Sublime

Suppose we took you and forty-nine of your coworkers and pitted you in a game of Survivor against a troop of fifty capuchin monkeys from Costa Rica. We would parachute both primate teams into the remote tropical forests of central Africa. After two years, we would return and count the survivors on each team. The team with the most survivors wins. O

It’s precisely this capacity to shift between scales that most obviously separates human social cognition from that of other primates.5 Apes may vie for affection or dominance, but any victory is temporary and open to being renegotiated. Nothing is imagined as eternal. Nothing is really imagined at all. Humans tend to live simultaneously with the 1

A stressor can also be the anticipation of that happening.

we discovered a series of novel behavioural and cultural processes that trigger the same neuropharmacological and cognitive mechanisms that underpin primate sociality.

Then the brain kicked in, its only job to reduce the metabolic expense of any and all of Anna’s present or future movements.

The large societies found in some other species, such as ants and bees, are stable and resilient because most of the information needed to sustain them is encoded in the genome.

The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain and professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, to learn what’s happening in the brain when our hearts are being put through a shredder. At the start of our discussion, he shared that the brain has but one primary mission: to keep us safe and ensure our surviv

Research using animals has shown that an elevated level of brainderived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is a protective brain hormone increased by such activities as calorie reduction, fasting, and mental and physical exercise, imparts a high level of protection for the hippocampus, making it resistant to damage from elevated cortisol; and we now