CAS behavior
This page describes the organizational forces that limit change.  It explains how to overcome them when necessary. 

Power& tradition holding back progress
This page uses an example to illustrate how:
  • A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
  • Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence. 
  • A program approach can ensure strategic alignment. 
Be responsive to market dynamics
This page uses the example of HP's printer organization freeing itself from its organizational constraints to sell a printer targeted at the IBM pc user. 
The constraints are described. 
The techniques to overcome them are implied. 
Overcome reactionaries
We are products of complexity, but our evolution has focused our understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the African savanna.  As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact the systems we depend on.  But we struggle to comprehend them.  So this web frame explores significant real world complex adaptive systems (CAS):
  • Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and retirement savings of the working class.  The assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched. 
  • The US nation was built from two divergent political views of: Jefferson and Hamilton.  It also reflects the development of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and Cyril.  But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall Street into a position of power, while the middle and working class were abandoned by the elites.  Housing financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions helped hide the shift. 
  • Most US health care is still operating the way cars built in the 1940s did.  Geisinger is an example of better solution.  But transforming the whole network is a challenge.  And public health investment has proved far more beneficial.  
  • Helping our children learn to be effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have created a robust but deeply flawed education system.  Better alternatives have emerged.  
  • Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our good ideas to become a second genetic material. 
  • The emergence of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent development; 
It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe.  It outlines the items we see as key to the system and why. 

Example systems frame
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and manage.  He provides examples of how this feature of these systems can have disastrous consequences for their human managers.  Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental strategic toolkit.  To prepare to more effectively manage CAS, Dorner recommends use of:
  • Effective iterative planning and
  • Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he reviews.   
Complexity catastrophes
E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to date and explains how the two systems can coexist most effectively. 
Adaptive ecology
Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and energy goals. 
US vds alignment
Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.  Their successful strategy used the credibility of conservative religious leaders to:
  • Demonstrate religious issues with the New Deal. 
  • Integrate the corporate elite and evangelicals. 
  • Use the power of corporate advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American people to view the US as historically religious and the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious socialism. 
  • Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham. 
  • Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower. 
  • Add religious elements to mainstream American symbols: money, pledge;
  • Push for prayer in public school
  • Push Congress to promote prayer
  • Make elections more about religious positions. 

Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Strategy is the art of the possible.  But it also depends on persistence. 

Inventing Christian America
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become highly corrupt. 

Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the transformation:
  • Junk bonds, 
  • Derivative deregulation, 
  • CMOs, ABS and analyst fraud,
  • Financial network deregulation,
  • Financial network consolidation, 
  • Short term incentives
Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the situation to build a global bubble, which Wall Street leveraged.  The bursting of the bubble: managed by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve; was advantageous to some. 

Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated financial services industry is damaging to the American economy.  And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.   He sees the result being a rigged system. 

Ferguson offers his proposals for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear. 

Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Once the constraints are removed from CAS amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows.  And it is often relatively damaging not to participate.  Corruption and parasitism can become entrenched. 

Financial WMD
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic alignment of the American justice system.  The result he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected.  Even as it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to extract profits and leave the victim deflated. 

Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the: activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes, prisons and deportation network.  The scenarios are: Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions.

Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  The alignment of the justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to win. 

Aligned justice
Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, actually operated.  Powell was Blair's only chief of staff. 
Mechanics of power
H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and libertarianism. 
Libertarianism
John Doerr argues that company leaders and their organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs. 

He promotes strategies that help OKR success: Focus, Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance reviews, and provides illustrative success stories. 

Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's view that employees are adaptive and will respond to what they see being measured.  He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative. 

Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Doerr's architecture is tailored for the startups KPCB invests in.  It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all CAS.  Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the association to planning. 

Startup PDCA
David Bodanis illustrates how disruptive effects can take hold.  While the French revolution had many driving forces including famine and oppression the emergence of a new philosophical vision ensured that thoughtful leaders were constrained and conflicted in their responses to the crisis. 
Voltaire's disruptive network
An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges during the enlightenment. 
It was a poem encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a humanist book hunter. 
Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and reemergence.  He argues that the rediscovery was the foundation of the modern world. 
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms are discussed. 

Constraining happiness
Isaacson uses the historic development of the global cloud of web services to explore Ada Lovelace's ideas about thinking machines and poetic science.  He highlights the value of computer augmented human creativity and the need for liberal arts to fulfill the process. 
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agent networks and collaboration are discussed. 

Arts technology & intelligence
Haikonen juxtaposes the philosophy and psychology of consciousness with engineering practice to refine the debate on the hard problem of consciousness.  During the journey he describes the architecture of a robot that highlights the potential and challenges of associative neural networks. 

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is then used to illustrate the additional requirements and constraints of self-assembling evolved conscious animals.  It will be seen that Haikonen's neural architecture, Smiley's Copycat architecture and molecular biology's intracellular architecture leverage the same associative properties. 

Associatively integrated robots
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior developments that have been successfully implemented.  Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
Developing ideas
A government sanctioned monopoly supported the construction of a superorganism American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).  Within this Bell Labs was at the center of three networks:
  1. The evolving global scientific network. 
  2. The Bell telephone network.  And
  3. The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems. 
Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine. 
They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas. 
Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted. 
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed. 

Strategic innovation
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of BREXIT is summarized.  His ideas are then framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory and reviewed. 


BREXIT
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are monopolists that trade workers for technology.  Monopolies that he argues should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle class. 

Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS).  While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts with relevant CAS history and theory. 

Monopoly job killers
The IPO of Netscape is defined as the key emergent event of the New Economy by Michael Mandel.  Following the summary of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. 
New economy
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy.  It was enabled by the experience of Keynes and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard, the necessity of improving the situation between the wars and the opportunity created by the catastrophe of the Second World War. 

He describes how it was planned and developed.  How it emerged from the summit.  And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy. 

Like all plans there are mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US recovered the situation as best it could. 

And then Conway describes the period after Bretton Woods collapsed.  He explains what followed and also compares the relative performance of the various periods before during and after Bretton Woods. 

Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments from the perspective of Complex Adaptive System (CAS) theory.  Conway's book illustrates the rule making and infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier.  He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and against the development and deployment of the system.  And The Summit provides a key piece of the history of our global economic CAS. 

Bretton woods
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008 housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential mortgage value delivery system (VDS) by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla.  But they show the VDS was full of amplifiers and control points.  With no one incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst.  Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. 
Housing amplifiers
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives system.  Das describes the components of the value delivery system and the key transactions.  He demonstrates how the system interacted with emerging economies expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the induced bubbles burst.  Following Das's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. 
Derivative systems
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as creditors are willing to continue lending.  They illustrate different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the eighteenth century administrations of England and France. 

The US embodies two different political and economic systems which approach the national debt differently:
  • Taxes to support a sinking fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in: Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social programs; Starting with Hamilton, Lincoln & Chase, Wilson, FDR;
  • Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison, Reagan, George W. Bush (Gingrich);
Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US government does.  They argue that the conflicting sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in the middle' with a future problem.  And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the future.  

They conclude the question is still political.  They hope it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed explanations.  They ask who is willing to push all the coming risk onto individuals. 

Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery system, key CAS features are highlighted. 

National debt
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second industrial revolution were the foundation for American economic growth.  Gordon shows how flows of people into difficult rural America built a population base which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets, Clothes in department stores; that supported increasing productivity and standard of living.  The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities; terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow the economy. 

Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of:
  • Communications and advertising
  • Credit and finance
  • Public health and the health care network 
  • Health insurance
  • Education
  • Social and welfare services

Counter intuitively the constraints introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2 provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970 creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post war America. 

Subsequently the rate of growth was limited until the shift of women into the workplace and the full networking of voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were muted by the narrow reach of the technologies. 

The development of Big Data, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth, but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of the middle class. 

Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 

American growth
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of money based on the attractive features of precious metals.  He compares the potential for government edicts to create money but sees them as lacking. 

Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts.  Government backed promissory notes are analogous to:
  • Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy transaction intermediates and
  • Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in supporting survival and replication in the currently accessible niches. 

Emergence of money
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth?  To do this he replaces traditional economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an economy is a system in equilibrium, with complexity economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex adaptive system (CAS). 

He introduces Sugerscape to illustrate an economic CAS model in action.  And then he explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics, Agents, Networks, Emergence, and Evolution. 

Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to the economy to build wealth.  He explains how design spaces map strategies to instances of physical and social technologies.  And he identifies the interactors and selection mechanism of economic evolution. 

This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition of wealth. 

In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance, & Politics & Policy. 

Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we leverage. 

Economic complexity
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and their trade over time.  He describes the rise of a first global commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land and labor to work it including slaves. 

He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of the VDS and the power of the control points.  This VDS was quickly copied.  The increased capacity of the industrialized cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to operate the machines.  Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages and the ways found to mobilize industrial labor. 

Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected.  Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all prior structures collapsed as they interconnected.  So when the US civil war blocked access to the major production nodes in the American Deep South the CAS began adapting. 

Beckert describes the global reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways of life in the global countryside.  This colonial expansion further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation states.  Beckert explains how other countries responded by copying the colonial strategies and creating the opportunities for future armed conflict among the original colonialists and the new upstarts. 

Completing the adaptive shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in the colonized global south and how over time they joined the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing nodes and creating the current global CAS dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers, spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each other on cost. 

Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory.  The transformation of disconnected peasant farmers, pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over time: of military force, global transportation and communication networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows, models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and evolved amplifiers.  The emergent system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of extended phenotypic alignment. 

Globalization from cotton
The structure and problems of the US health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 

The network:
  • Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net or low tax without.  The emergence of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network.  
    • The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous levels of: salt, sugar, cigarettes, guns, light, cell phones, opioids, costly education, global travel, antibacterials, formula, foods including endocrine disrupters;
    • Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress, amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of walking, microbiome collapse;
  • Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies.  This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough. 
  • Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development, provision, reimbursement and payment. 
  • Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.  
  • Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to.  As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems.  The interactions with patients tend to be transactional. 
  • Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is:
    • Costly and inefficient
    • Structured around yearly contracts which undermine long-term health goals and strategies.  
  • Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR products deep within the hospital systems.  
  • Is maintained, and kept in alignment, by massive network effects across the:
    • Hospital platform based sub-networks connecting to
    • Physician networks
    • Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA narrow network legislation
    • Hospital clinical supply and food production networks
    • Medical school and academic research network and NIH
    • Global transportation network 
    • Public health networks 
    • Health care IT supply network
Health care
Deaton describes the wellbeing of people around the world today.  He explains the powerful benefit of public health strategies and the effect of growth in material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of aid. 

Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  The situation he describes is complex including powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The biosphere, Politics, Economics, Philosophy and Health care. 

Improving wellbeing
Donald Barlett and James Steele write about their investigations of the major problems afflicting US health care as of 2006. 
Problems of US health care
Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC.  After an overview of the business, they describe how a calamity unfolding around them supported building a vision of a better US health care network.  And they explain:
  • How they planned out the transformation,
  • Leveraging an effective governance structure,
  • Using a strategy to gain buy in,
  • Enabling reengineering at the clinician patient interface. 
  • Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic & hot spot care; to help the patients and help the physicians.  
  • Geisinger's leverage of biologics.  
  • Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience.  
  • Where Geisinger is headed next. 

Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them.  We frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 

E2E insured quality care
Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader and son who know that the current health care network interacts with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that caused his father's death.  But he is confident that these problem perceptions can be changed.  Once that occurs he asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated, collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their patients.  The supporting technology infrastructure will be made highly interoperable.  All that will reduce medical errors and make care more cost effective. 

Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them.  We frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory including synergistic examples of these systems in operation.  The health care network is built out of emergent human agents.  All agents must model the signals they perceive to represent and respond to them.  Pinker explains how this occurs.  Sapolsky explains why fear and hierarchy are so significant.  He includes details of Josh Green's research on morality and death.  Charles Ferguson highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives. 

Bad medical models
US healthcare is ripe for disruption.  Christensen, Grossman and Hwang argue that technologies are emerging which will support low cost business models that will undermine the current network.  Applying complex adaptive system (CAS) theory to these arguments suggests that the current power hierarchy can effectively resist these progressive forces. 
Disrupting health care
Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent improvement in quality in medicine by organizing to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists. 

With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates the effects of complexity and how to organize to cope with it. 

Following the short review RSS additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within the network of US health care, contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping his various examples and reviewing facets of complex failures. 
Complexity checklists
Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on 1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects' lives significantly affected their longevity.  Looking broadly across each subject's: Personality, Education, Parental impacts, Energy levels, Partnering, Careers, Religion, Social networks, Gender, Impact from war and trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways, which each individual could be seen to select and travel along.  Some paths led to the traveler having a long life.  Others were problematic.  The models imply that the US approach to health and wellness should focus more on supporting the development and selection of beneficial pathways. 

Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory.  The pathways are most applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support necessary to make and leverage choices they make.  Striving to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network, starved of resources. 

Promoting longevity
Gawande uses his personal experience, analytic skills and lots of stories of innovators to demonstrate better ways of coping with aging and death.  He introduces the lack of focus on aging and death in traditional medicine.  And goes on to show how technology has amplified this stress point.  He illustrates the traditional possibility of the independent self, living fully while aging with the support of the extended family.  Central planning responded to the technological and societal changes with poorly designed infrastructure and funding.  But Gawande then contrasts the power of bottom up innovations created by experts responding to their own family situations and belief systems. 

Gawande then explores in depth the challenges that unfold currently as we age and become infirm.  He notes that the world is following the US path.  As such it will have to understand the dilemma of integrating medical treatment and hospice strategies.  He notes that all parties involved need courage to cope. 

He proposes medicine must aim to assure well being.  At that point all doctors will practice palliative care. 

Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agency, death, evolution, cooperation and adaptations to new technologies are discussed. 

Agent death
Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles mosquitoes and Plasmodium.  250 - 500 million people are infected each year with malaria and one million die. 
Malaria
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution of medical science. 
Medical science events
Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of design.  They show how this can limit the interdependencies that generate complexity within systems.  They do this through a focus on modularity. 
Modular designed systems
Lou Gerstner describes the challenges he faced and the strategies he used to successfully restructure the computer company IBM. 
Compartmented systems
Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer software design. 
Object based systems
Bertrand Meyer develops arguments, principles and strategies for creating modular software.  He concludes that abstract data types and inheritence make object orientation a superior methodology for software construction.  Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory suggests agents provide an alternative strategy to the use of objects. 
Software construction
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved dramatically.  W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
Tools
Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the World. He highlights:
  • A list of preconditions resulting in
  • Additional niche capture & more free time 
  • Building a network to interconnect memes processes & tools which
  • Enabling inter-generational transfers
  • Innovations that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil fuels

Memetic trading networks
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported the emergence of human creativity.  This resulted in man building cultures and later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities.  Wilson identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these are presently ignored by the humanities.  So he calls for a change of approach. 

He:
  • Explores creativity: how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter gatherer, enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the evening around the campfire. He notes the power of fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing signature of aesthetic surprise. 
  • Looks at the current limitations of the humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect.  
  • Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and culture:
    • Ultimate causes viewed through art, & music
    • The bedrock of:
      • Ape senses and emotions,
      • Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied by humanities, & 
      • Exponential change in science and technology.  
    • How the breakthrough from our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat, supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory & language. 
    • Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution.  
    • The impact on human nature.  
  • Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are destroying. 
  • Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes, exploration, irony, and considers the potential for a third enlightenment, supported by cooperative action of humanities and science

Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory:
  • The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework for representing the cultural CAS while 
  • Wilson's desire to integrate the humanities and science gains support from viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS. 

