LIARS, LOVERS, AND HEROES --- WHAT THE NEW BRAIN SCIENCE REVEALS ABOUT
HOW WE BECOME WHO WE ARE by Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski. 2002
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pix-xi)
PREFACE (xiii-xiv)
This book combines the latest findings in neuroscience with examples from history and recent headlines concerning militant Islamic terrorists to offer new insights into who we are --- as human beings!
The book introduces the new science of "cultural biology" which integrates advances in brain imaging, computer modeling, and genetics. It demystifies the dynamic between your BRAIN and your WORLD that makes us --- as human beings --- something far beyond the sum of our bodily parts!
The book shows how our shared humanity unfolds in precise stages as brain and world engage in increasingly complexlevels. This "scientific model" helps us understand WHY we live together, love, kill --- and sometimes herorically lay down our own lives for others!
The book's answers are surprising and paradoxical compared to conventional/orthodox answers up to this point in history. This is because many of the noblest aspects of human nature, such as altruism, love, courage, and creativity, are rooted in brain systems so ancient that we share them with insects! Also, these "survival systems" form the basis as well of some of our darkest most destructive traits.
The new THEORY is that we survive by creating an ingenious "web of ideas" for making sense of our world. It is the symbolic reality called CULTURE!
Thus, we are not the simple product of "animal urges" or "selfish genes" or behavior that can be explained by a "nature versus nurture" dichotomy.
Culture is the BLUEPRINT for survival!
It is the LEGACY that you will endow to your survivors!
Your ENGAGEMENT with your outside "world" excites your brain chemistry, which in turn drives further engagement with the world! This process is the essential ingredient in the further development of cultural complexity!
[1] Who are we?
[2] What is it to be a person?
[3] Are we good or fundamentally evil?
[4] What makes us happy?
[5] Ultimately, who can we become?
This book will take you on a journey inside your brain to begin to help you uncover the mystery of who you are. Computers are getting so fast that they can now be used to similate brain processes for research purposes and molecular genetics is providing powerful tools for manipulating brain mechanisms, including the monumental sequencing of the human genome. This book brings you new insights from the results of these new technical developments.
Since the development of your human brain and of your behavior depends on interactions with human culture, the "HEART" of who you are depends upon the partnership between your genes and the changing, uncertain world of culture. Explaining the implications of this extraordinarily rich and complex interaction with human culture requires a new view of who you are --- that in the book is called "cultural biology."
Just what does it means to be "human" in this modern age with the new technology and insights into CULTURAL BIOLOGY'S emerging answers to the age-old "enduring questions" or mysteries of life. This book is an invitation to join the "conversation" between the sciences and humanities, which are both engaged in trying to understand the meaning of life.
1) Our brains, ourselves! (p1-20)
Every nuance of yourself, the very fabric of your experience, ultimately arises from the machinations of your brain. Your brain houses your humanity! Without it, you would be as heartless and cold as a robot, an automaton for which life might have goals but would have no meaning. Among the astounding diversity of brains in nature, your human brain seems capable of many unique capacities. As far as science knows, human brains are the only ones to generate a sense of "who we are" and to ask such questions as "Who are we?" and "Where did we come from?" and "What makes us happy?"
Humans seem to be driven by a basic biological need to live in a world that makes sense, whose events occur not willy-nilly but for reasons! Nearly all humans are tempted to cast random events into a larger scheme or destiny that is part of some overall coherent plan. Somewhere the truth is out there --- we think!
[1] Who do we think we are? (p5)
[2] Prison life (p6-7)
[3] The modern battle for human nature (p7-9)
[4] Invasion of the body snatchers (p9-12)
[5] The march of the genes (p12-15)
[6] Taking the next step (p16-17)
[7] Follow the spot (p17-20)
Your brain can detect, and respond to, regular patterns in the environment without your conscious awareness of them. Your "basil ganglia" is involved in generating sequences of movements. The beginnning of functional brain-imaging technologies signaled an important advance in brain science. Using these techniques, researchers have verified, by examining normal subjects in a sequential button-press task in which the sequences were generated by fixed probabilities. The researchers found, since they could see inside their subjects' brains to watch changes in brain activity, that there was increased brain activity in the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia, which signaled the involvement of these structures in "implicit learning."
