Behavioral Neuroscience Quotes

Psychologists usually try to help people use insight and understanding to manage their behavior. However, neuroscience research shows that very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding; most originate in pressures from deeper regions in the brain that drive our perception and attention. When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

The purpose of all of this (left hemisphere's way of choosing denial or repression over considering an anomaly) is to impose stability on behavior and to prevent vacillation because indecisiveness doesn't serve any purpose. Any decision, so long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision at all. A perpetually fickle general will never win a war.

A victim of virtually any disease usually elicits pity, addicts mostly evoke revulsion. What is it about the irrational behavior of an addict that makes everyone want to turn away?

neuroscience confirms that storytelling has unique power to change opinions and behavior.

One way or another we are all biased, but still we have the modern cortical capacity to choose whether or not to let the harmful biases dictate our behavior.

The philosophers Liam Clegg and Daniel Dennett have argued that human behavior is inherently unpredictable not just because of random neural noise in the brain but as an adaptation that makes it harder for our rivals to outguess us.

If you have to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be "it's complicated.

Nothing has more power over a man than a woman's tears.

Own your biases, don't be owned by them.

Man’s earliest prereligious fear of the natural forces gradually became religious in nature and got personalized and spiritualized. Eventually he learnt to say 'God works in a mysterious way'.

A huge portion of the human society runs on autopilot, under the authority of biases. That's why, the world is infested with so many conflicts. Once the humans get hold of their biases instead of letting their biases get hold of them, all conflicts would vanish into thin air.

Primitive humans could not comprehend the vastness of infinity and eternity, so as a trick of self-preservation they came up with the perception of survival of the soul after death and its recurring incarnations.

Anxiety is a complex emotional response that’s similar to fear. Both arise from similar brain processes and cause similar physiological and behavioral reactions; both originate in portions of the brain designed to help all animals deal with danger. Fear and anxiety differ, however, in that fear is typically associated with a clear, present, and identifiable threat, whereas anxiety occurs in the absence of immediate peril.

The systems we will be exploring in order are: ● Breeding Targets: Arousal patterns tied to systems meant to get our ancestors to have sex with things that might bear offspring (e.g., arousal from things like penises, the female form, etc.). ● Inverse Systems: Arousal patterns that arise from a neural mix-up, causing something that disgusts the majority of the population to arouse a small portion of it (e.g., arousal from things like being farted on, dead bodies, having insects poured on one’s face, etc.). ● Emotional States and Concepts / Dominance and Submission: Arousal patterns that stem from either emotional concepts (such as betrayal, transformation, being eaten, etc.) or dominance and submission pathways. ● Emotional Connections to People: While emotional connections do not cause arousal in and of themselves, they do lower the threshold for arousal (i.e., you may become more aroused by a moderately attractive person you love than a very attractive stranger). ● Trope Attraction: Arousal patterns that are enhanced through a target’s adherence to a specific trope (a nurse, a goth person, a cheerleader, etc.). ● Novelty: Arousal patterns tied to the novelty of a particular stimulus. ● Pain and Asphyxiation: Arousal patterns associated with or enhanced by pain and oxygen deprivation. ● Basic Instincts: Remnants of our pre-cognitive mating instincts running off of a “deeper” autopilot-like neurological system (dry humping, etc.) that compel mating behavior without necessarily generating a traditional feeling of arousal. ● Physical Stimuli: Arousal patterns derived from physical interaction (kissing, touching an erogenous zone, etc.). ● Conditioned Responses: Arousal patterns resulting from conditioning (arousal from shoes, doorknobs, etc.).

Every single human being is neurologically predisposed to be biased in various walks of life. It is biologically impossible to be absolutely free from all biases, nevertheless, the more a person rigorously trains the self to be rational and conscientious, the more that self becomes strong enough to keep the biases in check, never to let them run rampant over the psyche.

But intelligence is not just a matter of acting or behaving intelligently. Behavior is a manifestation of intelligence, but not the central characteristic or primary definition of being intelligent. A moment's reflection proves this: You can be intelligent just lying in the dark, thinking and understanding. Ignoring what goes on in your head and focusing instead on behavior has been a large impediment to understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines

Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space. There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime—love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives.

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

Therefore, reading and reacting to other people’s behaviors, emotions, and attitudes have been hardwired into our brains. We are not only wired to connect, but we are also wired to attune to, resonate with, and learn from others.

I know that psychology and neuroscience have to work in concert if we want to address the full range of human behavior, and I really do love the idea of the whole animal, but I guess my question is that if the brain can't account for things like reason and emotion, then what can? If the brain makes it possible for 'us' to feel and think, then what is 'us'? Do you believe in souls? I was breathless.