Evening campfire rituals
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the economy.  They argue it has generated exponential growth.  This has been due to innovation.  It has created a huge bounty of additional wealth.  But the wealth is spread unevenly across society.  They look at the short and long term implications of the innovation bounty and spread and the possible future of technology. 

Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. 

Brilliant technologies
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles.  He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers.  Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative, Khan:
  • Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method. 
  • Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity.  The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework.  Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics. 
  • Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time,  In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning. 
  • Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs. 
  • Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education;
  • Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking. 

Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network? 

Education versus guilds
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's New York Times opinion based on The Triple Package is summarized.  Their ideas are then framed by CAS theory and reviewed. 


What drives success
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions.  Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles.  After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings. 
Warrior groups
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael Pollan explores their relative merits.  The application of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory highlights the value of evolutionary testing of the food chain. 
Natural systems
E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can take hold.  Various social insects have developed strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable available niches.  Like humans they invest in specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped competitors. 
Insect superorganisms
Computational theory of the mind and evolutionary psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its relationship to the brain.  Humans captured a cognitive niche by natural selection 'building out' specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs we call the mind. 

He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from psychology regarding: The visual system - an example of natural selections solutions to the sensory challenges of inverse modeling of our environment; Intensions - where he highlights the challenges of hunter gatherers - making sense of the objects they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other people.  He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war. 

These conclusions allow him to understand the development and maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor, Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life. 

Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved amplifiers: Globalization, Cliodynamics, The green revolution and resource bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.  The implications are discussed. 

Computationally adapted mind
The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span: conception, infantile puberty, girlhood, juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are described.  Brizendine notes the significant difference in how emotions are processed by women compared to men. 

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and behavioral CAS. 

Evolved female brain
CAS behavior
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
  • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
  • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
  • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
  • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
  • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
  • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
  • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 
Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
  • Our familiar time emerges
    • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
    • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
    • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
    • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
    • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

Emergence of time
Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for centuries.  Now it is finally being characterized scientifically.  That required a transformation of approach. 
Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access. 
In the book he outlines the limitations of previous psychological dogma.  Instead his use of subjective assessments opened the window to contrast totally unconscious brain activity with those including consciousness. 
He describes the research methods.  He explains the contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to specific neural activity. 
He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal workspace' to position all the experimental details into a whole. 
He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and treatment of real world mental illnesses. 
The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent consciousness research are outlined. 
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and operation introduce constraints which are discussed. 

Conscious access
Reading and writing present a conundrum.  The reader's brain contains neural networks tuned to reading.  With imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?  Dehaene explains the importance of education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia.  But he notes the reading networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved.  And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing reading and culture. 

He explains the cultural engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that enable and constrain reading and culture. 

Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural complex adaptive system (CAS) are related.  We review his explanations in CAS terms and use his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge. 

Evolved reading
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions.  In particular he explains how:
  • Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that allow
  • Life changing real-time decisions to be made, and how
  • Schematic structures provide encodings of computable control structures which operate through and on incomputable, schematically encoded, physically active structures and operationally associated production functions. 
Receptor indirection
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson describe a scientific investigation of meditation's impact on the brain.  They introduce the book by describing their experiences with meditation, science and the research establishment, their friendship, how meditation is now used in two distinct ways: deep - leading to altered traits & wide - that can reach the multitudes; which the book reviews as it critiques the claims and research used to back them up. 

Goleman and Davidson describe meeting as Harvard psychology graduate students, interested in consciousness, and how minds work.  They rebel against the behavioral orthodoxy, visit Asia and discover the Eastern tradition of exploring and altering the mind. 

Goleman had travelled to Sri Lanka to understand an Asian model of the mind, which he presented to the undergraduates at Harvard.  Goleman and Davidson developed it into a shared vision of consciousness.  It took over twenty years for scientific theory and experimental data to catch up and align with this model.  Much of the prior experimental data had to be abandoned. 

They introduce meditation's impact on the amygdala responding to pain and stress. 

They look at the changes in:
  • Stress
  • Compassion
  • Attention
  • Self-awareness; and the potential for use of mediation in psychiatry. 
And they warn of the occurrence of dark nights. 
They detail how scientists were able to study the brains of Tibetan meditation masters, starting with Mingyur Rinpoche, and detect meditation altering traits. 
Finally they discuss the potential benefits of meditation and strategies to distribute it broadly to a busy America. 

Meditating neurons
Tara Brach was worried from a young age that there was something terribly wrong with her: she like many others felt unworthy.  She responded by developing Radical Acceptance.  Brach then explains the steps in applying it: pause, greet what happens next with unconditional friendliness; allowing us to:
  • Initially attend to the sensations of our body, 
  • Accept the wanting self and discover its source of boundless love.  
  • Welcome fear with a widening attention, accept the pain of death and become free.  
  • Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion for ourselves and others.  
  • Focus on our basic goodness to counter Western culture turning anger, at being betrayed, towards ourselves.  Extend observing this goodness in everyone.  This enables the use of loving-kindness.  
  • Leverage friendships to understand more about our shared nature and strengthen Radical Acceptance.  
  • Realize our Buddha nature. 

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic code and machinery.  It provides an analog of the Buddhist presence. 

Compassionate CAS
The influence of childhood on behavior is significant.  Enneagrams define personality types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of childhood driven wounds. 

The Enneagram becomes a tool to enable interested people to transform from the emotionally wounded base, hidden within the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence. 

Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear.  In response each of us adopts an induced Basic Desire of the type.  But as we develop the inner observer, it will support presence and undermine the identification that supports the armor of the type. 

The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type armor:
  1. Triadic self revealing: Instinctive, feeling, thinking; childhood needs that became significant wounds
  2. Social style groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for managing inner conflict
  3. Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for defending childhood wounds
Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual distortions reflected in the interests of the variants. 

The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development: unhealthy, average, healthy, liberation; including their current center of gravity, steriotypical social role, wake-up call, leaden rule, red flag, and direction of integration and disintegration. 

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family and social life.  Emergent evolved amplifers can be constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies. 

Enneagram strategies
Antonio Damasio argues that ancient & fundamental homeostatic processes, built into behaviors and updated by evolution have resulted in the emergence of  nervous systems and feelings.  These feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general systems supporting enteric operation, are later ubiquitously integrated into the 'images' built by the minds of higher animals including humans. 

Damasio highlights the separate development of the body frame in the building of minds. 

Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness.  His chain of emergence suggests the 'order of things.'  He stresses the end-to-end integration of the organism which undermines dualism.  And he reviews Chalmers hard problem of consciousness. 

Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the cultural creative process, linking culture to homeostasis.  He sees cultures as supporting the development of tools to improve our lives.  But the results of the creative process have added stresses to our lives. 

Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Each of the [super]organisms discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems:
  • Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns well with CAS theory. 
  • Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS examples. 

Emergence of feelings
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent van Gogh in Arles. 

Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven to create, and successfully invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and especially portraits.  Vincent worked hard to allow artists like him-self to innovate.  But Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis. 

Nemeczek also provides a brief history of Vincent's life. 

Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
 
Vincent creates
Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, writes a hilarious memoir, full of anecdotal and sometimes morbid humor and gossip, which describes his immediate family, upbringing, development as a singer songwriter, stardom and its support for his problems, collapse and eventual recovery. 

Elton stresses the serendipitous nature of his emergence as a musician.  He describes the contributions  of his parents, Stanley & Sheila, mother's sister, and her mother Ivy; who formed his early childhood proximate environment which prepared him for a job in entertainment: he developed his performance in the club circuits, setup a commercial partnership with Bernie Taupin to write songs; entering a network based around Dick James Music.  And he almost got married. 

DJM focused Elton and Bernie's initial song writing while they studied the songs they admired and Elton did session work, tightening his performance skills and paying for the food.  A first album supported touring and the formation of a band.  A second one sent them to the US where Elton became an overnight sensation.  And during this period of time Elton's testosterone level ramped.  Life changed dramatically. 

Stardom provided many rewards but there were still life's problems to deal with.  Elton was befriended by his idol, John Lennon; he achieved new heights of success but, sensitive to any hint of failure and fraud, suicidally disassociated. 

His career crested, he struggled with loneliness and drugs, and foresaw a fearful vision of his future, as fame caged him idly in hotels between concerts.  His hair abandoned him.  But he was saved by the challenge of transforming the collapsed Watford football club.  He retired from touring which allowed him the time to reconstruct his life. 

Empowered by success, supported by the removal of constraints, Elton dominates - limiting feedback, doing whatever he hopes will bring him happiness: trying new options, expanding the range and increasing the quantity of mind altering substances; eventually hitting John Reid and marrying Renata. 

He allows his drug use to enter the recording studio.  Problems stress him.  He is frightened by a cancer scare, AIDS, inspired by Ryan White, angered by the Sun, and saddened at breaking Renata's heart.  But he was there for Ryan White's final days.  And his lover Hugh Williams confronted Elton about his string of addictions.  Elton finally agreed he had a problem.  He went to rehab, stopped hating himself, gave up his current addictions, accepted the influence of a higher force, and began admiring the everyday world and other people. 

It seemed the higher force was supporting Elton's progress: he wrote the music for the Lion King, met David Furnish who accepted Elton warts and all; they both enjoyed a friendship with Gianni Versace; until Gianni was murdered.  Princess Diana died soon after, and Elton performed at the funeral.  He toured with Billy Joel and aimed to do the same with Tina Turner.  While his new records sold well he found himself in debt and terminated the management relationship with John Reid Enterprises. 

Elton and Bernie improved their situations: Elton started writing film scores, he helped turn the film Billy Elliot into a musical, Bernie lobbied Elton to improve the way they were making records, Elton and David entered into a civil partnership, and Elton made a record with his seminal influence: Leon Russell. 

Elton and David became parents of two boys: Zachary and Elijah; using their sperm a surrogate mother and network in California.  They quietly get married when the UK allows.  Elton's mum remains difficult and cruel to him, but he is sad when she dies, and many at the funeral recall her fun side with him.  Being parents increases the long-term stresses on their lives, forcing them to adjust, so they can be there for their boys.  But Elton needs to go out with a bang! And everyone helps. 

Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details of the creative process from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
 
My song
Richard Feynman outlines a series of amusing vignettes, as he reviews his life story. 

Richard's personality encouraged him to patiently seek out fun: performing Shewhart cycles with electricity, in his childhood laboratory, and aligning theory, and practice through building and fixing radios.  Leonardo's life inspired him to try innovation, which he concluded was hard.  He played with the emotion in communications, a skill which he used later at Caltech.  And he made a game of avoiding following orders at MIT.  Working during the holidays revealed the benefit of joining theory and practice. 

Feynman enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton, where the successful approach to science was just like his.  His approach was based on patience and fun: he used his home lab and other tools for qualitative exploration.  Overtime he added experimental techniques.  He would test the assertions in articles with amusing investigations; with his mind aligned by feelings of joy.  Everyone at Princeton heard he would want to be hypnotized.  He was driven to compare the challenges of complex subjects being taught at Princeton to his current pick.  In his summer recess he explored biology.  Gathering problems in challenging areas of science, and then picking one to solve, supported his creativity.  And his practical orientation and situation when growing up in Far Rockaway, supported his desire for choices and adolescent dislike for purely intellectual and cultural pursuits.  Being mostly self-taught, he developed different approaches to problems than the standard strategies provided by mass education. 

Richard saw his skill set as very different to that exhibited by his father.  But are they very different?

While Richard was at Princeton, America became concerned about the implications of the European war.  After a friend enlisted he decided to dedicate his summer holiday to helping the war effort.  Feynman got involved in the Manhattan Project, and went to Los Alamos where he experienced constraints, applied by: the military, the physics of the project, him on Niels Bohr; but was freed from them by Von Neumann.  The records & reports of the project were kept in filing cabinets.  Richard explored the weaknesses of the locks and safes deployed to secure these secrets.  Just after the war he was called up by the draft board for a medical but was rejected for being mentally unfit. 

After the war, Richard was asked to become a professor at Cornell.  He initially struggled in this role: Too young to match expectations, stressed by the demands of his new job and his recent experiences; until he adopted an approach that focused on fun.  He enjoyed knowing about numbers: using, learning about them and the tools to use them, and competing with others; to calculate, interpolate and approximate a value the fastest. 
Traveling to Buffalo in a light plane once a week to give a physics lecture before flying back the next morning wasn't much fun for Richard.  So he used the stipend to visit a bar after each lecture to meet beautiful women.  Richard liked bars and nightclubs, spending a summer in Albuquerque frequenting one, and later ones in Las Vegas, as he explored how to get the girls he drank with to sleep with him. 

Richard reflects on various times when he made government officials obey their parts of contracts: patent fees, limits on red tape;
 
Richard became frustrated with his life at Cornell, seeing more things that interested him on the sunny west coast at Caltech.  Both institutions, and Chicago, offered him incentives to help his decision making, but Richard began to find reevaluating the alternatives a waste of time and he saw risks in a really high salary, deciding he would move to Caltech and stay there. 

Richard is invited to attend a scientific symposium in Japan.  Each of the US attendees is asked to learn a little Japanese.  Richard takes lessons, persists, can converse effectively, but stops when he finds the cultural parts of the language conflict with his individualism. 

Richard was unhappy with his achievements in physics.  He felt: slower than his peers, not keeping up or understanding the latest details, fearful that he could not cope; as the community worked to understand the laws of beta decay.  But Martin Block pushed him to question the troubling parity premise.  Encouraged by Oppenheimer the community focused on parity and failures were discovered in a cascade of reports.  Richard attended a meeting where Lee & Yang discussed a failure and a theory to explain it.  Richard felt terrified and could not understand what they said.  His sister pushed him to change his attitude: act like a student having fun, read every line and equation of their paper; he would understand it.  And he did, as well as developing additional insights about what was happening and what still seemed conflicted.  He reported his ideas back to the community.  After Richard returned from Brazil he reviewed the confusion of facts with Caltech's experimental physicists who made him aware of Gell-mann abandoning another former premise of Beta decay.  Feynman realized his ideas were consistent: fully and simply describing the details of beta decay.  He had identified the workings of a fundamental law.  Years later he was awarded the Nobel prize for physics.  He was conflicted about the prize and attending the ceremony, but eventually enjoyed the trip, where he discussed cultural achievement with the Japanese ambassador. 

Richard was interested in the operation of the brain, modeling it on a digital computer.  He explored hallucinations and the reality of experiences. 

Richard lobbies for integrity in science. 

In aspects of his life that weren't focused directly on science, Richard was quirky.  He would tease those who asked for his help: pushing bargains to their logical conclusion; insisting on everyone keeping to their part of the agreement.  And he paid no attention to the logistical details of planning.  He loved percussion, playing: drums, bongos, baskets, tables, Frigideira; and became quite a success.  He eventually discovered art could be fun, and tried to express his joy at the underlying mathematical beauty of the physical world.  He had a great art teacher.  But he discovered although he could eventually draw well he did not understand art. 

Many of the artists he met were fakers, and even the powerful, who were interested in integrating art and science, did not understand either subject.  He found the situation was similar in other complex adaptive systems: philosophy, religion and economics; which he dabbled in for a while but found the strategies of other people practicing the study of such subjects made him angry and disturbed, so he avoided participating in them.  It seemed ironic that he was eventually asked to help in bringing culture to the physicists!

He discusses issues in teaching creative physics in Brazil.  He gets involved in the California public school text book selection process which he concluded was totally broken, but also reveals how his father provided him with a vision of how our world works, inspiring his interest in experimentation and physical theory. 