One of the activated areas of the "prefrontal cortex" was the fascinating "anterior cingulate," which is involved in monitoring task performance and helps you focus your attention. Although many parts of the brain are directly involved in this task, converging evidence points to the "basil ganglia" as the primary site where sequential information about the world is learned implicitly.
In addition to emerging experimental techniques like brain imaging, new theoretical approaches to understanding the function of brain systems provide new ways of understanding the brain's complex workings. A surprising conclusion to the computer modeling studies was that learning in your basil ganglia is similar to learning in the bee brain, which suggests that a great diversity of brains in nature may share important properties.
In recent years a great deal has been learned about how the brain recognizes important regularities in the world. Further discoveries regarding how the brain works are often surprising and offer revealing insights into human nature. Since even sensible ideas can be wrong, you must be wary of any plausible proposal that does not have converging sources of experimental evidence behind it.
The first source of information is observation of behavior under carefully controlled conditions. The next source is detailed measurements of brain activity that allow hypotheses to be formed on how the behavior is generated. Finally, the last source of information is "computational models" that link these observations to provide insights and explanations that are often counterintuitive.
A new discipline known as "cognitive neuroscience" is beginning to put all these mysterious "pieces" of information together into coherent theories.
We are now getting our first glimpses into the most supreme of mysteries --- how your brain makes its remarkable journey across a lifetime --- shaping your thinking and feeling as a unique person!
These findings are unlike anything before in the history of science. The findings give the first answers to the most basic and complexing questions all of us ask as we search for meaning in our lives and in the world around us.
2) Making connections (p21-31)
[1] Thinking about the brain (p22-26)
[2] Our journey begins (p26-28)
[3] 28-31)
3) How to make a human --- the 1.6 percent solution (p32-60)
[1] The post-modular world (p38-40)
[2] Brain informants (p41-43)
[3] The fall of the genetic despot (p44-46)
[4] The key to making a human --- the new view of development (p46-52)
[5] The world can make you free (p52-56)
[6] Beyond Swiss army knives (p56-59)
[7] Culture and biology (p59-60)
4) Life on the far shore --- crossing the mental Rubicon (p61-87)
[1] from La Jolla to Africa (p63-64)
[2] A babe in toyland (p64-66)
[3] Signs of human life (p66-68)
[4] The search for Eden (p68-70)
[5] How to win friends and influence primates (p71)
[6] A tale of two apes (p72)
[7]Girl power, Bonobo-style (p73-76)
[8] There is nothing glacial about glacial change (p76-81)
[9] Coming in from the rain --- culture as an umbrella (p81-85)
[10] Constructing yourself --- some self-assembly required! (p85-86)
[11] Culture's Faustian bargain (p86-87)
[12] The "well-cultured" brain (p87)
5) Between thought and feeling --- the mystery of emotions (p88-122)
[1] Emotion's ancient roots (p90-92)
[2] The serotonin connection --- from here to ecstasy (p92-97)
The serotonin system is not the only mood system in the brain stem that fans out over wide areas. Another uses a chemical called noradrenaline --- also known as norepinephrine. A drug, rebosetine, marketed under the name Edronax, works along the lines of Prozak, except that it targets cells that make noradrenaline.
Whereas serotonin activation results in a serene mellowness, noradrenaline activity is more involved in increasing drive and motivation.
[3] What makes Spock run? (p97-98)
From the vantage point of psychology, the real problem with Spock is why he does anything at all! He seems to be clinically depressed, perhaps suffering from anhedonia, since nothing seems to gives him pleasure. For Spock, life has just lost its fun. No doubt a counselor would put Spock on Prozac!
No matter how impressive Spock's thinking may be, there does not seem to be anything inside him to get him into gear. Is there a connection between his lack of emotion and his lack of motivation?
We can only speculate about the inner world of a Vulcan, but if the same question is asked about humans with bipolar disorder, there is a close connection between emotion and motivaton. In the 1970s research indicated that your emotions come from your brain's motivational system! Your brain's motivation system, or "behavioral facilitation system," is centered in a small group of cells in your "midbrain" area or in the VTA and "substantia nigra pars compacta" and uses the chemical dopomine. This motivation system of dopamine neurons underlies both the motivational and the emotional facets of extroversion, which facilitates your pleasurable engagement with the world. Thus it also plays a central role in cultural biology!