It has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!

Sometimes, humanity surprises me with all its lack of control over the primordial urges. These innate urges are the biological traits that make us similar to the rest of the animal kingdom. But the modern qualities that make us superior to all the animals are intellect and self-control.

Stanford University's psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability—whether you think it's a fixed gift, or an earned ability that can be developed—makes a difference to your behavior, persistence, and performance. Students who see ability as fixed—as a gift—are more vulnerable to setbacks and difficulties. And stereotypes, as Dweck rightly points out, "are stories about gifts—who has them and who doesn't." Dweck and her colleagues are shown that when students are encouraged to see math ability as something that grows with effort—pointing out, for example, that the brain forges new connections and develops better ability every time they practice a task—grades improve and gender gaps diminish (relative to groups given control interventions).

We humans are the Tyrannosaurus Rex of mammals.

Humanism is not a single character. It is a magnificent blend of various emotional and behavioral traits that are unique to the human mind.

The human brain always concocts biases to aid in the construction of a coherent mental life, exclusively suitable for an individual’s personal needs.

In everyday life of the common human, reason takes a back seat and emotions dictate all significant behavior.

Fundamentalism not only fuels devastating acts of violence, but also all kinds of primitive prejudicial behaviors, such as Misogyny, Polygamy, Homophobia, and Islamophobia.

The human mind has a primordial affinity towards ideas of miracles and mysticism, especially, in times of weakness.

There is not much difference between a person drunk on alcohol and a person drunk on biases. Both do things, that they wouldn't do, had they not been under the influence.

According to neuroscience research from 2012, it is intrinsically rewarding to talk about oneself. This is perhaps why Facebook, Twitter and blogging platforms like Tumblr have been such successful products.

Human nature is a combination of modern conscience and ancient primitiveness. As the creation of the human mind in a state of transcendence, all scriptures are also a fusion of human conscience and gruesome primitiveness.

Why should caring for others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague ideas about this issue, which I am sure neuroscience will one day resolve. Let me offer my own “hand waving” explanation by saying that advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation. The mirroring allows the sight of another person in a particular emotional state to induce a similar state in us. We literally feel their pain, loss, delight, disgust, etc., through so-called shared representations. Neuroimaging shows that our brains are similarly activated as those of people we identify with. This is an ancient mechanism: It is automatic, starts early in life, and probably characterizes all mammals. But we go beyond this, and this is where mental separation comes in. We parse our own state from the other’s. Otherwise, we would be like the toddler who cries when she hears another cry but fails to distinguish her own distress from the other’s. How could she care for the other if she can’t even tell where her feelings are coming from? In the words of psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Self-absorption kills empathy.” The child needs to disentangle herself from the other so as to pinpoint the actual source of her feelings.

The best way to build rapport with people or companies is to share in their beliefs and behaviors. When we don’t mesh with someone, when he or she rubs us the wrong way, or when we don’t aspire to the same values and passions, we routinely dismiss that person, just as we reject brands that are out of sync with our own lives.

By nature, that mind is easily fooled by supernatural mysticism. It is extremely gullible. And no matter how much we the civilized human beings advance in the fields of modern sciences, there is always a part of us, that tries to allure us with magical nonsense, because that nonsense has been with us since the birth of humanity.

We the experts in cognitive and behavioral sciences can predict human behavior but not human potential. What this means is that, though we can tell how a person is likely to feel, think and behave in a certain situation, we still cannot tell what a person is capable of. Hence the possibilities that a person holds in their neurons are immeasurable.

Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.

Honeybees possess amazing numerical skills that rival those of many vertebrates. Honeybees have a reputation of being insect geniuses: not only can they enumerate and order numbers, but they also possess elaborate working memory to ponder about upcoming decisions, understand abstract concepts such as 'sameness' and 'difference', and learn intricate skills from other bees. And they achieve all of this with fewer than one million neurons.

Consumption is a universal phenomenon. All humans consume varieties of products, many of which beyond actual necessity, because it activates the brain's reward center. And the more a certain product activates the reward center with its unique characteristics or its predominant social stature, the more that product gets chiseled into the long-term memory of the consumer, making it a fundamental part of the individual's psychological well being. Thus the human mind grows a deep psychological bond with a product. And this bond can grow so strong in time that it would defend itself from all sorts of criticisms. It is the brain's way to maintain its internal purely individualistic well being. Hence, a strong psychological bond between the mind and a product slowly not only becomes invincible to criticisms, but also, develops its own cognitive immune system against such criticisms.