Following our summary of his main points, RSS reviews how his personality, family and cultural history supported his creative development from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
 
Richard draws
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes. 
Accumulating small changes
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and the emergence of agents. 
Autonomous emergence
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work.  He shows how these phenomena are sustained.  The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition. 
Constraint based phenomena
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CAS behavior



Summary
The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociology.  The rich network of adaptive in evolutionary biology is a trait that increased the number of surviving offspring in an organism's ancestral lineage.  Holland argues: complex adaptive systems (CAS) adapt due to the influence of schematic strings on agents.  Evolution indicates fitness when an organism survives and reproduces.  For his genetic algorithm, Holland separated the adaptive process into credit assignment and rule discovery.  He assigned a strength to each of the rules (alternate hypothesis) used by his artificial agents, by credit assignment - each accepted message being paid for by the recipient, increasing the sender agent's rule's strength (implicit modeling) and reducing the recipient's.  When an agent achieved an explicit goal they obtained a final reward.  Rule discovery used the genetic algorithm to select strong rule schemas from a pair of agents to be included in the next generation, with crossing over and mutation applied, and the resulting schematic strategies used to replace weaker schemas.  The crossing over genetic operator is unlikely to break up a short schematic sequence that provides a building block retained because of its 'fitness';  In Deacon's conception of evolution, an adaptation is the realization of a set of constraints on candidate mechanisms, and so long as these constraints are maintained, other features are arbitrary. 
flows he outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for scientific research on behavior. 

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured to successfully enter niches we now occupy. 

Behave
In Robert Sapolsky's book 'Behave' he binds his research on baboons to the complex adaptive systems (
This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 

John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
CAS) that influence their and our behavior. 

The Behavior
Sapolsky explains the approach of the book.  In the first part some good or bad behavior occurs driven by selection of a strategy.  Typically the context and meaning of the behavior are more complex than the mechanics.  The complexity can only be understood by incorporating all of the following aspects: 
In the second part of the book Sapolsky looks at realms of behavior where the strategies already described are most important.  This includes behaviors that are:
He concludes by summarizing that nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else.  But he says we lucky educated humans must try to cope with complexity and be our best.  We can be scientific and compassionate indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them.  The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others.  Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive.  Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions. 
. 

And he notes the challenges in developing these complex descriptions:

One Second Before
Sapolsky explores the neurobiology of the brain that commanded the muscles to act in the second before the behavior.  He leverages Maclean's Triune brain is Dr. Paul MacLean's popular but discredited 1940s theory of the brain.  He proposed a three layer structure:
  1. Reptilian inner brain containing circuits for basic survival; which is interfaced to layer 2 through the hypothalamus and together with the brain stem, spine and projections into the body make up the autonomic nervous system. 
  2. Limbic middle brain containing emotional circuits which signal layer 1 through the hypothalamus. 
  3. Rational outer brain which is uniquely human.  
 because while wrong it provides a good organizing metaphor for the automaticity, emotion are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
and cognition is the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals according to Princeton's Jonathan Cohen. 
aspects of behaviors.  What were the crucial proximate
Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents.  This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS.  The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents.  These software agents are aggregates. 
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined. 
agents?
Within this representation Sapolsky calls out three brain regions that are the most significant contributors to this final common pathway that funnels all the factors of the overall
This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 

John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
CAS, described in subsequent chapters of Behave, to converge and create our best and worst behaviors.  The main
Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents.  This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS.  The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents.  These software agents are aggregates. 
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined. 
agents are the: Amygdala, Frontal cortex, mesolimbic includes projections between the tegmentum and the accumbens, amygdala, hippocampus; is together with the mesocortical pathway the major network in the brain's reward system, allowing dopamine-producing neurons to broadcast widely.  /mesocortical dopamine pathways includes projections between the tegmentum and the prefrontal cortex; is together with the mesolimbic pathway the major network in the brain's reward system, broadcasting to regions throughout the cerebral cortex. 
; with other occasional bit players.  And their contributions alter as the agent's adapt depending on the other factors of the
This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 

John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
CAS.  This then affects the other factors: fusiform is a region of the brain which supports advanced mechanisms of shape recognition and implements the early stages of reading.  Subliminal priming with words did not depend on the shape of the word.  The fusiform gyrus was able to process the abstract identity of a word without caring if it was upper or lower case.   While high up in the cortex it can operate below the level of conscious experience.  It contributes to social emotions with:
  • Its face area being more activated by faces with in-group skin color.  
  • It activating when shown pictures of cars in automobile aficionados. 
  • It activating when shown pictures of birds in birdwatchers; since it really recognizes examples of items from an individual's emotionally salient categories. 
pays attention to what ever has become highly salient to that individual. 

The Amygdala
The amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
  • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
  • Participates in disgust
  • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
  • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
  • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
  • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
  • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
  • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
  • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
 is strongly associated with aggression, fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful.  The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger.  There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala.  Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart.  The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario.  And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault.  Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships.  The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna.  This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. 
, anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards.  Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias.  Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density.  Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women.  Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety.  Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children.  Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future.  Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders.  Treatments for anxiety differ.  50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac).  Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga.  But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT.  Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge. 
, social & emotional are emotions that are induced in response to other people's signals, are implemented by specific brain regions including: Prefrontal cortex, Insula cortex, Anterior cingulate cortex, Amygdala; receive lots of projections from interoceptive networks.  Sapolsky asserts in the moments just before we prioritize a consequential act the process is less rational and autonomous than we assume.  There are many significant signals from the prior seconds to minutes that effect social emotions:
  • Our brains respond subliminally to skin color very quickly: Amygdala activates, Fusiform face area activates; prior to the conscious stream activating the anterior cingulate and DLPFC which then inhibit the amygdala. 
  • Social dominance is culture independent and accurately subliminally assessed after a 40-millisecond exposure.  Stable status relations activate the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and DLPFC, while a dynamic situation also activates the amygdala.  
  • People who are subliminally judged attractive by the medial orbitofrontal cortex are considered kinder, smarter and more honest.  They are given more breaks. 
  • Faces and eyes in particular are most important subliminal cues.  They are monitored by the fusiform.  People respond more appropriately under the subliminal influence of eyes. 
  • Olfactory sensors send more direct projections to the limbic network than other sensory networks.  Pheromones signal fear activating the amygdala. 
  • Observing pain responses in others results in empathy even among young children. 
  • Words are important emotional signals providing unconscious priming of social responses.  Kahneman & Tversky demonstrated how the phrase '95% survival rate' is found to be a more acceptable choice than '5% death rate'.  Sapolsky notes that prosocial word priming fosters cooperation with antisocial word priming doing the opposite.  
  • Cultural objects such as visible: flags, team badges; subliminally modify in-group outgroup decisions. 
  • The presence of women in a situation alters the responses of men: Increased risk-taking, more focus on luxuries, increased aggression; in circumstances where conflict is already encouraged but not when status is achieved prosocially.  
  • Physical environment shapes behavior as demonstrated by Philip Zimbardo and leveraged in broken windows policing.  
  • Bodily adjustments to sensory structures introduce adaptive complexity, with the brain being influenced to become more sensitive and alter the sensor networks to make some more sensitive.  But these adaptations also vary culturally.  Collectivist cultures focus on a visual scene's surrounding contextual information while people from individualistic cultures focus on the focal object!  
decision making integrates situational context, state and signals to prioritize among strategies and respond in a timely manner.  It occurs in all animals, including us and our organizations: 
  • Individual human decision making includes conscious and unconscious aspects.  Situational context is highly influential: supplying meaning to our general mechanisms, & for robots too.  Emotions are important in providing a balanced judgement.  The adaptive unconscious interprets percepts quickly supporting 'fast' decision making.  Conscious decision making, supported by the: DLPFC, vmPFC and limbic system; can use slower autonomy.  The amygdala, during unsettling or uncertain social situations, signals the decision making regions of the frontal lobe, including the orbitofrontal cortex.  The BLA supports rejecting unacceptable offers.  Moral decisions are influenced by a moral decision switch.  Sleeping before making an important decision is useful in obtaining the support of the unconscious in developing a preference.  Word framing demonstrates the limitations of our fast intuitive decision making processes.  And prior positive associations detected by the hippocampus, can be reactivated with the support of the striatum linking it to the memory of a reward, inducing a bias into our choices.  Prior to the development of the PFC, the ventral striatum supports adolescent decision making.  Neurons involved in decision making in the association areas of the cortex are active for much longer than neurons participating in the sensory areas of the cortex.  This allows them to link perceptions with a provisional action plan.  Association neurons can track probabilities connected to a choice.  As evidence is accumulated and a threshold is reached a choice is made, making fast thinking highly adaptive.  Diseases including: schizophrenia and anorexia; highlight aspects of human decision making. 
  • Organisations often struggle to balance top down and distributed decision making: parliamentry government must use a process, health care is attempting to improve the process: checklists, end-to-end care; and include more participants, but has systemic issues, business leaders struggle with strategy. 
, social reflects the amygdala's particular sensitivity to unsettling social circumstances that stimulate anxiety because of uncertainty.  Being unsure of your place in a hierarchy is unsettling activating the amygdala.  Rationally going against a counter-factual but group agreed judgement stimulates the amygdala.   uncertainty is when a factor is hard to measure because it is dependent on many interconnected agents and may be affected by infrastructure and evolved amplifiers.  This is different from Risk.  , [moral] disgust is a universal human emotion.  Pinker notes it has its own facial expression and is codified in food taboos.  The mind must be associated with the proximate environment and parents minimize the risk for their omnivorous children by teaching them what foods to eat and what to avoid.  The children's minds are initially receptive to trying all foods but their brains subsequently lock in on the foods they have experienced.  These parental choices are affected by schematic influence on what has been beneficial.  Adolescent's brain developments undermine these constraints enabling intergroup transfers.  Disgust is modulated by the insula cortex which projects signals to the amygdala.  Adult humans merge moral and physical disgust enabling metaphorical out grouping. 
; with lots of supporting experimental evidence.  It gets signals from all sensory systems.  It is especially signalled about: pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems.  But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis.  These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems.  Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'.  Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers.  A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex.  The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks.  Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so.  Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety.  Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US.  Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation. 
, disgust.  It sends alarms throughout the brain & body and has fast circuits to stimulate movement.  Sapolsky explains how learning allows signals interpreted in sub-regions (e.g. auditory in the BLA is the basolateral amygdala, a relatively recently evolved part of the amygdala which learns stimuli to fear and then signals the central amygdala.  It recieves inputs from all sensory networks.  Some are fast pathways that allow the BLA to detect and respond when the sensory cortex is unaware.  But it is far less accurate than the cortex.  The BLA's learning involves increased excitability of synapses coupling the BLA and central amygdala.  This is due to gene driven: Increased levels of growth factors promoting new connections, more receptors for excitatory neurotransmitters in dendritic spines.  The BLA also responds to signals from the frontal cortex that a stimulus no longer appears frightening.  This subset of BLA cells respond inhibiting the associating subset.  Stress and glucocorticoids increase levels of CRH and BDNF encouraging the building of new dendrites and synapses. 
) of the amygdala to be bound: synaptic, a neuron structure which provides a junction with other neurons.  It generates signal molecules, either excitatory or inhibitory, which are kept in vesicles until the synapse is stimulated when the signal molecules are released across the synaptic cleft from the neuron.  The provisioning of synapses is under genetic control and is part of long term memory formation as identified by Eric Kandel.  Modulation signals (from slow receptors) initiate the synaptic strengthening which occurs in memory. 
, growth factor are chemical signals which stimulate cellular growth.  In the brain they induce plasticity. 
changes refers to lasting changes to the brain that occur throughout the life span of the organism.  Many aspects of the brain can be altered into adulthood.  Almost anything in the nervous system can change in response to sustained stimulus.  And in a different environment the changes will often reverse.  The changes include:
  • The strength of dendritic input alters due to genetic, neural and hormonal signals
    • Hebb notes that memories require strengthening of preexisting synapses.  Glutamate responsive neurons' post synaptic dendritic spines have two types of receptor: non-NMDA and NMDA.  NMDA channels are responsible for this strengthening mechanism.  LTP then occurs to prolong the increase in excitability of the synapse. 
    • The LTP operation results in calcium diffusion which triggers new spine formation in adjacent parts of the dendrite.  Eventually that can stimulate dentrite growth enabling more neurons to connect. 
    • Short term stress promotes hippocampal LTP.  
    • Sustained stress promotes:
      • Hippocampal & frontal cortex  LTD & suppresses LTP.  Subsequent reductions in NCAM then reduce dendrite and synapse density. 
      • Amygdala LTP and suppresses LTD boosting fear conditioning.  It increases BDNF levels and expands dendrites in the BLA. 
    • Depression and anxiety reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number by reducing BDNF. 
  • The axon's conditions for
    • Initiating an action potential. 
      • Progesterone boosts GABA-ergic neurons response to GABA decreasing the excitability of other neurons over a period of hours. 
    • Duration of a neuron's refractory period.  Testosterone shortens the refractory period of amygdala and amygdala target neurons over a period of hours. 
  • Synaptic connections being constantly removed and recreated
  • Synapses being created or destroyed.  Stimulation generates additional dendritic spines which become associated with a nearby axon terminal and within weeks a synapse forms.  The synapse then contributes calcium diffusion through LTP triggering more spine formation.  When dendritic spines recede synapses disappear. 
  • Cortical maps change to reflect alterations in the inputs and outputs from the body. 
  • Birth of brain cells in many areas of adult brains: the hippocampus (where 3% are replaced each month) and olfactory bulb and lesser amounts in the cortex. 
  • Restructuring after brain damage including axonal plasticity.  Distant rerouting of axons is observed but no mechanism has been identified yet. 
  • Vision is plastic in predators, where the eyes are moved during final development.  Dehaene argues for neuronal recycling supporting reading.  
; to the central area is a relatively ancient evolved part of the amygdala which processes 'innate' fears.  It projects to the BNST to raise the heart rate and blood pressure in preparation for fight and flight. 
linking the signals to fear.  And signals from the frontal cortex can teach the amygdala not to fear some bound signal any more: medial PFC in Buckner's fMRI based analysis is part of the brain's default mode network.  It facilitates the flexible use of information during the construction of self-relevant mental simulations.  Nauta considered its ventromedial part as participating in the limbic system.  With the medial temporal lobe it converges on important integration nodes: posterior cingulate cortex.   signals to the inhibitory circuits of the BLA that a sound is not to be feared.  Even when involved in pleasure is the outcome of the dopamine reward system, argues UCSF professor Robert Lustig.  He, like the early Christians, contrasts [addiction oriented] pleasure with serotonin driven happiness & contentment. 
the amygdala actually contributes awareness of the uncertainty of a potential pleasure and anxiety, fear & anger is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend.  When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater.  Anger is mostly experienced as a rapid wave that then quickly dissipates.  When it is repressed, for example by a strong moral sense (superego), it can sustain, inducing long term stress. 
that the reward may not happen.  And feedback from the autonomic nervous system does not alter what is felt but does change the intensity.  Fear and aggression are not inevitably intertwined by the amygdala but typically become so for people who are already prone to this and when aggression is reactive and frenzied. 

