialist brains as are our simple motor movements.* 15

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Turns out that the same APA had filed a brief some years earlier in a different case, emphasizing that adolescents are sufficiently mature that they should be able to choose whether to have an abortion, even without parental consent.

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And yes, being a child molester is as much a product of biology as is being a pedophile. To think otherwise is little more than folk psychology.

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“Brains don’t kill people. People kill people.”

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it.” 23

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example, 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.

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The biology of the behaviors that interest us is, in all cases, multifactorial—that is the thesis of this book.

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This is a deep, atavistic pleasure. Put people in brain scanners, give them scenarios of norm violations. Decision making about culpability for the violation correlates with activity in the cognitive dlPFC. But decision making about appropriate punishment activates the emotional vmPFC, along with the amygdala and insula; the more activation, the more punishment.

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But there is simply no place for the idea that punishment is a virtue. Our dopaminergic pathways will have to find their stimulation elsewhere.

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zygomatic arches.

Seventeen: WAR AND PEACE

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As we saw, small-band cultures (such as hunter-gatherers) rarely invent moralizing deities. It is not until cultures are large enough that people regularly interact anonymously with strangers that it becomes commonplace to invent a judgmental god—the Judeo-Christian/ Muslim deity.

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Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it.

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“people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend,”

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It’s not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it’s being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochial identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds.

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inter-group

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intergroup

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Prisoner’s Dilemma shows that whoever takes the first cooperative step becomes one step behind.

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It’s open-ended play that fosters cooperation—an unknown number of rounds, producing the shadow of the future, where retribution is possible and the advantages of sustained mutual

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Sometimes it takes a village to ransack a neighboring village.

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We’re the only species that institutionalizes reconciliation and that grapples with “truth,” “apology,” “forgiveness,” “reparations,” “amnesty,” and “forgetting.”

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Thus TRCs show the differences between reconciliation and the likes of remorse and forgiveness.*

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Irrational optimism can be great; it’s why only about 15 percent instead of 99 percent of humans get clinically depressed.

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“humans are bad at [close-range, hand-to-hand] violence, even if civilization makes us a bit better at it.” 43

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book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by David Grossman,

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Of the almost 27,000 single-load muskets recovered from the field, almost 24,000 of them were loaded and unfired; 12,000 were loaded multiple times, 6,000 loaded three to ten times. Lots of soldiers were standing there thinking, “I’m going to shoot soon, yes I am,

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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.

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But consider drone pilots—soldiers who sit in control rooms in the United States, directing drones on the other side of the planet. They are not in danger. Yet their rates of PTSD are just as high as those of soldiers actually “in” war.

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It 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.

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It’s remarkable the things humans can spend their lives studying. You can be a coniologist or a caliologist, studying dust or birds’ nests, respectively. There are batologists and brontologists, pondering brambles and thunder, and vexillologists and zygologists, with their dazzling knowledge of flags and of methods for fastening things. On and on—odontology and odonatology, phenology and phonology, parapsychology and parasitology. A rhinologist and a nosologist fall in love and have a child who becomes a rhinological nosologist, studying the classification of nose diseases.

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Like another widely dispersed primate, humans, baboons eat almost anything—fruit, plants, tubers, insects, eggs, prey they’ve killed, dead things they’ve scavenged.

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discarded roast beef and drumsticks and plum pudding, and then waddle out for a nap. I’d even darted Garbage Dump animals and studied them with colleagues—they put on weight, thickened with subcutaneous fat, had elevated circulating levels of insulin and triglycerides, had the start of metabolic syndrome. 46

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They stayed close together, sat in contact, and groomed more than average. Levels of aggression were lower, and in an informative way. Males still had a dominance hierarchy; number three would still fight with numbers four and two, defending his status and seeking a promotion. But there was minimal displacement aggression onto innocent bystanders—when number three lost a fight, he’d rarely terrorize number ten or a female. Stress hormone levels were low; the neurochemistry of anxiety and benzodiazepines worked differently in these individuals.

EPILOGUE

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Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that’s how we learn—context, context, context.

Appendix 1: Neuroscience 101

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What I’ve just outlined is that a single dendritic fibril receives an excitatory signal from the previous neuron (i.e., the previous neuron has had an action potential); this generates an action potential in that dendrite, which propagates toward the cell body, over it, on to the axon, to the axon terminals, and signals the next neuron in line. Not true. Instead: So the neuron is sitting there with nothing to say, which is to say that it’s displaying a resting potential; all of its insides are negatively charged. Along comes an excitatory signal at that one dendritic fibril, emanating from the previous neuron in line. As a result, channels open and ions flow in and out of that one dendrite. But only a little bit. Not enough to make the entire inside of the neuron positively charged, simply a little less negatively charged just inside that dendrite (just to attach some numbers here that don’t matter in the slightest, the resting potential charge shifts from around–70 millivolts

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two different types of signaling

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analogue

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digital

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The brain is wired in networks of divergent and convergent signaling.