Where do the behavioral-cognitive concepts that contemporary cognitive neuroscience operates with come from? The answer is from Aristotle and his heart-centered philosophy, not brain mechanisms. Aristotle’s terms were adopted by the Christian philosophers and were extensively used by both Descartes and the British empiricists John Locke and David Hume. To their credit, they used many of the cognitive expressions only as hypothetical constructs.

Philosophy is the discipline of human thought that allows us to interpret our experience of ourselves and of the world at large, thereby giving meaning to our existence. While science constructs models of reality that predict the behavior of matter and energy, philosophy asks how those models relate to our condition as conscious entities. Without philosophy, science is merely an enabler of technology; it tells us nothing about the underlying nature of nature.

To tip the cognitive hurdle fast, tipping point leaders such as Bratton zoom in on the act of disproportionate influence: making people see and experience harsh reality firsthand. Research in neuroscience and cognitive science shows that people remember and respond most effectively to what they see and experience: “Seeing is believing.” In the realm of experience, positive stimuli reinforce behavior, whereas negative stimuli change attitudes and behavior. Simply

Now you know that the fascinating phenomenon of love has nothing to do with the supernatural entity known as Cupid, but everything to do with neurochemistry. Likewise, divinity is a cerebral creation, not a supernatural one. And it has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!

Psychologists have found that the most significant common trait among people who are pulled to the mountains is something called sensation seeking. “Neuroscience calls it novelty, it’s the willingness to take risks for the sake of rewards,” says Cynthia Thomson, a health researcher who looks at behavioral genetics. “Compared to people who don’t ski, skiers are higher on the sensation-seeking scale. They have a low threshold for boredom, and tend to look for more exciting experiences, even if there are dangers associated with them.

It is much easier to concentrate the mind on external things, than to concentrate on the mind itself. For example, a Neuroscientist can be the smartest man (or woman) on earth in his understanding of the human mind. He may know all the neurochemical changes underlying an outrageous behavior of a person. But when he gets mad himself, very little of his own scientific intellect would actually come in handy for him to control his rage. The virtue of self-control is a skill, which requires practice, regardless of all the neurobiological expertise in the world.

Despite these criticisms of his criticisms, my stance has a major problem, one that causes Morse to conclude that the contributions of neuroscience to the legal system “are modest at best and neuroscience poses no genuine, radical challenges to concepts of personhood, responsibility, and competence.”25 The problem can be summarized in a hypothetical exchange: Prosecutor: So, professor, you’ve told us about the extensive damage that the defendant sustained to his frontal cortex when he was a child. Has every person who has sustained such damage become a multiple murderer, like the defendant? Neuroscientist testifying for the defense: No. Prosecutor: Has every such person at least engaged in some sort of serious criminal behavior? Neuroscientist: No. Prosecutor: Can brain science explain why the same amount of damage produced murderous behavior in the defendant? Neuroscientist: No. The problem is that, even amid all these biological insights that allow us to be snitty about those silly homunculi, we still can’t predict much about behavior. Perhaps at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to individuals.

Dr. Jaak Panksepp told me. “If you don’t recognize that the brain creates psychological responses, then neuroscience becomes a highly impoverished discipline. And that’s where the battle is right now. Many neuroscientists believe that mental states are irrelevant for what the brain does. This is a Galileo-type battle, and it will not be won very easily because you have generations and generations of scholars, even in psychology, who have swallowed hook, line, and sinker the notion—the Skinnerian notion—that mentality is irrelevant in the control of behavior.”3 Dr.

Let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness. What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. ... The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. ... This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities...

Freud elevated unconscious processes to the throne of the mind, imbuing them with the power to guide our every thought and deed, and to a significant extent writing free will out of the picture. Decades later, neuroscience has linked genetic mechanisms to neuronal circuits coursing with a multiplicity of neurotransmitters to argue that the brain is a machine whose behavior is predestined, or at least determined, in such a way as seemingly to leave no room for the will. It is not merely that will is not free, in the modern scientific view; not merely that it is constrained, a captive of material forces. It is, more radically, that the will, a manifestation of the mind, does not even exist, because a mind independent of brain does not exist.

More and more people will start telling themselves: "I don't understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I've seen through the game. The most efficient strategy will be to go on pretending I'm a conservative, old-fashioned believer in moral values.