The Frontal Cortex
Sapolsky stresses the frontal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires, responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  It is significant that it is the last brain region to fully mature.  This only happens during the mid-twenties.  The frontal cortex is highly distinctive: evolution, size, complexity.  There are many unique, highly individuated, primate genes active in the frontal cortex.  And one unique cell type: the von Economo neuron are also called spindle neurons and are:
  • Found only in: Primates, Whales, Dolphins, Elephants;
  • Present in the: Insula, Anterior cingulate - focused on empathy; integrating and repurposing these basic facilities into high level capabilities such as moral disgust. 
  • First neurons destroyed by FTD. 
which is central to empathy is the capability to relate to another person from their perspective.  It is implemented by spindle neurons.  Empathy towards others is controlled by the right-hemisphere supramarginal gyrus.  Empathy is context dependently mediated by estrogen.  It develops over time: Piaget's preoperational stage includes rudimentary empathy, Theory of mind supports the development; initially feeling someone's pain as one integrated being, then for them and eventually as them.  In adults, when someone else is hurt the anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala & insula activates projecting [scapegoating] to the vmPFC.  If the pain is physical the PAG activates and motor neurons for the area where the other person was injured.  The intertwining of the ACC amygdala & insula in adults results in attribution of fault even when there is none which can make it hard to step in and actually help.  But in seven-year-olds the activation is concrete: PAG and sensory & motor cortexes with minimal coupling to the rudimentary vmPFC.  In older children the vmPFC is coupled to limbic structures.  Ten to twelve year olds abstract empathy to classes of people.  Brizendine asserts young girls develop empathy earlier than boys, because their evolved greater neuronal investment in communication and emotion networks.  Year old girls are much more responsive to the distress of other people than boys are.  At 18 months girls are experiencing infantile puberty.  By adolescence the vmPFC is coupled to theory of mind regions and intentional harm induces disgust via the amygdala.  Sapolsky explains adolescent boys are utilitarian and tend to accept inequality more than girls do.  But both sexes accept inequality as the way it is.  Sociopaths do not develop empathy.   (ACC is either the
  • Anterior cingulate cortex which:
    • Includes the subgenual ACC and the paragenual ACC, and Brodmann areas 24, 25, 32 and 33. 
    • The gyrus of the ACC has two functional components, which both operate abnormally in mood disorders: depression, anxiety & bipolar.  The
      • Rostral/ventral part is involved in emotional processes and autonomic functions.  It connects to the hippocampus, amygdala, orbital prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, nucleus accumbens.  It is overactive during regular or bipolar depression. 
      • Caudal part is involved in cognition and the control of behavior.  It connects with the dorsal PFC, secondary motor cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex
    • Is a central focus of empathy supporting people relating to other's pain.  This is dependent on oxytocin. 
    • In non-human mammals it processes interoceptive signals.  The ACC focuses the internal signals into high level 'gut intuitions.'  Pain catches the ACC's attention. 
    • Performs discrepancy detection from the outcome that was predicted - at a high level.  The ACC cares about the meaning of what is predicted. 
      • If the ACC has been convinced that a pain killer placebo has inhibited pain signals, the ACC will stay silent about actual pain that is signalled from interoceptive networks.  
      • The ACC will signal: physical pain, emotional pain, metaphorical pain, anxiety, disgust, embarrassment, social exclusion especially in adolescence; as one and the same.  The ACC's abnormalities being associated with major depression. 
    • Has a bridging role between the empathetic and self-interested pain monitor.  Sapolsky notes the ACC is essential for learning fear and conditioned avoidance by observation alone through an intermediate step of shared representation of self.  He concludes "At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about the other person in pain as an add-on." 
  • American College of Cardiology
) and binding the insula to moral disgust.  The frontal cortex looks for patterns in its situational models and selects from strategic actions.  It partners with the cerebellum is involved with the efficiency of fine movement. It modulates the force and range of motion and is involved in motor coordination and the learning of motor skills.  Damage to the cerebellum impairs standing, walking, or performance of coordinated movements. A virtuoso pianist or other performing musician depends on their cerebellum.  The cerebellum receives visual, auditory, vestibular, and somatosensory information.  It also receives information about individual muscular movements being directed by the brain.  The cerebellum integrates this information and modifies the motor outflow, exerting a coordinating and smoothing effect on the movements.  However, patients born without a cerebellum have survived reasonably well.  The cerebellum is part of the implicit learning mechanism.  It is required for the rabbit eye-blink to be classically conditioned to respond to a sound, and puff of air (threat to eye).  It integrates the sound and puff and outputs the response to the motor area (blink).  Levitin has shown the cerebellum participates in aspects of emotion and auditory processing.  He found the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout a session listening to music, modeling the beat, rewarding a match between the internal and external rhythm and integrating movement. And he notes the cerebellum providing Williams syndrome sufferers with their capability to play music.   which takes over repeated strategies including: bravery, honesty; making them automatic and rapid.  Within the frontal cortex the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is
  • The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex.  It evolved most recently.  During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum.  The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior.  It regulates feelings.  Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice.  The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions.  It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory.  It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels.  It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat.  Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it.  Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.  
 (PFC) sub-region is the decider, but it gets tired easily after which decisions become less prosocial is prioritizing benefiting others through: Help, Charity, Truth; even if many are acts of restitution to balance out antisocial acts.  Due to the Insula's binding of physical and metaphorical disgust, physically washing your hands can be enough to reduce the need for a prosocial act.  
.  Social complexity expands the frontal cortex.  FTD is frontotemporal degeneration, the most common form of dementia for people under age 60.  It results from progressive loss of neurons from the frontal or temporal lobes.  The first neurons known to die are von Economo neurons.  Tau and TDP43 proteins both congregate in these areas.  People with FTD display behavioral disinhibition and socially inappropriate behaviors.  They appear apathetic and don't make decisions because the PFC is being destroyed.  FTD can impact brain regions that help is relate to other people.  This makes the sufferers indifferent to those around them.  They may struggle with addictions: overeating, smoking, spending; which can destroy the lives of the whole family.  There are three main types: Behavioral variant, primary progressive aphasia, and disturbances of motor function.  FTD is associated with genetic risk factors: mutated tau gene, mutated C90RF72 gene, and mutated progranulin gene which does not make enough of the protein; generating tau and TDP43 protein clumps in the brain which lead to neuron death in the PFC.  FTD provides insights into creativity, showing that the onset of FTD in the left hemisphere stops it from inhibiting the creative and musical right hemisphere. 
destroys it.  The dorsolateral PFC is dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is:
  • At the heart of decision making - highly rational, unsentimental 
  • A major agent of working memory
  • The most recently evolved part of the prefrontal cortex.  
  • Mainly interconnected with other parts of the cortex. 
  • Must be inhibited or it constrains right brain creativity. 
is the most socially rational part of the prefrontal cortex.  It inhibits the amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
  • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
  • Participates in disgust
  • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
  • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
  • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
  • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
  • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
  • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
  • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
's out-grouping responses.  The ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) is:
  • Focused on the impact of emotion on decision making
  • A participant in limbic system operations 
  • Many human behaviors involve interactions between the vmPFC, the limbic system & the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Part of decision making is for the limbic system to internally simulate (often with the help of the sympathetic nervous system) what alternative outcomes of a decision will feel like with the results of these somatic marker analyses being reported to the vmPFC.  
  • Damage to the vmPFC results in bad decision making: Poor judgement in choosing friends & partners, Failure to respond to negative feedback; because they can't feel the issues; and are overly controlled by the logical contribution of the DLPFC. 
imparts essential decision making integrates situational context, state and signals to prioritize among strategies and respond in a timely manner.  It occurs in all animals, including us and our organizations: 
  • Individual human decision making includes conscious and unconscious aspects.  Situational context is highly influential: supplying meaning to our general mechanisms, & for robots too.  Emotions are important in providing a balanced judgement.  The adaptive unconscious interprets percepts quickly supporting 'fast' decision making.  Conscious decision making, supported by the: DLPFC, vmPFC and limbic system; can use slower autonomy.  The amygdala, during unsettling or uncertain social situations, signals the decision making regions of the frontal lobe, including the orbitofrontal cortex.  The BLA supports rejecting unacceptable offers.  Moral decisions are influenced by a moral decision switch.  Sleeping before making an important decision is useful in obtaining the support of the unconscious in developing a preference.  Word framing demonstrates the limitations of our fast intuitive decision making processes.  And prior positive associations detected by the hippocampus, can be reactivated with the support of the striatum linking it to the memory of a reward, inducing a bias into our choices.  Prior to the development of the PFC, the ventral striatum supports adolescent decision making.  Neurons involved in decision making in the association areas of the cortex are active for much longer than neurons participating in the sensory areas of the cortex.  This allows them to link perceptions with a provisional action plan.  Association neurons can track probabilities connected to a choice.  As evidence is accumulated and a threshold is reached a choice is made, making fast thinking highly adaptive.  Diseases including: schizophrenia and anorexia; highlight aspects of human decision making. 
  • Organisations often struggle to balance top down and distributed decision making: parliamentry government must use a process, health care is attempting to improve the process: checklists, end-to-end care; and include more participants, but has systemic issues, business leaders struggle with strategy. 
to social/emotional challenges and tightly integrates with limbic structures supports emotional circuits: Amygdala, Hippocampus, Septum, Habenula, Mammillary bodies; all of which signals the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The broad interconnections of these regions with a part of the frontal lobe suggested to Walle Nauta that it (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) is a quasi-member of the limbic network.  .  These two subparts are inversely correlated but typically collaborate: both are needed in different situations to be prosocial.  Stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  • The short term response to the stressor
    • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  In order for the body to destroy bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area.  The induced inflammation signals the brain to activate the insula and through it the ACC.  But when the stressor is
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
      • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
      • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
    • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
impacts the frontal cortex: like distraction and heavy cortical load, it can dissociate the frontocortical importance signal about some action from the Boolean do/don't do it signal, explaining why you may do exactly the wrong thing under stress. 

Emotion are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
can be controlled to some extent by thought.  There are two strategies:

Sapolsky argues the frontal cortex gets its metaphorical motivation to do the harder thing from the brains dopaminergic reward systems. 

The Mesolimbic/Mesocortical Dopamine System
Dopamine is a synaptic signal supporting generalized goal-directed behavior & anticipation of reward.  Its significance is that the receptors that detect the signal are of the slow acting type and are used to alter (modulate) the response of fast acting dopaminergic neural circuits in which the receptors are deployed (LTP).  The signal detects significant changes including predictions of models and actual results which differ unexpectedly.  Dopamine is released primarily by neurons of the ventral tegmental area and the substantia nigra.  The dopamine network architecture is designed to signal the possibility of any type of reward: Norm violation punishment, Winning a lottery, & Misfortune of an envied competitor.  Dopamine signalling:
  • Rescales continuously to accommodate the range of intensity offered by different stimuli.  So dopamine's responses to any reward habituate.  GABA is released by some tegmental neurons to induce habituation.  This allows addictions to develop. 
  • Reflects the anticipation of reward.  It supports establishment of a relationship between a signal, working for a reward and obtaining the reward, but subsequently dopamine is mainly released encouraging the work, right after the signal supporting anticipation of the reward.  Anticipation requires learning and is reflected in hippocampus activity.  That explains context dependent cravings.  And the learning architecture means reliable cues become rewarding.  The accumbens supports willpower.  And dopamine
  • Promotes goal-oriented behavior needed to obtain & likely to achieve the reward - through the dopamine projections to the prefrontal cortex.  That makes dopamine central to:
    • Motivation.  This binding fails in depression - due to stress and in anxiety - due to signals from the amygdala.  
    • The prefrontal cortex's mesocortically stimulated support for willpower to act to delay rewards.  To sustain work for delayed rewards additional dopamine is released based on the length of the delay and the rewards uncertainty (modelled in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - which promotes the long term and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - which promotes the short term) and the anticipated size of the reward (modelled in the accumbens).  Impulsiveness in ADHD is reflected in abnormal dopamine processing.  Addictive drugs bias the dopamine network towards impulsiveness.  
  • Is lowered by certain gene variants which induce: less dopamine in the synapse, fewer receptors, lower responsiveness of receptors; associated with (as tiny effects in hugely varying social scenarios): sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, extroversion; where:
    • The receptor D4's gene shows high variability.  The D47R form is relatively unresponsive to dopamine.  
    • Dopamine is degraded by COMT.  The COMT gene includes a variant which is highly efficient reducing dopamine signalling but with complicating gene/environment interactions.  
    • Dopamine is removed from the synapse by a reuptake transporter DAT. 
is central to
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions.  In particular he explains how:
  • Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that allow
  • Life changing real-time decisions to be made, and how
  • Schematic structures provide encodings of computable control structures which operate through and on incomputable, schematically encoded, physically active structures and operationally associated production functions. 
motivated pursuit of goals.  Sapolsky explains the best and the worst behaviors involve the projections from the ventral tegmentum is part of the tegmentum which contains dopamine long system cell bodies (high levels of D(2)).  Their axons branch extensively and reach many areas including: Mesolimbic to the limbic system: amygdala, hippocampus; Tegmentostriatal to the nucleus accumbens, Mesocortical to the forebrain including the prefrontal cortex.  The terminals are fairly evenly distributed through out layers 1 - 6.  So dopamine can modulate input and output excitatory and inhibitory transmissions.  If a rodent wins a fight on his home territory, there are long-lasting increases in levels of testosterone receptors enhancing pleasurable effects.  The lateral ventral tegmental area is now known to be one of two large adrenergic pathways, along with the locus ceruleus.  During child birth the ventral tegmentum deploys more oxytocin receptors increasing its sensitivity to the neuropeptide.  
to the:
Social interactions are affected by dopamine rewards:

The Anticipation of Reward
The dopamine is a synaptic signal supporting generalized goal-directed behavior & anticipation of reward.  Its significance is that the receptors that detect the signal are of the slow acting type and are used to alter (modulate) the response of fast acting dopaminergic neural circuits in which the receptors are deployed (LTP).  The signal detects significant changes including predictions of models and actual results which differ unexpectedly.  Dopamine is released primarily by neurons of the ventral tegmental area and the substantia nigra.  The dopamine network architecture is designed to signal the possibility of any type of reward: Norm violation punishment, Winning a lottery, & Misfortune of an envied competitor.  Dopamine signalling:
  • Rescales continuously to accommodate the range of intensity offered by different stimuli.  So dopamine's responses to any reward habituate.  GABA is released by some tegmental neurons to induce habituation.  This allows addictions to develop. 
  • Reflects the anticipation of reward.  It supports establishment of a relationship between a signal, working for a reward and obtaining the reward, but subsequently dopamine is mainly released encouraging the work, right after the signal supporting anticipation of the reward.  Anticipation requires learning and is reflected in hippocampus activity.  That explains context dependent cravings.  And the learning architecture means reliable cues become rewarding.  The accumbens supports willpower.  And dopamine
  • Promotes goal-oriented behavior needed to obtain & likely to achieve the reward - through the dopamine projections to the prefrontal cortex.  That makes dopamine central to:
    • Motivation.  This binding fails in depression - due to stress and in anxiety - due to signals from the amygdala.  
    • The prefrontal cortex's mesocortically stimulated support for willpower to act to delay rewards.  To sustain work for delayed rewards additional dopamine is released based on the length of the delay and the rewards uncertainty (modelled in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - which promotes the long term and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - which promotes the short term) and the anticipated size of the reward (modelled in the accumbens).  Impulsiveness in ADHD is reflected in abnormal dopamine processing.  Addictive drugs bias the dopamine network towards impulsiveness.  
  • Is lowered by certain gene variants which induce: less dopamine in the synapse, fewer receptors, lower responsiveness of receptors; associated with (as tiny effects in hugely varying social scenarios): sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, extroversion; where:
    • The receptor D4's gene shows high variability.  The D47R form is relatively unresponsive to dopamine.  
    • Dopamine is degraded by COMT.  The COMT gene includes a variant which is highly efficient reducing dopamine signalling but with complicating gene/environment interactions.  
    • Dopamine is removed from the synapse by a reuptake transporter DAT. 
network architecture ensures once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine release is associated with anticipation.  Mastery, expectation & confidence of the result are rewarded until the binding fails!  The learning involves a circuit of excited hippocampus is a part of the medial temporal lobe of the brain involved in the temporary storage or coding of long-term episodic memory.  It includes the dentate gyrus.  Memory formation in the cells of the hippocampus uses the MAP kinase signalling network which is impacted by sleep deprivation.  The hippocampus dependent memory system is directly affected by cholinergic changes throughout the wake-sleep cycle.  Increased acetylcholine during REM sleep promotes information attained during wakefulness to be stored in the hippocampus by suppressing previous excitatory connections while facilitating encoding without interference from previously stored information.  During slow-wave sleep low levels of acetylcholine cause the release of the suppression and allow for spontaneous recovery of hippocampal neurons resulting in memory consolidation.  It was initially associated with memory formation by McGill University's Dr. Brenda Milner, via studies of 'HM' Henry Molaison, whose medial temporal lobes had been surgically destroyed leaving him unable to create new explicit memories.  The size of neurons' dendritic trees expands and contracts over a female rat's ovulatory cycle, with the peak in size and cognitive skills at the estrogen high point.  Adult neurogenesis occurs in the hippocampus (3% of neurons are replaced each month) where the new neurons integrate into preexisting circuits.  It is enhanced by learning, exercise, estrogen, antidepressants, environmental enrichment, and brain injury and inhibited by various stressors explains Sapolsky.  Prolonged stress makes the hippocampus atrophy.  He notes the new neurons are essential for integrating new information into preexisting schemas -- learning that two things you thought were the same are actually different.  Specific cells within the hippocampus and its gateway, the entorhinal cortex, are compromised by Alzheimer's disease.  It directly signals area 25. 
amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
  • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
  • Participates in disgust
  • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
  • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
  • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
  • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
  • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
  • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
  • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
 & frontal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires, responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
projecting to dopamine neurons.  This ensures the return of context-dependent cravings in addiction results from changes in the operation of the brain's reward network's regulatory regions, altering the anticipation of rewards.  Addictive drugs mediate the receptors of the reward network, increasing dopamine in the pleasure centers of the cortex.  The learned association of the situation with the reward makes addiction highly prone to relapse, when the situation is subsequently experienced.  This makes addiction a chronic disease, where the sufferer must remain vigilant to avoid relapse inducing situations.  Repeated exposure to the addictive drug alters the reward network.  The neurons that produce dopamine are impaired, no longer sending dopamine to the reward target areas, reducing the feeling of pleasure.  But the situational association remains strong driving the addict to repeat the addictive activity.  Destroying the memory of the pleasure inducer may provide a treatment for addiction in the future.  Addiction has a genetic component, which supports inheritance.  Some other compulsive disorders: eating, gambling, sexual behavior; are similar to drug addiction. 
.  And it means more dopamine will be generated when the result becomes uncertain. 