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the axon terminals of one neuron don’t actually touch the dendritic spines of the next. Instead there’s a tiny gap between the two. This notion was called the “neuron doctrine.”

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saw, some of the most interesting findings that help explain individual differences in the behaviors that concern us in this book relate to amounts of neurotransmitter made and released, and the amounts and functioning of the receptors, reuptake pumps, and degradative enzymes.

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inhibitory neurotransmitters.

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Neurotransmitters are therefore made from precursors that are plentiful; often they are simple dietary constituents. Serotonin and dopamine, for example, are made from the dietary amino acids tryptophan and tyrosine, respectively. Acetylcholine is made from dietary choline and lecithin.

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tyrosine into dopamine.

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two categories: those that increase signaling across a particular type of synapse, and those that decrease it.

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“SSRI”—a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

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“feed-

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forward inhibition.”

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system down for a while. And that is precisely what we often do in such circumstances. An insect bite throbs unbearably, we scratch hard right around it to dull the pain, and the slow, chronic pain pathway is shut down for up to a few minutes.

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So it’s important to distinguish between “neuronal nuclei” and “fibers of passage.”

Appendix 2: The Basics of Endocrinology

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Once secreted, it enters the bloodstream, where it can influence any cells throughout the body that possess receptors for it.*

Appendix 3: Protein Basics

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In other words, a more manageable length. That RNA is then shipped to wherever it is supposed to be in the cell, where it then directs which amino acids are strung together in which sequence to form a protein (and there are amino acids floating around in a cell, ready to be grabbed for the protein-construction project). Think of RNA as a photocopy of a single page out of this vast twenty-thousand-page-long DNA encyclopedia.

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there are three types of mutations that can occur. The first is called a point mutation. One single nucleotide is copied incorrectly.

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Trouble. The next type of classical mutation is called a deletion mutation.

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Finally, there are insertion mutations. During copying of the DNA to pass on to the next generation, a nucleotide is inadvertently copied twice, duplicated.

Notes

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For reviews

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V. Salimpoor et al., “Interactions Between the Nucleus Accumbens and Auditory Cortices Predicts Music Reward Value,” Sci 340 (2013): 216; G. Berns and S. Moore, “A Neural Predictor of Cultural Popularity,” J Consumer Psych 22 (2012): 154; S. Erk et al., “Cultural Objects Modulate Reward Circuitry,” Neuroreport 13 (2002): 2499.

Index

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This fact prompted Greene, in a conversation with me, to dryly note how Harvard’s budget projections incorporate the expectation that if they work hard enough, approximately 50 percent of junior faculty will receive tenure.

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They are just plain “WEIRD”—Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.

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* Related to this was the notion that most of the evolution of behavior was not about dealing with the social complexities of fellow species members but about dealing with abiotic (i.e., nonbiological) pressures. In other words, that behavior evolved mostly for dealing with the environment, rather than for competing with other individuals. Again, the main implication of that for our purposes is that it would be another way in which the gradualist importance of interindividual competition was less than the sociobiologists thought. This emphasis on the importance of abiotic selective pressures was common among Soviet evolutionary biologists, probably reflecting not only the Marxist ideology but also the awful winters.

18/01/202418/01/2024

Chat GPT on Dopamine in Sectors other than the Substantia nigra

Q :Why doesn’t the death of dopamine receptors in the substantia nigra in Parkinson’s not affect the other dopamine receptors in the brain which deal with motivatiom, reward and addiction?

A That’s an interesting question! In Parkinson’s disease, the death of dopamine receptors specifically in the substantia nigra occurs because of the degeneration of dopamine-producing neurons in that region. This leads to a decrease in dopamine levels in the brain, which in turn affects motor control and movement.

However, it’s important to note that the dopamine receptors involved in motivation, reward, and addiction are distributed throughout various regions of the brain, including the mesolimbic pathway. These receptors are not primarily affected in Parkinson’s disease because the degeneration of dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra is specific to that region.

In other words, the death of dopamine receptors in the substantia nigra in Parkinson’s disease does not directly impact the dopamine receptors involved in motivation, reward, and addiction because they are located in different regions of the brain.

Pretty impressive. But there is something tautological about it. (Maybe all human meaning is tautological.)