Princess Cookie’s cognitive pathways may have required a more comprehensive analysis. He knew that it was possible to employ certain progressive methods of neural interface, but he felt somewhat apprehensive about implementing them, for fear of the risks involved and of the limited returns such tactics might yield. For instance, it would be a particularly wasteful endeavor if, for the sake of exhausting every last option available, he were even to go so far as resorting to invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery, for this unorthodox process would only prove to be the cerebral equivalent of tracking a creature one was not even sure existed: surely one could happen upon some new species deep in the caverns somewhere and assume it to be the goal of one’s trek, but then there was a certain idiocy to this notion, as one would never be sure this newfound entity should prove to be what one wished it to be; taken further, this very need to find something, to begin with, would only lead one to clamber more deeply inward along rigorous paths and over unsteady terrain, the entirety of which could only be traversed with the arrogant resolve of someone who has already determined, with a misplaced sense of pride in his own assumptions, that he was undoubtedly making headway in a direction worthwhile. And assuming still that this process was the only viable option available, and further assuming that Morell could manage to find a way to track down the beast lingering ostensibly inside of Princess Cookie, what was he then to do with it? Exorcise the thing? Reason with it? Negotiate maybe? How? Could one hope to impose terms and conditions upon the behavior of something tracked and captured in the wilds of the intellect? The thought was a bizarre one and the prospect of achieving success with it unlikely. Perhaps, it would be enough to track the beast, but also to let it live according to its own inclinations inside of her. This would seem a more agreeable proposition. Unfortunately, however, the possibility still remained that there was no beast at all, but that the aberration plaguing her consciousness was merely a side effect of some divine, yet misunderstood purpose with which she had been imbued by the Almighty Lord Himself. She could very well have been functioning on a spiritual plane far beyond Morell’s ability to grasp, which, of course, seared any scrutiny leveled against her with the indelible brand of blasphemy. To say the least, the fear of Godly reprisal which this brand was sure to summon up only served to make the prospect of engaging in such measures as invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery seem both risky and wasteful. And thus, it was a nonstarter.

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

Adding to our understanding of why the brain seems undisturbed by disconnections was not only the notion that it was, in a sense, sending half its decisions into the realm of the unconscious; it was also the discovery of the “interpreter.” This special left brain system kept note of all the behaviors that resulted from the many mental systems. It appeared to be the surveillance camera on our behavior, which, of course, was the evidence that a mental or cognitive act had occurred. The interpreter not only took note; it tried to make “sense” out of the behavior by keeping a running narrative going on about why a string of behaviors was occurring. It is a precious device and most likely uniquely human. It is working in us all the time as we try to explain why we like something or have a particular opinion, or rationalize something we have done. It is the interpreter device that takes the inputs from the massively modularized and automatic brain of ours and creates order from chaos. It comes up with the “makes sense” explanation that leads us to believe in a certain form of essentialism, that is, that we are a unified conscious agent. Nice try, interpreter!

From another corner of neuroscience, we’re learning about a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Though there are more than fifty neurotransmitters (that we know of), scientists studying substance problems have given dopamine much of their attention. The brain’s reward system and pleasure centers—the areas most impacted by substance use and compulsive behaviors—have a high concentration of dopamine. Some brains have more of it than others, and some people have a capacity to enjoy a range of experiences more than others, owing to a combination of genetics and environment. The thing about dopamine is that it makes us feel really good. We tend to want more of it. It is naturally generated through ordinary, pleasurable activities like eating and sex, and it is the brain’s way of rewarding us—or nature’s way of rewarding the brain—for activities necessary to our survival, individually or as a species. It is the “mechanism by which ‘instinct’ is manifest.” Our brains arrange for dopamine levels to rise in anticipation and spike during a pleasurable activity to make sure we do it again. It helps focus our attention on all the cues that contributed to our exposure to whatever felt good (these eventually become triggers to use, as we explain later). Drugs and alcohol (and certain behaviors) turn on a gushing fire hose of dopamine in the brain, and we feel good, even euphoric. Dopamine produced by these artificial means, however, throws our pleasure and reward systems out of whack immediately. Flooding the brain repeatedly with dopamine has long-term effects and creates what’s known as tolerance—when we lose our ability to produce or absorb our own dopamine and need more and more of it artificially just to feel okay. Specifically, the brain compensates for the flood of dopamine by decreasing its own production of it or by desensitizing itself to the neurotransmitter by reducing the number of dopamine receptors, or both. The brain is just trying to keep a balance. The problem with the brain’s reduction in natural dopamine production is that when you take the substance or behavior out of the picture, there’s not enough dopamine in the brain to make you feel good. Without enough dopamine, there is no interest or pleasure. Then not only does the brain lose the pleasure associated with using, it might not be able to enjoy a sunset or a back rub, either. A lowered level of dopamine, combined with people’s longing for the rush of dopamine they got from using substances, contributes to “craving” states. Cravings are a physiological process associated with the brain’s struggle to regain its normal dopamine balance, and they can influence a decision to keep using a substance even when a person is experiencing negative consequences that matter to him and a strong desire to change. Depending on the length of time and quantities a person has been using, these craving states can be quite uncomfortable and compelling. The dopamine system can and does recover, starting as soon as we stop flooding it. But it takes time, and in the time between shutting off the artificial supply of dopamine and the brain’s rebuilding its natural resources, people tend to feel worse (before they feel better). On a deep, instinctual level, their brains are telling them that by stopping using, something is missing; something is wrong. This is a huge factor in relapse, despite good intentions and effort to change. Knowing this can help you and your loved one make it across this gap in brain reward systems.

Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems. [C]ognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. The brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or the self.

The rats that Marian Diamond studied had either an enriched or an impoverished environment. That changed their brain state. If you’re surrounded by a nurturing physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual environment, you’re in one brain state. If you’re surrounded by danger, uncertainty, and hostility, you’re in a quite different brain state. Brain states, along with mental, emotional, and spiritual states, run the gamut. When the brain’s Enlightenment Circuit is turned on, you’re in a happy and positive state. When the Default Mode Network (DMN) of Chapter 2 predominates, you’re in a negative and stressed state. State Progression Cognitive psychologist Michael Hall has been fascinated by human potential for over 40 years. He has studied the most advanced methods, authored more than 30 books on the topic, and mapped the stages by which people change. Unpleasant experiences are what usually motivate us to change. These involve mental, emotional, or spiritual states. Examples of such states are despair, stagnation, anger, or resentment. Hall calls these “unresourceful” states. We can cultivate resourceful states, such as joy, empowerment, mastery, and contentment. To describe the movement of a person from an unresourceful to a resourceful state, Hall uses the term “state progression.” Hall’s “state progression” model has several steps: Identify the unresourceful state. Identify the desired state. Countercondition dysfunctional behavioral patterns that maintain the unresourceful state. Activate change toward the desired state. Experience the target state. Repeat the experience of the desired state. Condition new behaviors that reinforce the desired state. That’s the promise of directing your attention consciously rather than defaulting to the brain’s negativity bias. Attention sustained over time produces state progression and triggers neural plasticity. If you focus on positive beliefs and thoughts repeatedly, bringing your mind and focus back to the good, you then use attention in the service of positive neural plasticity. When we have practiced sufficiently to be able to maintain this focus, we achieve a condition that Hall calls positive state stability. Our minds become stable in that new state. Their default setting is no longer to focus on the negative. The brain’s negativity bias is no longer hijacking our attention and directing it toward the negative things that are happening, either in our own lives or in the world. We have moved through the stages of state progression to positive state stability.

Given the power of modern molecular techniques, it is easy to forget that the ultimate objective of physiological discoveries is to find their possible significance within the context of the whole organism, particularly its behavior. In: Neuroscience. 246:265-70.

contact—emotional networks integrate with sensory and motor systems to connect social and emotional meaning with behaviors.

Keep in mind that teaching in tribal societies is generally performed by biologically related, caring, and deeply invested elders, one on one or in small groups. In these naturally occurring, attachment-based apprenticeships, learning is interwoven with the behaviors and biochemistry of bonding.

Group biological changes in lower life-forms are more likely to have a direct correlation with final behavior.

Reward systems, such as those mediated by dopamine, also destabilize during adolescence in order to allow for the creation of new attachments, behaviors, and goals. This search for purpose and meaning makes adolescents more vulnerable to good and bad social influences,

She’s probably going to be chair of our department in a couple years. She’s the editor of the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience. She’s involved with basically every committee possible at the university. She’s the kind of person who wakes at four in the morning and writes a couple manuscripts before the kids wake up at seven. And she’s the leader of our daughter’s Girl Scout troop. She’s just the kind of person who makes everybody feel like: What am I doing wrong? And she’s an incredibly nice person, too. She’s not arrogant or egotistical. And she picked me. That’s the one thing that stops me from feeling insecure. She must have seen something.

Most of human behavior is a result of subconscious processes. We are unaware of them. As a result, many of our beliefs about how people behave—including beliefs about ourselves—are wrong. That is why we have the multiple social and behavioral sciences, with a good dash of mathematics, economics, computer science, information science, and neuroscience.

Drawing on the latest findings from psychology, organizational behavior, and neuroscience—research on resilience, creativity, mindfulness, compassion, and more—I will show you how the following six strategies for attaining happiness and fulfillment are actually the key to thriving professionally.