University of Michigan's Huda Akil showed reliable cues to an impending reward eventually become rewarding.  Rats eventually enjoy the cue.  This is the foundation of fetishes. 

Crucially, dopamine binds the value of a reward to the strategic action that attains the result.  This is implemented in the dopaminergic projections to the PFC is prefrontal cortex which is:
  • The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex.  It evolved most recently.  During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum.  The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior.  It regulates feelings.  Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice.  The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions.  It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory.  It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels.  It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat.  Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it.  Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.  
 which decides on the strategy to execute. 

Dopamine still operates effectively when the work is prolonged and the reward is delayed.  To maintain the action a second gradual increase in dopamine occurs.  The increase is a function of the length of the delay and the anticipated size of the reward.  The level of the increase in dopamine is controlled by the accumbens is a region of the basal forebrain (striatum) rostral to the preoptic area and immediately adjacent to the septum.  The nucleus accumbens was closely associated with the limbic system, mediates the impact of emotion and plays an important role in reinforcement.  If a rodent wins a fight on his home territory, there are long-lasting increases in levels of testosterone receptors enhancing pleasurable effects.  When prairie voles first mate, epi-genetic state changes are induced in the accumbens to support pair-bonding.  The accumbens projects to brain regions associated with movement.  The major pathways of dopaminergic neurons begin in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area.  The amygdala projects back to the accumbens.  The tegmentostriatal system begins in the ventral tegmental area and projects to the nucleus accumbens.  The nucleus accumbens includes high levels of D1, D2 and D3 dopamine receptors located on the spine & shafts of dendrites of excitatory cells reduce the transfer of excitation from the dendrites to the cell bodies, so only especially strong excitatory inputs get through to the cell body to elicit excitation.  It also has D4 dopamine receptors which are highly variable.  The accumbens responds differently to rewards depending on maturity: In juveniles all reward levels result in the same response activity level, During adolescence the accumbens responds to small rewards negatively, and large rewards hugely, In adults the rewards result in measured scaled positive responses.  Chronic stress depletes dopamine from the nucleus accumbens biasing humans towards depression.   while dlPFC is dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is:
  • At the heart of decision making - highly rational, unsentimental 
  • A major agent of working memory
  • The most recently evolved part of the prefrontal cortex.  
  • Mainly interconnected with other parts of the cortex. 
  • Must be inhibited or it constrains right brain creativity. 
& vmPFC is ventromedial prefrontal cortex which is:
  • Focused on the impact of emotion on decision making
  • A participant in limbic system operations 
  • Many human behaviors involve interactions between the vmPFC, the limbic system & the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Part of decision making is for the limbic system to internally simulate (often with the help of the sympathetic nervous system) what alternative outcomes of a decision will feel like with the results of these somatic marker analyses being reported to the vmPFC.  
  • Damage to the vmPFC results in bad decision making: Poor judgement in choosing friends & partners, Failure to respond to negative feedback; because they can't feel the issues; and are overly controlled by the logical contribution of the DLPFC. 
neurons assess the time delay.  A flexible arrangement that supports delayed gratification.  Differences in the volume of these different agents in different people results in the variations in effectiveness of performing delayed gratification.  Sapalsky adds that humans can delay gratification for huge amounts of
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
  • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
  • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
  • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
  • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
  • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
  • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
  • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 
Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
  • Our familiar time emerges
    • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
    • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
    • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
    • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
    • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time in pursuit of abstract goals.  It has not yet been determined exactly how this is done. 

A Final Small Topic: Serotonin
Sapolsky notes that serotonin is a neurotransmitter.  it is:
  • Inversely associated with: human impulsive, cricket, mollusk, crustacean; aggression.  Low levels of serotonin are associated with impulsive aggression ranging from psychological measures of hostility to overt violence and cognitive impulsivity and impulsive suicide. 
  • Nearly all synthesized in the Raphe nucleus.  Tryptophan hydroxylase makes serotonin from the amino-acid tryptophan.  Monoamine oxidase degrades serotonin.  The serotonin receptor binds serotonin to initiate cross membrane signalling.  The serotonin transporter actively removes serotonin from synapses.  Serotonin levels can be increased with: exercise, high light levels, consumption of chickpeas and traditional lime boiled corn tortillas.  Reuptake is inhibited by SSRIs.  Variants of the genes coding for these various enzymes alter the strength of their effects. 
  • Increasing serotonin signalling does not lessen impulsiveness in normal subjects but did in those prone to impulsivity.  However, such experiments are fraught with complexity:
    • Transient changes induced by drugs may adjust the immediate levels of serotonin but may not demonstrate structural effects. 
    • Gene variants likely produce structural changes in the developing brain.  
    • Effects monitored in experiments are often tiny.  
    • Behavioral changes: Violence, Arson, Exhibitionism; seen in different test subjects may be difficult to compare.  
    • Monoamine oxidase has high gene/environment interactions undermining heritability estimates.  Its gene promotor is regulated by stress and glucocorticoids.  So non genetic factors such as childhood adversity and adult provocation appear to be significant.  
 effects impulsivity.  The raphe nucleus consists of a group of nuclei running through the core of the brain stem from the medulla to the back of the midbrain.  It projects to the tegmentum, accumbens, prefrontal cortex, & amygdala where serotonin enhances dopamine's effects on goal-directed behavior.  The raphe is associated with:
  • Neural mechanisms of sleep and waking.  Jouvet and Renault produced large lesions that destroyed 80 - 90 % of the raphe in cats inducing complete insomnia for 3-4 days.  Slow-wave, but not REM sleep, gradually returned, but never exceeded 2.5 hours a day.  Sleep amount correlates to the 5-HT concentration.  The neurons of the raphe nuclei are rich in serotonin (5-HT).  It is suspected that the dorsal raphe nuclei inhibit the phasic components of REM sleep and thus prevent them from occurring at inappropriate times.  The activity of serotonergic neurons is low during REM sleep and higher at other times.  The dorsal raphe nucleus has been associated with 
  • Depression.  
  • Impulsive aggression which is associated with relatively low serotonin levels.   
 projects serotonin signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
to the tegmentum is involved in homeostatic and reflex pathways in the brain.  It includes: ventral; areas.  It forms the base of the midbrain.  It projects via the: mesolimbic dopamine pathway to limbic structures, mesocortical dopamine pathway to the prefrontal cortex.  Sapolsky explains that Wolfram Schultz demonstrated that following a reward, the dopamine system codes for discrepancy from expectation--get what you expected, and there's a steady-state dribble of dopamine.  Get more reward and/or get it sooner than expected, and there's a big burst; less and or later a decrease.  Some tegmental neurons respond to positive discrepancy from expectation, others to negative; appropriately, the latter are local neurons that release inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA.  Those same neurons participate in habituation, where the reward that once elicited a big dopamine response becomes less exciting.  These coding neurons get projections from the frontal cortex where the expectancy/discrepancy calculations occur. 
, accumbens is a region of the basal forebrain (striatum) rostral to the preoptic area and immediately adjacent to the septum.  The nucleus accumbens was closely associated with the limbic system, mediates the impact of emotion and plays an important role in reinforcement.  If a rodent wins a fight on his home territory, there are long-lasting increases in levels of testosterone receptors enhancing pleasurable effects.  When prairie voles first mate, epi-genetic state changes are induced in the accumbens to support pair-bonding.  The accumbens projects to brain regions associated with movement.  The major pathways of dopaminergic neurons begin in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area.  The amygdala projects back to the accumbens.  The tegmentostriatal system begins in the ventral tegmental area and projects to the nucleus accumbens.  The nucleus accumbens includes high levels of D1, D2 and D3 dopamine receptors located on the spine & shafts of dendrites of excitatory cells reduce the transfer of excitation from the dendrites to the cell bodies, so only especially strong excitatory inputs get through to the cell body to elicit excitation.  It also has D4 dopamine receptors which are highly variable.  The accumbens responds differently to rewards depending on maturity: In juveniles all reward levels result in the same response activity level, During adolescence the accumbens responds to small rewards negatively, and large rewards hugely, In adults the rewards result in measured scaled positive responses.  Chronic stress depletes dopamine from the nucleus accumbens biasing humans towards depression.  , prefrontal cortex (PFC) is
  • The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex.  It evolved most recently.  During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum.  The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior.  It regulates feelings.  Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice.  The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions.  It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory.  It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels.  It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat.  Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it.  Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.  
 and amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
  • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
  • Participates in disgust
  • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
  • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
  • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
  • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
  • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
  • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
  • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
 where the serotonin enhances dopamine is a synaptic signal supporting generalized goal-directed behavior & anticipation of reward.  Its significance is that the receptors that detect the signal are of the slow acting type and are used to alter (modulate) the response of fast acting dopaminergic neural circuits in which the receptors are deployed (LTP).  The signal detects significant changes including predictions of models and actual results which differ unexpectedly.  Dopamine is released primarily by neurons of the ventral tegmental area and the substantia nigra.  The dopamine network architecture is designed to signal the possibility of any type of reward: Norm violation punishment, Winning a lottery, & Misfortune of an envied competitor.  Dopamine signalling:
  • Rescales continuously to accommodate the range of intensity offered by different stimuli.  So dopamine's responses to any reward habituate.  GABA is released by some tegmental neurons to induce habituation.  This allows addictions to develop. 
  • Reflects the anticipation of reward.  It supports establishment of a relationship between a signal, working for a reward and obtaining the reward, but subsequently dopamine is mainly released encouraging the work, right after the signal supporting anticipation of the reward.  Anticipation requires learning and is reflected in hippocampus activity.  That explains context dependent cravings.  And the learning architecture means reliable cues become rewarding.  The accumbens supports willpower.  And dopamine
  • Promotes goal-oriented behavior needed to obtain & likely to achieve the reward - through the dopamine projections to the prefrontal cortex.  That makes dopamine central to:
    • Motivation.  This binding fails in depression - due to stress and in anxiety - due to signals from the amygdala.  
    • The prefrontal cortex's mesocortically stimulated support for willpower to act to delay rewards.  To sustain work for delayed rewards additional dopamine is released based on the length of the delay and the rewards uncertainty (modelled in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - which promotes the long term and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - which promotes the short term) and the anticipated size of the reward (modelled in the accumbens).  Impulsiveness in ADHD is reflected in abnormal dopamine processing.  Addictive drugs bias the dopamine network towards impulsiveness.  
  • Is lowered by certain gene variants which induce: less dopamine in the synapse, fewer receptors, lower responsiveness of receptors; associated with (as tiny effects in hugely varying social scenarios): sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, extroversion; where:
    • The receptor D4's gene shows high variability.  The D47R form is relatively unresponsive to dopamine.  
    • Dopamine is degraded by COMT.  The COMT gene includes a variant which is highly efficient reducing dopamine signalling but with complicating gene/environment interactions.  
    • Dopamine is removed from the synapse by a reuptake transporter DAT. 
's
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions.  In particular he explains how:
  • Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that allow
  • Life changing real-time decisions to be made, and how
  • Schematic structures provide encodings of computable control structures which operate through and on incomputable, schematically encoded, physically active structures and operationally associated production functions. 
effects on goal-directed behavior. 

Seconds to minutes before
Having reviewed what the nervous system was doing to generate our best and worst behaviors Sapolsky now aims to explore:
  • What outside stimulus, acting through what sensory channel and targeting which parts of the brain, prompted this behavior?
  • Were you aware of that environmental stimulus?
  • What stimuli had your brain made you particularly sensitive to?
  • What does this tell us about our best and worst behaviors?
Huge variety of external and internal cues impact behavior and many of these signals are subliminal.  This makes us less rational and autonomous decision makers than we typically assume. 

Sapolsky repeats that an animal's dominant sensory channel has the most direct access to the limbic system supports emotional circuits: Amygdala, Hippocampus, Septum, Habenula, Mammillary bodies; all of which signals the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The broad interconnections of these regions with a part of the frontal lobe suggested to Walle Nauta that it (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) is a quasi-member of the limbic network.  .  And he stresses that subliminal sensory cues are hugely significant. 

Pertinent to our best and worst behaviors our brains are highly attuned to skin color, noting within a hundred milliseconds:
  1. Amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
    • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
    • Participates in disgust
    • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
    • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
    • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
    • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
    • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
    • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
    • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
     activation and more so in someone who tests positive for race bias
  2. Fusiform is a region of the brain which supports advanced mechanisms of shape recognition and implements the early stages of reading.  Subliminal priming with words did not depend on the shape of the word.  The fusiform gyrus was able to process the abstract identity of a word without caring if it was upper or lower case.   While high up in the cortex it can operate below the level of conscious experience.  It contributes to social emotions with:
    • Its face area being more activated by faces with in-group skin color.  
    • It activating when shown pictures of cars in automobile aficionados. 
    • It activating when shown pictures of birds in birdwatchers; since it really recognizes examples of items from an individual's emotionally salient categories. 
    face area is less activated by other-race faces. 
The medial prefrontal cortex in Buckner's fMRI based analysis is part of the brain's default mode network.  It facilitates the flexible use of information during the construction of self-relevant mental simulations.  Nauta considered its ventromedial part as participating in the limbic system.  With the medial temporal lobe it converges on important integration nodes: posterior cingulate cortex.   differentially activates when considering misfortune to members of one's own race. 

