Sublime

In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of “affective primacy.”7 Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too

ages of nineteen and forty-one. The volunteers played a game in which each group member was shown two different three-dimensional objects on a computer screen and asked to decide whether the first object could be rotated to match the second. The experimenters used an fMRI scanner to take snapshots of the volunteers’ brains as they conformed to or

asking everybody whom they relied on for emotional support.

Nous avons tous un vieux cerveau. Cependant, de même que l’amygdale d’une personne hautement réactive sera plus sensible que la moyenne à la nouveauté, les extravertis semblent plus exposés que les introvertis aux pulsions du vieux cerveau. Certains scientifiques commencent même à se pencher sur l’idée que la sensibilité à la récompense ne soit pas

Homo heidelbergensis is therefore our best candidate for Rubicon crosser.64 These people had cumulative culture, teamwork, and a division of labor. They must have had shared intentionality, including at least some rudimentary moral matrix that helped them work together and then share the fruits of their labor.

Edwin Hollander argued that when people act generously in groups, they earn idiosyncrasy credits—positive impressions that accumulate in the minds of group members. Since many people think like matchers, when they work in groups, it’s very common for them to keep track of each member’s credits and debits. Once a group

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the same part of the brain that deals with conflict is active when our choices differ from those of the group.

One of the most interesting ideas we discussed in our study group is that our resonance with others may actually precede our awareness of ourselves. Developmentally and evolutionarily, our modern self-awareness circuitry may be built upon the more ancient resonance circuits that root us in our social world.