A Code of Nature must accommodate a mixture of individually different behavioral tendencies. The human race plays a mixed strategy in the game of life. People are not molecules, all alike and behaving differently only because of random interactions. People just differ, dancing to their own personal drummer. The merger of economic game theory with neuroscience promises more precise understanding of those individual differences and how they contribute to the totality of human social interactions. It's understanding those differences, Camerer says, that will make such a break with old schools of economic thought. "A lot of economic theory uses what is called the representative agent model," Camerer told me. In an economy with millions of people, everybody is clearly not going to be completely alike in behavior. Maybe 10 percent will be of some type, 14 percent another type, 6 percent something else. A real mix. "It's often really hard, mathematically, to add all that up," he said. "It's much easier to say that there's one kind of person and there's a million of them. And you can add things up rather easily." So for the sake of computational simplicity, economists would operate as though the world was populated by millions of one generic type of person, using assumptions about how that generic person would behave. "It's not that we don't think people are different—of course they are, but that wasn't the focus of analysis," Camerer said. "It was, well, let's just stick to one type of person. But I think the brain evidence, as well as genetics, is just going to force us to think about individual differences." And in a way, that is a very natural thing for economists to want to do.

All experiences, emotions, behaviors and beliefs, that make us humans, are the creation of various intricate and inexplicable molecular interactions within the brain.

You know very well what the right choice is, yet you keep making the wrong one.

I can tell you the biological roots of your desires and drives, but implementing that factual information in a practical manner in your life is completely on you.

There is an animal in all of us, the sooner we recognize it, the sooner we can turn human.

As a scientist whose life's work has been to study human nature, one thing I've observed is that, everyone thinks they can see through others, while in reality all they really see is a reflection of their own expectations and insecurities.

We may have left the jungle, but the jungle still lives in us.

When required to work for set wages for a certain amount of time at work (i.e., a fixed-interval schedule, where one merely has to wait a certain amount of time before a single response will bring a reward), they tend to work slowly during the first part of the interval, gradually increasing behavioral output as “paytime” arrives (yielding a scalloped curve). When placed on variable-ratio and variable-interval schedules, where things are unpredictable (as in Las Vegas), animals work at constant steady rates, but the rates are substantially faster with variable-ratio schedules (just the way profiteers in Las Vegas want us to behave when playing one-armed bandits). Both humans and animals work in about the same way on such schedules. Unfortunately, behaviorism provided no cogent mechanistic explanation of why and how the brain generates such consistent learned behavior patterns.

As we now know, there are no credible, routine ways to unambiguously separate the influences of nature and nurture in the control of behavior that will apply across different environments. To understand the aspects of behavior that derive their organizational essence mainly from nature, we must first identify how instinctual behaviors emerge from the intrinsic potentials of the nervous system. For instance, animals do not learn to search their environment for items needed for survival, although they surely need to learn exactly when and how precisely to search. In other words, the “seeking potential” is built into the brain, but each animal must learn to direct its behaviors toward the opportunities that are available in the environment. In addition, animals do not need to learn to experience and express fear, anger, pain, pleasure, and joy, nor to play in simple rough-and-tumble ways, even though all of these processes come to modify and be modified by learning. Evidence suggests that evolution has imprinted many spontaneous psychobehavioral potentials within the inherited neurodynamics of the mammalian brain; these systems help generate internally experienced emotional feelings.

in order to understand the neural nature of emotional feelings in humans, we must first seek to decode how brain circuits control the basic, genetically encoded emotional behavioral tendencies we share with other mammals. Then we must try to determine how subjective experience emerges from or is linked to those brain systems. Progress on these issues has been meager. In general, both psychology and modern neuroscience have failed to give sufficient credence to the fact that organisms are born with a variety of innate affective tendencies that emerge from the ancient organizational structure of the mammalian brain.

It is now well established that one can reliably evoke several distinct emotional patterns in all mammals during electrical stimulation of homologous subcortical regions. Typically, animals either like or dislike the stimulation, as can be inferred from such behavioral criteria as conditioned approach and avoidance. If the electrodes are not placed in the right locations, no emotional behaviors are observed. For instance, most of the neocortex is free of such effects. Even though cortical processes such as thoughts and perceptions (i.e., appraisals) can obviously instigate various emotions, to the best of our knowledge, the affective essence of emotionality is subcortically and precognitively organized.

The most primal affective-cognitive interaction in humans, and presumably other animals as well, is encapsulated in the phrases “I want” and “I don’t want.” These assertions are reflected in basic tendencies to approach and avoid various real-life phenomena. However, there are several distinct ways to like and dislike events, and a proper classification scheme will yield a more complex taxonomy of emotions than the simple behavioral dimension of approach and avoidance. For instance, it seems unlikely that the dislike of bitter foods and the dislike of physical pain emerge from one and the same avoidance system. It is equally unlikely that the desire for food and the urge to play emerge from the same brain systems.

Because of the ascending interactions with higher brain areas, there is no emotion without a thought, and many thoughts can evoke emotions. Because of the lower interactions, there is no emotion without a physiological or behavioral consequence, and many of the resulting bodily changes can also regulate the tone of emotional systems in a feedback manner.