Eyes are major sensors in primates, based on opsins deployed in the retina & especially fovea, signalling the visual system: Superior colliculi, Thalamus (LGN), Primary visual cortex; and indirectly the amygdala.  They also signal [social] emotional state to other people.  And they have implicit censorious power with pictures of eyes encouraging people within their view to act more honorably.  Eyes are poor scanners and use a saccade to present detail slowly to the fovea.  The eye's optical structures and retina are supported by RPE.  Eyes do not connect to the brain through the brain stem and so still operate in locked-in syndrome.  Evo-devo shows eyes have deep homology.  High pressure within the eye can result in glaucoma.  Genetic inheritance can result in retinoblastoma.  Age is associated with AMD. 
and then faces present the most significant subliminal signals for watching humans.  Emotion are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
is discerned primarily from the eyes. 

Subliminal auditory cues also alter behavior in a racially biased way. 

Subliminal smell is still significant in humans.  The olfactory network directly projects to the limbic system: 

Beauty is accepted cross-culturally is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings: 
    • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
    • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
, and from an early age, as indicating, through the medial orbitofrontal cortex is a rich club hub region of the prefrontal cortex, involved in representing emotion & reward in decision making.  It is positioned immediately above the orbits where the eyes sit.  The medial part judges the beauty of faces, minds and acts and will conflate them in social emotion evaluations.  The orbitofrontal cortex receives projections from the: hippocampus & associated areas of the cingulate, retrosplenial & entorhinal cortices, anterior thalamus, amygdala, midline thalamus, non-isocortical insula, mediodorsal thalamus.  , smarter, kinder & more honest people. 

Body posture is rapidly analyzed, signalling, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
social status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others.   & dominance signals the power to hurt a rival.  Maynard Smith & Parker explain that in group situations females compete for food and males compete for females.  Maleness is a huge factor for violence.  Fighting to the death is costly for all participants so instead they indicate:
  • Size and weapons to demonstrate who will win.  Males who are, or look like, better fighters: Large heads, Big men, Height; gain in dominance. 
  • Political acumen to demonstrate they won't be pushed around and have the support of other powerful groups.  Dominant males push other rivals aside and gain interest of females, enabling themselves to replicate more.  Being a signal its authenticity can be challenged and so must be defended to remain credible.  Hotheads leverage the doomsday machine to constrain rational challenges.  Bands and cultures leverage honor.  Youth and lack of resources reduce the power of rivals' political constraints. 
helping support stable social hierarchies. 

Interoceptive signals indicate the body's internal homeostatic state: Pain, Fatigue; seconds to minutes before.  The signals are conveyed to the CNS via unmyelinated C fibers or lightly myelinated A delta fibers.  Damasio suggests this is key to the fabrication of feelings, allowing interaction with the surrounding chemical environment and cross talk between axons.  These signals operate unconsciously unless mapped by feelings into consciousness.  The interoceptive 'networks': default mode network; project to brain regions that implement social emotions. 
also influence our behaviors.  Sapolsky notes evidence supporting the James-Lange theory developed by William James & Carl Lange who, independently proposed that humans decide how they feel based on interoceptive signals, rather than from external ones.  Sapolsky notes the theory reflects these signals influence on behavior where social emotion processing areas receive lots of projections from interoceptive networks.  The most notable is pain.  But he writes it fails to support specificity or speed of reactions since autonomic responses are too slow to precede awareness of an emotion. 
, that these internal feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits.  These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula.  Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience.  Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism.  They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles.  Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience.  Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints.  Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:
  • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
  • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
  • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
 shape your interpretation of external signals and your emotions.  But he notes issues of specificity and speed that make these influences rather than determinants of emotions. 

Words have significant behavioral influence.  Subliminal prime flashes a subliminal word or picture, the prime, immediately before another visible item, the target.  Experiments demonstrate that the presence of the subliminal prime speeds up conscious processing when the prime is represented consciously within a second of the initial showing. 
words shift behavior to be more or less prosocial is prioritizing benefiting others through: Help, Charity, Truth; even if many are acts of restitution to balance out antisocial acts.  Due to the Insula's binding of physical and metaphorical disgust, physically washing your hands can be enough to reduce the need for a prosocial act.  
.  Kahneman & Tversky showed word framing related to gain or loss is processed differently in decision making.  Kahneman & Tversky asked participants in an experiment, including doctors, to decide whether to administer a hypothetical drug.  When to the drug:
  • Has a 95 percent survival rate, the participants were more likely to approve its use than if it
  • Has a 5 percent death rate. 
can alter decision making integrates situational context, state and signals to prioritize among strategies and respond in a timely manner.  It occurs in all animals, including us and our organizations: 
  • Individual human decision making includes conscious and unconscious aspects.  Situational context is highly influential: supplying meaning to our general mechanisms, & for robots too.  Emotions are important in providing a balanced judgement.  The adaptive unconscious interprets percepts quickly supporting 'fast' decision making.  Conscious decision making, supported by the: DLPFC, vmPFC and limbic system; can use slower autonomy.  The amygdala, during unsettling or uncertain social situations, signals the decision making regions of the frontal lobe, including the orbitofrontal cortex.  The BLA supports rejecting unacceptable offers.  Moral decisions are influenced by a moral decision switch.  Sleeping before making an important decision is useful in obtaining the support of the unconscious in developing a preference.  Word framing demonstrates the limitations of our fast intuitive decision making processes.  And prior positive associations detected by the hippocampus, can be reactivated with the support of the striatum linking it to the memory of a reward, inducing a bias into our choices.  Prior to the development of the PFC, the ventral striatum supports adolescent decision making.  Neurons involved in decision making in the association areas of the cortex are active for much longer than neurons participating in the sensory areas of the cortex.  This allows them to link perceptions with a provisional action plan.  Association neurons can track probabilities connected to a choice.  As evidence is accumulated and a threshold is reached a choice is made, making fast thinking highly adaptive.  Diseases including: schizophrenia and anorexia; highlight aspects of human decision making. 
  • Organisations often struggle to balance top down and distributed decision making: parliamentry government must use a process, health care is attempting to improve the process: checklists, end-to-end care; and include more participants, but has systemic issues, business leaders struggle with strategy. 
. 

Symbols: National flag, Team shirt; also influence behavior.  Cues about group identity demonstrate the complex nature of the signal processing.  Asian American women primed to think about racial identity performed better in a mathematics test than those primed to think about gender.  Sapolsky notes that their assumptions about females struggling at mathematics depend on cultural influences. 

When women are present, or men are prompted to think about women, men increase their risk-taking, spend more on luxuries that signal status, and act more aggressively.  Except when men's status has been achieved prosocially in which case the presence of women makes the men more prosocial. 

The physical environment also signals changes in behavior: Broken windows is a 1982 crime theory of James Wilson and George Kelling, that was inspired by the results of vandalism experiments by Philip Zimbardo, which assumes urban disorder and vandalism undermine social constraints and encourage additional criminal and anti-social behavior.  By detecting and responding to petty vandalism rapidly it is assumed that more serious crime will be discouraged.  In New York Broken Windows was used to justify 'stop, question and frisk'.  However, Donohue & Levitt's analysis suggests an observed precipitous drop in crime rates depended on legal access to abortion. 
; which encouraged zero-tolerance policing in New York City resulting is reductions in crime. 

Sapolsky raises a complicating detail: the brain can
Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment.  This page reviews how these events become signals associated with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  CAS signals emerge from the Darwinian information model.  Signals can indicate decision summaries and level of uncertainty. 
alter the sensitivity of specific sensory modalities making some signals more influential.  Examples include: Directional sensing, Stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  • The short term response to the stressor
    • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  In order for the body to destroy bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area.  The induced inflammation signals the brain to activate the insula and through it the ACC.  But when the stressor is
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
      • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
      • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
    • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
driven alterations, Hunger based increases in sensitivity to smell of food.  There are more projections from the higher centers of the brain back to the sensory networks allowing modulation of the sensors operations.  Such complex interactions result in individuals from collectivist cultures looking at a complicated picture with foreground and background details differently to those from individualist cultures. 

Hours to days before
This is the timescale where hormones are signalling molecules: ACTH, TRH, Melanocyte stimulating hormone, Testosterone, Oxytocin, Vasopressin, Insulin, Growth hormone, Estrogen, Progesterone, Angiotensin II, Asprosin, EPO, Irisin, Leptin, FGF21 hormone, Prostaglandins, TSH, Thyroxine, Glococorticoids: Cortisol; that are transported by the circulatory system to interact with target organs having appropriate receptors.  The levels of hormones can fluctuate massively, as in pregnancy. 
influence the brain regions and sensory networks discussed previously.  The effects are mainly contingent and facilitative increasing sensitivity to preexisting tendencies setup over the longer term via adult neuroplasticity and adolescence and childhood and genetics and proximate environment including culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings: 
    • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
    • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
. 

Sapolsky's discusses testosterone is a hormone secreted by the testes, ovaries, and adrenal glands, in response to stimulation from the hypothalamic/pituitary/testicular cascade, that makes humans more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status, according to Sapolsky.  That means players of the Ultimatum Game, if previously given testosterone can become more generous.  High testosterone in a fetus masculinizes the brain.  Males generate 10 times the amount.  It is the trigger for sexual desire in males and females, stimulating the hypothalamus.  Testosterone's effect is highly socially contextual so it may encourage acts of kindness or aggression (when challenged).  The level of testosterone does not predict which individuals will be aggressive in: Birds, Fish, Mammals including primates.  Genes impact the potency of testosterone by altering the enzymes that: Construct it, Convert it to estrogen, code the androgen receptor.   This androgen receptor includes a variable polyglutamine repeat which alters the sensitivity to the testosterone signal.  The more potent form is associated with boys showing more dramatic 'masculinization' of the cortex.  But the detected genetic influences are small.  Testosterone decreases activity in the prefrontal cortex and its functional coupling to the amygdala while increasing the coupling between the amygdala & the thalamus.  Testosterone shortens the refactory period of amygdaloid & amygdaloid target neurons.  This results in impulsive risk taking and more focus on unfamiliar faces and distrust of them.  Testosterone increases activity in the ventral tegmentum projecting dopamine to enhance place preference.  Winners of fights become more willing to fight in part due to testosterone increasing confidence and optimism and reducing fear and anxiety.  And winning at: Chess, Athletics, Stock trades; induces the BNST to add testosterone receptors increasing its sensitivity to the hormone.  People become overconfident and overly optimistic. 
which he asserts is far less relevant to aggression than has been assumed and oxytocin is a peptide hormone which makes humans more prosocial to and socially competent in their in-group and more antisocial to everyone else.  The effects are contingent; changing during stress and in the presence of a threatening out-group.  Oxytocin makes people look at eyes longer, encouraging improved accuracy at perceiving emotions.  It enhances activity in the TPJ supporting modeling of other people's thinking.  Dogs and their owners secrete oxytocin increasing the amount of eye contact between them.  It is associated with pair bonding.  Brizendine explains that oxytocin and dopamine production are stimulated by ovarian estrogen at the onset of puberty, encouraging girls to connect and bond with their girlfriends, reducing stress, and exclude the out-group.  It is central to female mammals wanting to nurse, nursing, and remembering their child.  Its effects are context dependent and so is the regulation of the genes that control oxytocin.  Variants of a gene CD38 which facilitates oxytocin secretion from neurons are associated with differing levels of activation of the fusiform face area when looking at faces.  Sapolsky describes an oxytocin receptor gene variant that is associated with children showing: Extreme aggression, A callous unemotional style; foreshadowing adult psychopathy.  And another receptor gene variant is associated with childhood social disconnection and unstable adult relationships.  Gene/environment interactions complicate the interpretation of the presence of particular gene variants.  Hypothalamic neurons send projections to: ventral tegmentum which also becomes more receptive during child birth, nucleus accumbens, hippocampus, amygdala where it inhibits the central amygdala suppressing fear & anxiety consistently in men while still allowing women to respond to threats to their infants, frontal cortex, olfactory network where it helps new rat mums to learn the smell of their offspring; where oxytocin prepares the brain for in-group bonding, out-grouping, birth and maternal behavior.  Outside the brain hypothalamic neurons in females send oxytocin to the posterior pituitary where it enters the blood stream stimulating uterine contraction during labor & supporting milk production for weaning.  Disorders associated with oxytocin abnormalities include ASD. 
that is not as prosocial is prioritizing benefiting others through: Help, Charity, Truth; even if many are acts of restitution to balance out antisocial acts.  Due to the Insula's binding of physical and metaphorical disgust, physically washing your hands can be enough to reduce the need for a prosocial act.  
as often claimed. 

Males have more testosterone is a hormone secreted by the testes, ovaries, and adrenal glands, in response to stimulation from the hypothalamic/pituitary/testicular cascade, that makes humans more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status, according to Sapolsky.  That means players of the Ultimatum Game, if previously given testosterone can become more generous.  High testosterone in a fetus masculinizes the brain.  Males generate 10 times the amount.  It is the trigger for sexual desire in males and females, stimulating the hypothalamus.  Testosterone's effect is highly socially contextual so it may encourage acts of kindness or aggression (when challenged).  The level of testosterone does not predict which individuals will be aggressive in: Birds, Fish, Mammals including primates.  Genes impact the potency of testosterone by altering the enzymes that: Construct it, Convert it to estrogen, code the androgen receptor.   This androgen receptor includes a variable polyglutamine repeat which alters the sensitivity to the testosterone signal.  The more potent form is associated with boys showing more dramatic 'masculinization' of the cortex.  But the detected genetic influences are small.  Testosterone decreases activity in the prefrontal cortex and its functional coupling to the amygdala while increasing the coupling between the amygdala & the thalamus.  Testosterone shortens the refactory period of amygdaloid & amygdaloid target neurons.  This results in impulsive risk taking and more focus on unfamiliar faces and distrust of them.  Testosterone increases activity in the ventral tegmentum projecting dopamine to enhance place preference.  Winners of fights become more willing to fight in part due to testosterone increasing confidence and optimism and reducing fear and anxiety.  And winning at: Chess, Athletics, Stock trades; induces the BNST to add testosterone receptors increasing its sensitivity to the hormone.  People become overconfident and overly optimistic. 
and are more aggressive but Sapolsky notes that aggression occurs even when castration has removed testosterone from males.  Sapolsky concludes aggression is typically more about social learning than testosterone.  We reward aggression too often.  Testosterone has effects but they are hugely context dependent and typically amplify preexisting tendencies.  Testosterone boosts impulsivity, risk taking and feeling are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits.  These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula.  Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience.  Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism.  They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles.  Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience.  Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints.  Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:
  • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
  • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
  • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
 good from such activities.  It also makes winning a fight feel good.  And it supports the formation of a dominance hierarchy and encourages us to maintain status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others.  .  Only during a challenge does an increases in testosterone make aggression more likely.  When a person's pride depends on being prosocial rising testosterone will increase acts of kindness. 

