• We don’t hate violence. We hate and fear the wrong kind of violence, violence in the wrong context. Because violence in the right context is different.
• There really aren’t ‘centres’ in the brain ‘for’ particular behaviours. This is particularly the case with the limbic system and emotion.
• The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) mediates the body’s response to arousing circumstances, for example, producing the famed ‘fight or flight’ stress response.
• In different circumstances the frontal cortex and limbic system stimulate or inhibit each other, collaborate and coordinate, or bicker and work at cross-purposes.
• Humans show prepared learning, being predisposed to be conditioned to fear people with a certain type of appearance.
• Studies like these clarify that the amygdala isn’t about the pleasure of experiencing pleasure. It’s about the uncertain, unsettled yearning for a potential pleasure, the anxiety and fear and anger that the reward may be smaller than anticipated, or may not even happen. It’s about how many of our pleasures and our pursuits of them contain a corrosive vein of disease.
• Your heart does roughly the same thing whether you are in a murderous rage or having an orgasm. Again, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
• Not all fear causes aggression, and not all aggression is rooted in fear. Fear typically increases aggression only in those already prone to it; among the subordinate who lack the option of expressing aggression safely, fear does the opposite.
• The frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.
• Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource. Frontal neurons are expensive cells, and expensive cells are vulnerable cells. Consistent with that, the frontal cortex is atypically vulnerable to various neurological insults.
• Increase cognitive load on the frontal cortex, and afterward subjects become less prosocial - less charitable or helpful, more likely to lie. Or increase cognitive load with a task requiring difficult emotional regulation, and subjects cheat more on their diets afterward.
• People who dichotomise between thought and emotion often prefer the former, viewing emotion as suspect.
• The chance that you will do precisely the wrong thing rises not despite your best efforts but because of a stress-boggled version of them.
• Dopamine is about mastery and expectation and confidence. It’s ‘I know how things work; this is going to be great’. In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of the reward, and the reward itself is nearly an afterthought.
• Because nothing else fuels dopamine release like the ‘maybe’ of intermitted reinforcement.
• We use dopaminergic power of the happiness of pursuit to motivate us to work for rewards that come after we are dead.
• Over the course of seconds sensory cues can shape your behaviour unconsciously.
• So if whites see a black face shown at a subliminal speed, the amygdala activates. But if the face is shown long enough for conscious processing, the anterior cingulate and the cognitive dlPFC then activate and inhibit the amygdala. It’s the frontal cortex exerting executive control over the deeper, darker, amygdaloid response.
• You decide what you feel based on signals from your body
• During acute stress, all of our sensory systems become more sensitive