Sublime

We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

The body has a surprisingly similar set of responses (which he called the general adaptation syndrome, but which we now call the stress-response) to a broad array of stressors. If stressors go on for too long, they can make you sick.

Serotonin, which you’ll hear a lot more about in later chapters, is often called the policeman of the brain because it helps keep brain activity under control. It influences mood, impulsivity, anger, and aggressiveness.

The answer derives from the fact that what is good for groups is not always good for the individuals comprising them. For example, both multicellular organisms and social insect colonies are functionally specialized and hierarchically organized collectives that are highly successful in maintaining and transmitting accumulated knowledge, in the form

The ancient reptiles from which mammals evolved did not have neural mechanisms that allowed them to turn off threat responses to get close to others, co-regulate, and exhibit maternal behavior.

New research into the neurobiology of parenting and caregiving helps explain why alloparenting succeeds in different cultures. We are learning that a person doesn’t need to be pregnant for the brain to reconfigure into an infant-caregiving brain: hands-on parenting can rewire a male brain in a similar way to the effect of pregnancy and childbirth.

Their five modules have to do with suffering (it’s good to help and not harm others), reciprocity (from this comes a sense of fairness), hierarchy (respect for elders and those in legitimate authority), coalitionary bonding (loyalty to your group) and purity (praising cleanliness and shunning contamination and carnal behavior).

Scientists have known for decades that the brain relegates more habitual jobs (like checking breathing and heart rate) to less thoughtful, more automatic, less energy-draining parts of the nervous system.

Remove the sponge cell from the sponge, prevent it from finding its way back to its brethren, and it dies. Scrape a liver cell from the liver, and in its isolation it too will shrivel and give up life. But what happens if you remove a human from his social bonds, wrenching him from the superorganism of which he is a part?