Oxytocin became interesting to neurobiologists when it was realized the hypothalamic is essential to many instinctive operations of the body.  It can be viewed as the executor of emotion: happiness, sadness, aggression, eroticism and mating, relaying the amygdala's responses to low level sensory signals.  It has many small sub-regions whose main functions are to regulate hunger, thirst, temperature, sexual behavior, parenting, heart rate, blood pressure, sleep cycles, and similar body operations.  Kandel notes it includes a nucleus containing two distinct populations of neurons: one that regulates aggression and one that regulates sex and mating.  At the intersection neurons are active in both.  Depending on the intensity of the stimulus applied to these neurons mating (weak) or aggression (danger) is activated.  This probably contributes to sexual rage and is why some couples derive extra pleasure from sexual experiences following an argument.  The hypothalamus's (paraventricular nucleus) is closely connected to the pituitary which secrets hormones into the bloodstream ( => acth -> adrenal cortex => cortisol (+)->  amygdala & (-)-> hippocampus).  It directly signals area 25. 
neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
that sent axons, a long extension of a neuron which has a membrane constructed to support the uni-directional flow of action potential from the dendritic tree and cell body to the synaptic terminals.   to the posterior pituitary also sent projections throughout the brain, including to the: ventral tegmentum is part of the tegmentum which contains dopamine long system cell bodies (high levels of D(2)).  Their axons branch extensively and reach many areas including: Mesolimbic to the limbic system: amygdala, hippocampus; Tegmentostriatal to the nucleus accumbens, Mesocortical to the forebrain including the prefrontal cortex.  The terminals are fairly evenly distributed through out layers 1 - 6.  So dopamine can modulate input and output excitatory and inhibitory transmissions.  If a rodent wins a fight on his home territory, there are long-lasting increases in levels of testosterone receptors enhancing pleasurable effects.  The lateral ventral tegmental area is now known to be one of two large adrenergic pathways, along with the locus ceruleus.  During child birth the ventral tegmentum deploys more oxytocin receptors increasing its sensitivity to the neuropeptide.  
, accumbens is a region of the basal forebrain (striatum) rostral to the preoptic area and immediately adjacent to the septum.  The nucleus accumbens was closely associated with the limbic system, mediates the impact of emotion and plays an important role in reinforcement.  If a rodent wins a fight on his home territory, there are long-lasting increases in levels of testosterone receptors enhancing pleasurable effects.  When prairie voles first mate, epi-genetic state changes are induced in the accumbens to support pair-bonding.  The accumbens projects to brain regions associated with movement.  The major pathways of dopaminergic neurons begin in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area.  The amygdala projects back to the accumbens.  The tegmentostriatal system begins in the ventral tegmental area and projects to the nucleus accumbens.  The nucleus accumbens includes high levels of D1, D2 and D3 dopamine receptors located on the spine & shafts of dendrites of excitatory cells reduce the transfer of excitation from the dendrites to the cell bodies, so only especially strong excitatory inputs get through to the cell body to elicit excitation.  It also has D4 dopamine receptors which are highly variable.  The accumbens responds differently to rewards depending on maturity: In juveniles all reward levels result in the same response activity level, During adolescence the accumbens responds to small rewards negatively, and large rewards hugely, In adults the rewards result in measured scaled positive responses.  Chronic stress depletes dopamine from the nucleus accumbens biasing humans towards depression.  , hippocampus is a part of the medial temporal lobe of the brain involved in the temporary storage or coding of long-term episodic memory.  It includes the dentate gyrus.  Memory formation in the cells of the hippocampus uses the MAP kinase signalling network which is impacted by sleep deprivation.  The hippocampus dependent memory system is directly affected by cholinergic changes throughout the wake-sleep cycle.  Increased acetylcholine during REM sleep promotes information attained during wakefulness to be stored in the hippocampus by suppressing previous excitatory connections while facilitating encoding without interference from previously stored information.  During slow-wave sleep low levels of acetylcholine cause the release of the suppression and allow for spontaneous recovery of hippocampal neurons resulting in memory consolidation.  It was initially associated with memory formation by McGill University's Dr. Brenda Milner, via studies of 'HM' Henry Molaison, whose medial temporal lobes had been surgically destroyed leaving him unable to create new explicit memories.  The size of neurons' dendritic trees expands and contracts over a female rat's ovulatory cycle, with the peak in size and cognitive skills at the estrogen high point.  Adult neurogenesis occurs in the hippocampus (3% of neurons are replaced each month) where the new neurons integrate into preexisting circuits.  It is enhanced by learning, exercise, estrogen, antidepressants, environmental enrichment, and brain injury and inhibited by various stressors explains Sapolsky.  Prolonged stress makes the hippocampus atrophy.  He notes the new neurons are essential for integrating new information into preexisting schemas -- learning that two things you thought were the same are actually different.  Specific cells within the hippocampus and its gateway, the entorhinal cortex, are compromised by Alzheimer's disease.  It directly signals area 25. 
, amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
  • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
  • Participates in disgust
  • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
  • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
  • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
  • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
  • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
  • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
  • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
 & frontal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires, responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
.  Maternal behaviors are induced by oxytocin and its production is boosted during birth by the hypothalamus.  And the ventral tegmentum increases its sensitivity to oxytocin by increasing the volume of receptors, in biological cells these proteins are able to span the cell membrane and present an active site which is tailored to interact with a specific signal.  When the receptor pairs with its signal, its overall shape changes resulting in changes in the part internal to the cell which can be relayed by the cells signalling infrastructure.  In neuron synapses one type of receptor (fast) is associated with an ion channel.  The other (slow) is associated with a signalling enzyme chain and modulates the neuron's response. 
.  In rats olfactory stimulation ensures the new mum learns the smell of her offspring. 
The male analog vasopressin developed by duplication and subsequent mutation of the vasotocin gene, along with oxytocin, during the initial formation of mammals.   It acts as a hormone regulating water retention in the kidneys.  It supports paternal behavior stimulated by a female giving birth.  Sex releases vasopressin in the nucleus accumbens of male prairie voles.  And prairie voles have more receptors in the accumbens than other voles supporting their pair bonding.  This situation is similar in bonobos relative to chimps where it encourages social bonding - but not monogamy.  Vasopressin is made in hypothalamic neurons which project to the posterior pituitary for release as a hormone.  It is also a neuropeptide transmitting from hypothalamic projections to the ventral tegmentum, nucleus accumbens, hippocampus, amygdala, and frontal cortex.  And it is made & secreted in other areas of the brain.  Vasopressin enhances aggression in paternal prairie vole males.  But the aggression is then maintained by social learning. 
supported paternal behavior.  Vasopressin receptor levels increase in the male's brain when the female gives birth. 

Oxytocin was also found to support pair bonding is an increase in the strength of relationship between parents and parents and children in some species: prairie voles, bonobos - not monogamous, and humans.  NIMH's Thomas Insel, Emory's Larry Young & Illinois's Sue Carter's research highlighted prairie voles, where pair-bonding is enabled by a genetic difference from montane voles in the operon controlling generation of the vasopressin receptor.  Oxytocin is associated with pair bonding.  There are: Higher levels of receptors in males (vasopressin) having lots of sex and in females (oxytocin) performing grooming & physical contact, Sex releases oxytocin in the nucleus accumbens of female prairie voles.  Such pair-bonded males are less interested in other females. Insel, Young & Carter engineered: (1) Male mice brains to express the prairie vole version of the vasopressin receptor in their brains resulting in grooming and huddling with familiar females.  (2) Male montane vole brains to add vasopressin receptors to the nucleus accumbens resulting in their being more socially affiliative with individual females.  .  And by inhibiting the central amygdala is a relatively ancient evolved part of the amygdala which processes 'innate' fears.  It projects to the BNST to raise the heart rate and blood pressure in preparation for fight and flight. 
it suppresses fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful.  The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger.  There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala.  Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart.  The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario.  And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault.  Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships.  The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna.  This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. 
and anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards.  Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias.  Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density.  Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women.  Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety.  Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children.  Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future.  Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders.  Treatments for anxiety differ.  50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac).  Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga.  But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT.  Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge. 
.  Except when a mother has to defend her babies where the central amygdala's instinctual fear supports oxytocin stimulated enhanced aggression. 

Oxytocin supports prosocial capabilities improving detection of happy faces and socially positive words.  It makes people study eyes for longer improving accuracy of reading emotions.  In a social-recognition-task it increases activity in the TPJ is the temporoparietal juncture: left, right; where the temporal and parietal lobes meet, an area of the cortex with projections from the thalamus, limbic system, visual, auditory and somatosensory networks.  It supports modeling of self and others. 
enhancing ideas about what other people are thinking.  But oxytocin decreases cooperation with strangers.  It helps us identify who is an Us.  Abnormalities in the oxytocin vasopressin network are associated with ASD is autism spectrum disorder.  All these disorders are characterized by difficulty connecting with others.  People who suffer from ASD show a reduced fusiform response to faces.  ASD is linked to gene variants affecting oxytocin and vasopressin, to nongenetic mechanisms that silence the oxytocin receptor gene and to lower levels of the receptor itself. 
. 

Oxytocin has contingent effects: It makes charitable people more charitable, Seeking social support occurred more when the subjects were from individual cultures, with a specific receptor variant & under stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  • The short term response to the stressor
    • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  In order for the body to destroy bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area.  The induced inflammation signals the brain to activate the insula and through it the ACC.  But when the stressor is
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
      • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
      • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
    • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
.  The actions of oxytocin & vasopressin depend on context: who you are, your environment, who they are.  Sapolsky notes that is also true for the regulation of the genes for these peptides. 

The endocrinology of Aggression in females
Sapolsky explains that this subject confuses him:

Maternal Aggression
Typically females increase aggression during pregnancy.  The increase is most significant in species with significant amounts of infanticide. 

In:

Bare-Knuckled Female Aggression
While non-maternal female competition is typically assumed to be passive and covert, Sapolsky asserts this is mistaken because:

Perimenstrual aggression and irritability
PMS is premenstrual syndrome associated with: negative mood, irritability, bloating cramps, acne; immediately prior to menstruation.  It occurs in various species.  Its symptoms vary by culture.  There is little evidence of an association with aggression. 
and PMDD is premenstrual dysphoric disorder, where the ovaries send out relatively low levels of estrogen and progesterone, which affects 2 to 5% of women impairing their normal functioning so they feel: hostility, hopeless depression, suicidal, panic attacks, fear, rage; and the PFC becomes undermined allowing unconstrained emotions to penetrate from the unconscious.  It is treated with: the continuous birth control pill, which keeps the estrogen and progesterone levels moderately high and inhibits the ovaries from sending out the hormones with large fluctuations, and, if necessary, an SSRI. 
 studies have not identified an association with aggression. 

Stress and imprudent brain function
Sapolsky notes the dilemma that important, consequential behaviors can be stressed situations and stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  • The short term response to the stressor
    • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  In order for the body to destroy bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area.  The induced inflammation signals the brain to activate the insula and through it the ACC.  But when the stressor is
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
      • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
      • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
    • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
often impacts decision making integrates situational context, state and signals to prioritize among strategies and respond in a timely manner.  It occurs in all animals, including us and our organizations: 
  • Individual human decision making includes conscious and unconscious aspects.  Situational context is highly influential: supplying meaning to our general mechanisms, & for robots too.  Emotions are important in providing a balanced judgement.  The adaptive unconscious interprets percepts quickly supporting 'fast' decision making.  Conscious decision making, supported by the: DLPFC, vmPFC and limbic system; can use slower autonomy.  The amygdala, during unsettling or uncertain social situations, signals the decision making regions of the frontal lobe, including the orbitofrontal cortex.  The BLA supports rejecting unacceptable offers.  Moral decisions are influenced by a moral decision switch.  Sleeping before making an important decision is useful in obtaining the support of the unconscious in developing a preference.  Word framing demonstrates the limitations of our fast intuitive decision making processes.  And prior positive associations detected by the hippocampus, can be reactivated with the support of the striatum linking it to the memory of a reward, inducing a bias into our choices.  Prior to the development of the PFC, the ventral striatum supports adolescent decision making.  Neurons involved in decision making in the association areas of the cortex are active for much longer than neurons participating in the sensory areas of the cortex.  This allows them to link perceptions with a provisional action plan.  Association neurons can track probabilities connected to a choice.  As evidence is accumulated and a threshold is reached a choice is made, making fast thinking highly adaptive.  Diseases including: schizophrenia and anorexia; highlight aspects of human decision making. 
  • Organisations often struggle to balance top down and distributed decision making: parliamentry government must use a process, health care is attempting to improve the process: checklists, end-to-end care; and include more participants, but has systemic issues, business leaders struggle with strategy. 
.  Sight of a large carnivore is detected in the amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
  • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
  • Participates in disgust
  • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
  • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
  • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
  • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
  • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
  • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
  • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
 which:
Sapolsky notes how we love stress in benevolent, mild, transient amounts.  In these situations the levels of glucocorticoids secreted stimulates production of dopamine is a synaptic signal supporting generalized goal-directed behavior & anticipation of reward.  Its significance is that the receptors that detect the signal are of the slow acting type and are used to alter (modulate) the response of fast acting dopaminergic neural circuits in which the receptors are deployed (LTP).  The signal detects significant changes including predictions of models and actual results which differ unexpectedly.  Dopamine is released primarily by neurons of the ventral tegmental area and the substantia nigra.  The dopamine network architecture is designed to signal the possibility of any type of reward: Norm violation punishment, Winning a lottery, & Misfortune of an envied competitor.  Dopamine signalling:
  • Rescales continuously to accommodate the range of intensity offered by different stimuli.  So dopamine's responses to any reward habituate.  GABA is released by some tegmental neurons to induce habituation.  This allows addictions to develop. 
  • Reflects the anticipation of reward.  It supports establishment of a relationship between a signal, working for a reward and obtaining the reward, but subsequently dopamine is mainly released encouraging the work, right after the signal supporting anticipation of the reward.  Anticipation requires learning and is reflected in hippocampus activity.  That explains context dependent cravings.  And the learning architecture means reliable cues become rewarding.  The accumbens supports willpower.  And dopamine
  • Promotes goal-oriented behavior needed to obtain & likely to achieve the reward - through the dopamine projections to the prefrontal cortex.  That makes dopamine central to:
    • Motivation.  This binding fails in depression - due to stress and in anxiety - due to signals from the amygdala.  
    • The prefrontal cortex's mesocortically stimulated support for willpower to act to delay rewards.  To sustain work for delayed rewards additional dopamine is released based on the length of the delay and the rewards uncertainty (modelled in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - which promotes the long term and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - which promotes the short term) and the anticipated size of the reward (modelled in the accumbens).  Impulsiveness in ADHD is reflected in abnormal dopamine processing.  Addictive drugs bias the dopamine network towards impulsiveness.  
  • Is lowered by certain gene variants which induce: less dopamine in the synapse, fewer receptors, lower responsiveness of receptors; associated with (as tiny effects in hugely varying social scenarios): sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, extroversion; where:
    • The receptor D4's gene shows high variability.  The D47R form is relatively unresponsive to dopamine.  
    • Dopamine is degraded by COMT.  The COMT gene includes a variant which is highly efficient reducing dopamine signalling but with complicating gene/environment interactions.  
    • Dopamine is removed from the synapse by a reuptake transporter DAT. 
based
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions.  In particular he explains how:
  • Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that allow
  • Life changing real-time decisions to be made, and how
  • Schematic structures provide encodings of computable control structures which operate through and on incomputable, schematically encoded, physically active structures and operationally associated production functions. 
rewards. 

Some important debunking: Alcohol
Sapolsky notes alcohols impact on judgment.  But he writes it does not cause everyone to become aggressive.  Instead people prone to aggression do become aggressive as do people who believe alcohol makes you aggressive.  That second situation demonstrates social learnings power to shape biology. 