Although each instinctual psychobehavioral process requires the concurrent arousal of numerous brain activities (Figure 2.2), our scientific work is greatly simplified by the fact that there are “command processes” at the core of each emotional operating system, as indicated by the ability of localized brain stimulation to activate coherent emotional behavior patterns.9 We can turn on rage, fear, separation distress, and generalized seeking patterns of behavior. Such central coordinating influences can provoke widespread cooperative activities by many brain systems, generating a variety of integrated psychobehavioral and physiological/hormonal response tendencies. These systems can generate internally experienced emotional feelings and promote behavioral flexibility via new learning.

The more people act different, the more they act the same

many investigators who study behavior have argued that emotions, especially animal emotions, are illusory concepts outside the realm of scientific inquiry. As I will seek to demonstrate, that viewpoint is incorrect. Although much of behavioral control is elaborated by unconscious brain processes, both animals and humans do have similar affective feelings that are important contributors to their future behavioral tendencies. Unfortunately, the nature of human and animal emotions cannot be understood without brain research. Fortunately, a psychoneurological analysis of animal emotions (via a careful study of how animal brains control certain behaviors) makes it possible to conceptualize the basic underlying nature of human emotions with some precision, thereby providing new insights into the functional organization of all mammalian brains. A strategy to achieve such a cross-species synthesis will be outlined here. It is based largely on the existence of many psychoneural homologies—the fact that the intrinsic nature of basic emotional systems has been remarkably well conserved during the course of mammalian evolution.

To their initial chagrin and eventual delight, more and more investigators began to note that animals trained according to behaviorist principles would often “regress” to exhibiting their own natural behavioral tendencies when experimental demands became too severe. For instance, raccoons that had been trained to put coins in piggy banks to obtain food (for advertisement purposes) would often fail to smoothly execute their outward demonstrations of learned “thriftiness,” instead reverting to rubbing the coins together and manipulating them in their hands as if they were food itself. Apparently, the instinctual, evolutionary baggage of each animal intruded into the well-ordered behaviorist view that only reinforcement contingencies could dictate what organisms do in the world.

Ultimately, an understanding of all our mental activities must begin with our willingness to use words that approximate the nature of the underlying brain processes. Our thinking is enriched if we use the right words—those that reflect essential realities—and it is impoverished if we select the wrong ones. However, words are not equivalent to physical reality; they are only symbols that aid our understanding and communication (see Appendix B). This book is premised on the belief that the common emotional words we learned as children—being angry, scared, sad, and happy—can serve the purpose better than many psychologists are inclined to believe. These emotions are often evident in the behaviors animals spontaneously exhibit throughout their life span.

I will develop the position that a hybrid discipline focusing on the neurobiological nature of brain operating systems (especially those that mediate motivational and emotional tendencies) is needed as a foundation for a mature and scientifically prosperous discipline of psychology. A guiding assumption of this approach is that a common language, incorporating behavioral, cognitive, and neuroscientific perspectives, must be found for discussing the fundamental psychoneurological processes that all mammals share.

Without a concurrent neural analysis, emotional concepts cannot be used noncircularly in scientific discourse. We cannot say that animals attack because they are angry and then turn around and say that we know animals are angry because they exhibit attack. We cannot say that humans flee from danger because they are afraid and then say we know that humans are afraid if they exhibit flight. Such circular word juggling does not allow us to make new and powerful predictions about behavior. However, thanks to the neuroscience revolution, we can begin to specify the potential brain mechanisms that are essential substrates for such basic emotions.

A central, and no doubt controversial, tenet of affective neuroscience is that emotional processes, including subjectively experienced feelings, do, in fact, play a key role in the causal chain of events that control the actions of both humans and animals. They provide various types of natural internal values upon which many complex behavioral choices in humans are based. However, such internal feelings are not simply mental events; rather, they arise from neurobiological events. In other words, emotional states arise from material events (at the neural level) that mediate and modulate the deep instinctual nature of many human and animal action tendencies, especially those that, through simple learning mechanisms such as classical conditioning, come so readily to be directed at future challenges. One reason such instinctual states may include an internally experienced feeling tone is that higher organisms possess neurally based self-representation systems.

After modest study of the underlying issues, one can understand why scientists must be conservative with their concepts. In order to make real scientific progress, as opposed to merely generating creative ideas, we must seek rigorous definitions for the concepts we use. All key concepts should be defined in clear and consistent ways, and they must be deployed experimentally (operationally) in ways that help us predict new behavioral acts.