[4] Cheer up, things could be worse (p98-100)
Dopamine is involved in our everyday good moods, called by researchers "positive emotionality!" Survey studies indicate that Americans think that about 50% of us are happy while scientific studies indicate that more than 80% are happy.
Why do so many people --- despite huge obstacles --- have their "emotional thermostats" hovering around a positive setting? The answer is in remembering that the same survival system underlying your emotional thermostat similarly underlies your drive and motivation, which is also called "approach tendencies."
Because positive moods energize approach tendencies, it is desirable that people on average be in a positive mood.
Human approach tendencies are demonstrated in the rapid exploration and settlement of new frontiers and in the unremitting invention of new ideas and institutions throughout human history. The large brains and opposable thumbs of human beings along with positive emotions were the three major reasons for the rapid spread of humanity around the world!
[5] Designs for a brain (100-103)
Being in a positive mood and being motivated to pursue goals are rooted in a common brain system, which is the dopomine system. But why are we interested in interacting with the world at all? Why do we pursue goals and why do certain aspects of the world have deep rewarding value to us?
Animals need a brain to move around a changing world to obtain life-enhancing goals! Two features of our world make brains possible:
(1) Change is uncertain but predictable
(2) Uncertainty goes primarily in one direction --- toward the future!
If change happened randomly, then predictions about the future would only be as good as chance, which is hardly a basis for life!
Fortunately for all animals, the world changes in uncertain but predictable ways. Also, fortunate is that a "truth" about the matter of change is established once things happen, which allows us to "build knowledge" of the past!
[6] Deciding to survive (p103-105)
[7] Games computers play (p105-108)
[8] How you learn the game (p108-111)
Research indicates that dopamine is involved in making predictions and decision making. If further research proves this connection, it would demonstrate the existance of "shared design principles" across an enormously diverse range of the brains of different species!
More research could tie together the many other functions of the dopomine system --- as both a motivating behavioral facilitation system and the inner fire of positive emotionality and extroversion --- with rational thought processes underlying learning and decision making!
These faculties would provide you with a stunningly complex "internal guideance system" underlying central facets of who you are!
[9] Adding the bells and whistles (p111-118)
[10] The human story (p118-120)
[11] Of human goals and a value-added world (121-122)
6) Becoming you --- genes, parenting, and personality (p123-147)
[1] A starting point --- genes and the baby (p125-128)
[2] Does being born "some way" equal being born "that way?" (p128-a29)
[3] From temperament to personality (p129-131)
[4] Enter Freud (p131-135)
[5] The trouble with traits (p135-137)
[6] the sense of being you (p138-140)
[7] Inventing you (p141-147)
7) Friend, lover, citizen --- the mystery of life together (p148-188)
[1] The origin's of society (p151-153)
[2] The emergence of Homo Economicus (p153-154)
[3] Whither the common good? (p154-156)
[4] Hobbes's prison (p156-158)
[5] Escape from hobbes's prison (158)
[6] Whose happiness, whose utility? (p185-160)
[7] Social by nature (p160-163)
[8] The ties that bind (p163-164)
[9] Of sex and bondage (p164-165)
[10] Reptilian love (p165-170)
[11] Nurturing bonds (171-175)
[12] Experience and human bonds (p175-176)
[13] When friends get inside your head (p176-178)
[14] Why your friends may save your life (p179-181)
[15] Attachment and the "symbolic mind" (p181-186)
One of the greatest mysteries left to solve in the human puzzle is how primitive attachment systems interact with cortical systems to underlie a moral sense and systems of ethics. (p181)
[16] Conformity, cults, and the biology of loneliness (p186-188)
8) The killer within --- from the solitary killer to the killing crowd (p189-215)
9) Inside intelligence --- rethinking what makes us smart (p216-251)
[1] Intelligence and the modern image (p218-219)
[2] America retools IQ
10) The search for happiness (p252-277)
AFTERWORD --- after 9/11 (p278-283)
NOTES (p285-327)
INDEX (p329-336)
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