Behaviorism has dealt credibly with the modification and channeling of behavior patterns as a function of learning, but it has not dealt effectively with the nature of the innate sources of behavioral variation that are susceptible to modification via the reinforcement contingencies of the environment. The various cognitive sciences are beginning to address the complexities of the human mind, but until recently they chose to ignore the evolutionary antecedents, such as the neural systems for the passions, upon which our vast cortical potentials are built and to which those potentials may still be subservient.

Despite its claim to a new view among the psychological sciences, affective neuroscience is deeply rooted within physiological psychology, behavioral biology, and the modernized label for all of these disciplines: behavioral neuroscience. The present coverage will rely heavily on data collected by individuals in these fields, but it will put a new twist on the evidence. It reinterprets many of the brain-behavior findings to try to account for the central neuropsychic states of organisms.

With apologies to the delicate nuances of neuroscience, here is what is happening in a nutshell: Within our brains are billions upon billions of neurons, interconnected in every which way to form a complex set of neural pathways. Electrical currents travel down these pathways, from neuron to neuron, delivering the messages that make up our every thought and action. The more we perform a particular action, the more connections form between the corresponding neurons. (This is the origin of the common phrase “cells that fire together, wire together.”) The stronger this link, the faster the message can travel down the pathway. This is what makes the behavior seem second nature or automatic.

The realization that the brain used so many different kind of chemicals, in addition to classical neurotransmitters, to communicate beween neurons was just the first step in a major conceptual shift in neuroscience. Many of these substances are neuropeptides, and most of those affect mood and behavior. The specificity of their effects resides not in the anatomical connectivity between neurons, but in the distribution of receptors within the brain. Different receptors have very different patterns of distribution, and the distributions differ between species in ways that correlate with differences in behavior. The mere fact of a receptor-peptide mismatch in a particular brain area might have no great importance. It might be that many cells are promiscuous in the receptors that they express: If some receptors see no ligand, the cost to the cells is negligible. Profligate receptor expression might contribute to the evolvability of neural systems, and might be common because organisms with a liberal attitude to receptor expression are those most likely to acquire novels functions. Because extrasynaptic signaling does not require precise point-to-point connectivity, it is intrinsically 'evolvable': a minor mutation in the regulatory region of a peptide receptor gene, by altering the expression pattern, could have functional consequences without any need for anatomical rewiring. That peptide receptors have distinctive patterns of expression, and that peptides produce coherent behavioral effects when given quite crudely into the brain, suggests that volume transmission is used as a signaling mechanism by many different populations of peptidergic neurons. We thus must see neuropeptides as 'hormones of the brain'.

Psychologists usually try to help people use insight and understanding to manage their behavior. However, neuroscience research shows that very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding; most originate in pressures from deeper regions in the brain that drive our perception and attention. When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it. I am reminded of the comedy in which a seven-time recidivist in an anger-management program extols the virtue of the techniques he’s learned: “They are great and work terrific—as long as you are not really angry.

Just because psychology seems relevant to explaining why the left and the right have diverged over reality doesn't mean that nothing else is, or that I am reducing conservatives to just their psychology (or reducing psychology to cognitive neuroscience, or cognitive neuroscience to genes, and so on). [...] Complex phenomena like human political behavior always have many causes, not one. This book fully recognizes that and does not embrace a position that could fairly be called determinism. Human brains are flexible and change daily; people have choices, and those choices alter who they are.

It has long been known that animals use electrical impulses, or “action potentials,” to communicate between different parts of their bodies. Neurons—the long, electrically excitable nerve cells that coordinate animal behavior—have their own field of study: neuroscience. Although electrical signaling is normally thought of as an animal talent, animals aren’t alone in producing action potentials. Plants and algae produce them, and it has been known since the 1970s that some types of fungi do also. Bacteria, too, are electrically excitable.

The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber. On subsequent occasions, one does not need the unconditioned fear stimulus—the feline smell—to evoke anxiety. The contextual cues of the chamber suffice. This, in essence, is classical or Pavlovian conditioning. The flow of associations is outlined more formally in Figure 1.2, and as we will see, classical conditioning is still one of the most powerful and effective ways to study emotional learning in the laboratory.

The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber.

your thoughts, actions, and behaviors are being recorded somewhere, and every day we have the choice of how we want to program our brains. Functional neuroplasticity is much less common, as it involves the brain’s ability to improve or retain functionality in cases such as when the brain is damaged. This involves more dramatic change of the cortical remapping variety.

We navigate life by making decisions that maximize pleasure and/ or minimize pain.

Of all the animals on earth, only the human is born with the capacity to conquer its animal nature.

At first the brain weighs a potential partner, and if the partner fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It's the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.

Each day I wake up with a naive perspective of life and universe, and walk towards understanding a little more about the true nature of human perception with all its vivacious nuances and behavioral expressions.