Days to Months Before
Any behavior was produced in prior seconds by the nervous system based on sensory cues minutes to hours before with the brain's sensitivity adjusted by hormones are signalling molecules: ACTH, TRH, Melanocyte stimulating hormone, Testosterone, Oxytocin, Vasopressin, Insulin, Growth hormone, Estrogen, Progesterone, Angiotensin II, Asprosin, EPO, Irisin, Leptin, FGF21 hormone, Prostaglandins, TSH, Thyroxine, Glococorticoids: Cortisol; that are transported by the circulatory system to interact with target organs having appropriate receptors.  The levels of hormones can fluctuate massively, as in pregnancy. 
in the previous hours and days.  But in the prior days to months enormous changes occurred is lasting change to the brain that occurs throughout life.  It is also termed neural plasticity.  The changes include:
  • The strength of dendritic input alters due to genetic, neural and hormonal signals
    • Hebb notes that memories require strengthening of preexisting synapses.  Glutamate responsive neurons' post synaptic dendritic spines have two types of receptor: non-NMDA and NMDA.  NMDA channels are responsible for this strengthening mechanism.  LTP then occurs to prolong the increase in excitability of the synapse. 
    • The LTP operation results in calcium diffusion which triggers new spine formation in adjacent parts of the dendrite.  Eventually that can stimulate dentrite growth enabling more neurons to connect. 
    • Short term stress promotes hippocampal LTP.  
    • Sustained stress promotes:
      • Hippocampal & frontal cortex  LTD & suppresses LTP.  Subsequent reductions in NCAM then reduce dendrite and synapse density. 
      • Amygdala LTP and suppresses LTD boosting fear conditioning.  It increases BDNF levels and expands dendrites in the BLA. 
    • Depression and anxiety reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number by reducing BDNF. 
  • The axon's conditions for
    • Initiating an action potential. 
      • Progesterone boosts GABA-ergic neurons response to GABA decreasing the excitability of other neurons over a period of hours. 
    • Duration of a neuron's refractory period.  Testosterone shortens the refractory period of amygdala and amygdala target neurons over a period of hours. 
  • Synaptic connections being constantly removed and recreated
  • Synapses being created or destroyed.  Stimulation generates additional dendritic spines which become associated with a nearby axon terminal and within weeks a synapse forms.  The synapse then contributes calcium diffusion through LTP triggering more spine formation.  When dendritic spines recede synapses disappear. 
  • Cortical maps change to reflect alterations in the inputs and outputs from the body. 
  • Birth of brain cells in many areas of adult brains: the hippocampus (where 3% are replaced each month) and olfactory bulb and lesser amounts in the cortex. 
  • Restructuring after brain damage including axonal plasticity.  Distant rerouting of axons is observed but no mechanism has been identified yet. 
  • Vision is plastic in predators, where the eyes are moved during final development.  Dehaene argues for neuronal recycling supporting reading.  
 in the brain's structure (neuroplasticity) including:

The realization that the brain is able to change throughout its existence introduces reason for optimism in how all of us can behave. 

The mechanisms of memory in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative, or explicit, (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb suggested that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening: short term memory.  This was shown to happen for explicit memory formation in the hippocampus.  This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP.  The non-real-time learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected.   formation and neural plasticity refers to lasting changes to the brain that occur throughout the life span of the organism.  Many aspects of the brain can be altered into adulthood.  Almost anything in the nervous system can change in response to sustained stimulus.  And in a different environment the changes will often reverse.  The changes include:
  • The strength of dendritic input alters due to genetic, neural and hormonal signals
    • Hebb notes that memories require strengthening of preexisting synapses.  Glutamate responsive neurons' post synaptic dendritic spines have two types of receptor: non-NMDA and NMDA.  NMDA channels are responsible for this strengthening mechanism.  LTP then occurs to prolong the increase in excitability of the synapse. 
    • The LTP operation results in calcium diffusion which triggers new spine formation in adjacent parts of the dendrite.  Eventually that can stimulate dentrite growth enabling more neurons to connect. 
    • Short term stress promotes hippocampal LTP.  
    • Sustained stress promotes:
      • Hippocampal & frontal cortex  LTD & suppresses LTP.  Subsequent reductions in NCAM then reduce dendrite and synapse density. 
      • Amygdala LTP and suppresses LTD boosting fear conditioning.  It increases BDNF levels and expands dendrites in the BLA. 
    • Depression and anxiety reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number by reducing BDNF. 
  • The axon's conditions for
    • Initiating an action potential. 
      • Progesterone boosts GABA-ergic neurons response to GABA decreasing the excitability of other neurons over a period of hours. 
    • Duration of a neuron's refractory period.  Testosterone shortens the refractory period of amygdala and amygdala target neurons over a period of hours. 
  • Synaptic connections being constantly removed and recreated
  • Synapses being created or destroyed.  Stimulation generates additional dendritic spines which become associated with a nearby axon terminal and within weeks a synapse forms.  The synapse then contributes calcium diffusion through LTP triggering more spine formation.  When dendritic spines recede synapses disappear. 
  • Cortical maps change to reflect alterations in the inputs and outputs from the body. 
  • Birth of brain cells in many areas of adult brains: the hippocampus (where 3% are replaced each month) and olfactory bulb and lesser amounts in the cortex. 
  • Restructuring after brain damage including axonal plasticity.  Distant rerouting of axons is observed but no mechanism has been identified yet. 
  • Vision is plastic in predators, where the eyes are moved during final development.  Dehaene argues for neuronal recycling supporting reading.  
 are flexible and reversible in different environments:

Adolescence; Or, Dude, Where's my Frontal Cortex?
Adolescence in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
is the later part of the human development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
phase where it generates different behaviors from young children & adults.  It reflects the slow maturation of the frontal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires, responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
which does not obtain its adult structure and function until the mid-twenties.  Sapolsky stresses the key implications:
  1. Adolescence shapes the frontal cortex
  2. Adolescence is only understood in the context of the delayed frontal cortex's maturation, making it: frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible and world changing.  Sapolsky adds it's when someone is most likely to kill or be killed.  A time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers.  
The delayed development allows the brain to get all its parts optimized from experience to leverage the social toolset: social memory, emotional perspective taking, impulse control, empathy is the capability to relate to another person from their perspective.  It is implemented by spindle neurons.  Empathy towards others is controlled by the right-hemisphere supramarginal gyrus.  Empathy is context dependently mediated by estrogen.  It develops over time: Piaget's preoperational stage includes rudimentary empathy, Theory of mind supports the development; initially feeling someone's pain as one integrated being, then for them and eventually as them.  In adults, when someone else is hurt the anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala & insula activates projecting [scapegoating] to the vmPFC.  If the pain is physical the PAG activates and motor neurons for the area where the other person was injured.  The intertwining of the ACC amygdala & insula in adults results in attribution of fault even when there is none which can make it hard to step in and actually help.  But in seven-year-olds the activation is concrete: PAG and sensory & motor cortexes with minimal coupling to the rudimentary vmPFC.  In older children the vmPFC is coupled to limbic structures.  Ten to twelve year olds abstract empathy to classes of people.  Brizendine asserts young girls develop empathy earlier than boys, because their evolved greater neuronal investment in communication and emotion networks.  Year old girls are much more responsive to the distress of other people than boys are.  At 18 months girls are experiencing infantile puberty.  By adolescence the vmPFC is coupled to theory of mind regions and intentional harm induces disgust via the amygdala.  Sapolsky explains adolescent boys are utilitarian and tend to accept inequality more than girls do.  But both sexes accept inequality as the way it is.  Sociopaths do not develop empathy.  , self-regulation, teamwork; appropriately in this particular proximate environment. 

The nuts and bolts of frontal cortical maturation
During adolescence in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
the neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
of the frontal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires, responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
that are not used in the proximate environment prune themselves, programmed cell death is a signal initiated DNA controlled process which results in eukaryotic cells self-destructing.   while the rest migrate to their target locations, leaving an optimized network.  The
This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first leaving the relatively young dl PFC is dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is:
  • At the heart of decision making - highly rational, unsentimental 
  • A major agent of working memory
  • The most recently evolved part of the prefrontal cortex.  
  • Mainly interconnected with other parts of the cortex. 
  • Must be inhibited or it constrains right brain creativity. 
changes waiting until late adolescence.  And as the configuration streamlines myelination is the fatty insulating material deployed by Schwann cells & oligodendrocytes, both types of glial cells, around axons to improve their conduction rate.  In humans it is still occurring 25 years after birth.  It has great impact on long axons, in neurons that project over long distances, where it helps brain inter-region signalling.  The long development time of myelination allows for the later myelinated brain regions to be particularly shaped by the proximate environment. 
increases the axon, a long extension of a neuron which has a membrane constructed to support the uni-directional flow of action potential from the dendritic tree and cell body to the synaptic terminals.  's conduction speeds.  While the frontal cortex takes shape other brain regions provide cover: Ventral striatum is a region within the basal ganglia.   It is a target of the tegmentostriatal dopamine pathway.  It has been captured by brain imaging assigning values to subliminal symbols experimentally associated with winning (highly valued) and losing (low valuation) money.  During adolescence, prior to the deployment of the prefrontal cortex, the ventral striatum helps balance/control emotional decision making. 
helps out with emotional regulation. 

The pubescent generation of gonadal hormones: Testosterone is a hormone secreted by the testes, ovaries, and adrenal glands, in response to stimulation from the hypothalamic/pituitary/testicular cascade, that makes humans more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status, according to Sapolsky.  That means players of the Ultimatum Game, if previously given testosterone can become more generous.  High testosterone in a fetus masculinizes the brain.  Males generate 10 times the amount.  It is the trigger for sexual desire in males and females, stimulating the hypothalamus.  Testosterone's effect is highly socially contextual so it may encourage acts of kindness or aggression (when challenged).  The level of testosterone does not predict which individuals will be aggressive in: Birds, Fish, Mammals including primates.  Genes impact the potency of testosterone by altering the enzymes that: Construct it, Convert it to estrogen, code the androgen receptor.   This androgen receptor includes a variable polyglutamine repeat which alters the sensitivity to the testosterone signal.  The more potent form is associated with boys showing more dramatic 'masculinization' of the cortex.  But the detected genetic influences are small.  Testosterone decreases activity in the prefrontal cortex and its functional coupling to the amygdala while increasing the coupling between the amygdala & the thalamus.  Testosterone shortens the refactory period of amygdaloid & amygdaloid target neurons.  This results in impulsive risk taking and more focus on unfamiliar faces and distrust of them.  Testosterone increases activity in the ventral tegmentum projecting dopamine to enhance place preference.  Winners of fights become more willing to fight in part due to testosterone increasing confidence and optimism and reducing fear and anxiety.  And winning at: Chess, Athletics, Stock trades; induces the BNST to add testosterone receptors increasing its sensitivity to the hormone.  People become overconfident and overly optimistic. 
, Estrogen is a generic term for a number of related steroid hormones each of which works differently.  Estrogen:
  • Is generated in the ovaries.  It supports the generation of oxytocin, and so is associated with attachment, nurturing and other affiliative behaviors. 
  • Supports verbal memory.  Removal of ovaries without immediate estrogen replacement therapy degrades verbal memory performance.  The HT reduces age-related shrinkage of the PFC, parietal cortex, and temporal lobe in women, and made them less depressed and angry. 
  • Supports mitochondrial operation in the blood vessels of the brain. 
  • Contributes to maternal aggression but it can reduce aggression and enhance empathy, depending on brain state.  There are two different estrogen receptor types which mediate these conflicting effects.  The level of each type of receptor is independently regulated.  Different receptor variants are associated with:
    • Higher rates of anxiety among women
    • Higher rates of antisocial behavior and conduct disorder in men
  • Is essential for vaginal lubrication 
  • Facilitates the elimination of cholesterol
  • Has anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative properties improving response to stress
, Progesterone is a steroid hormone.  It:
  • Rarely directly effects areas of the brain.  Instead it is converted into other sterioids which have different actions in different brain areas. 
  • Increases maternal aggression in concert with estrogen by increasing oxytocin release in certain brain regions.  However, on its own progresterone decreases aggression and anxiety.  It decreases anxiety by entering neurons where it is converted to allopregnanolone which binds to GABA receptors increasing their sensitivity to GABA.  
  • Decreases female sex drive during the second half of the menstrual cycle.  
; is dramatic and transformational.  Adult female endocrine function is cyclic but at puberty the activity is more intermittent.  Adolescent male brains also receive washes of gonadal hormones and often suffer hypoxia from blood flow diverted to the crotch. 

Frontal Cortical Changes in Cognition in Adolescence
Sapolsky reviews how frontal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires, responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
maturation is reflected in cognition is the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals according to Princeton's Jonathan Cohen. 
.  During adolescence in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
improvements are seen in:

Frontal Cortical Changes in Emotional Regulation
Adolescents in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
experience emotions are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
more intensely than adults or young children.  They respond more to affective visual displays is a face expressing strong emotions as interpreted by an observer's brain.  In:
  • Adult observers this activates that amygdala and subsequently the vmPFC as they become habituated to the emotional content. 
  • Adolescents the vmPFC responds less allowing the amygdala's activation to keep growing. 
.  Coping using reappraisal gets more effective during adolescence as the ventral striatum is a region within the basal ganglia.   It is a target of the tegmentostriatal dopamine pathway.  It has been captured by brain imaging assigning values to subliminal symbols experimentally associated with winning (highly valued) and losing (low valuation) money.  During adolescence, prior to the deployment of the prefrontal cortex, the ventral striatum helps balance/control emotional decision making. 
hands over the dampening activity to the frontal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires, responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
.  While the striatum is involved dopamine is a synaptic signal supporting generalized goal-directed behavior & anticipation of reward.  Its significance is that the receptors that detect the signal are of the slow acting type and are used to alter (modulate) the response of fast acting dopaminergic neural circuits in which the receptors are deployed (LTP).  The signal detects significant changes including predictions of models and actual results which differ unexpectedly.  Dopamine is released primarily by neurons of the ventral tegmental area and the substantia nigra.  The dopamine network architecture is designed to signal the possibility of any type of reward: Norm violation punishment, Winning a lottery, & Misfortune of an envied competitor.  Dopamine signalling:
  • Rescales continuously to accommodate the range of intensity offered by different stimuli.  So dopamine's responses to any reward habituate.  GABA is released by some tegmental neurons to induce habituation.  This allows addictions to develop. 
  • Reflects the anticipation of reward.  It supports establishment of a relationship between a signal, working for a reward and obtaining the reward, but subsequently dopamine is mainly released encouraging the work, right after the signal supporting anticipation of the reward.  Anticipation requires learning and is reflected in hippocampus activity.  That explains context dependent cravings.  And the learning architecture means reliable cues become rewarding.  The accumbens supports willpower.  And dopamine
  • Promotes goal-oriented behavior needed to obtain & likely to achieve the reward - through the dopamine projections to the prefrontal cortex.  That makes dopamine central to:
    • Motivation.  This binding fails in depression - due to stress and in anxiety - due to signals from the amygdala.  
    • The prefrontal cortex's mesocortically stimulated support for willpower to act to delay rewards.  To sustain work for delayed rewards additional dopamine is released based on the length of the delay and the rewards uncertainty (modelled in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - which promotes the long term and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - which promotes the short term) and the anticipated size of the reward (modelled in the accumbens).  Impulsiveness in ADHD is reflected in abnormal dopamine processing.  Addictive drugs bias the dopamine network towards impulsiveness.  
  • Is lowered by certain gene variants which induce: less dopamine in the synapse, fewer receptors, lower responsiveness of receptors; associated with (as tiny effects in hugely varying social scenarios): sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, extroversion; where:
    • The receptor D4's gene shows high variability.  The D47R form is relatively unresponsive to dopamine.  
    • Dopamine is degraded by COMT.  The COMT gene includes a variant which is highly efficient reducing dopamine signalling but with complicating gene/environment interactions.  
    • Dopamine is removed from the synapse by a reuptake transporter DAT. 
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions.  In particular he explains how:
  • Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that allow
  • Life changing real-time decisions to be made, and how
  • Schematic structures provide encodings of computable control structures which operate through and on incomputable, schematically encoded, physically active structures and operationally associated production functions. 
based rewards are very significant encouraging risk taking. 

Adolescent Risk Taking
Adolescents in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
activate the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is
  • The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex.  It evolved most recently.  During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum.  The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior.  It regulates feelings.  Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice.  The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions.  It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory.  It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels.  It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat.  Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it.  Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.  
 less often than adults when making risky, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring.  It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system.  As such it is different from uncertainty. 
decisions.  They do not incorporate feedback based on their poor assessments about bad news!  So they are willing to take more risks.  They also seek more novelty, developing new and subsequently stable tastes in music is a complex emergent capability supported by sexual selection and generating pleasure.  It transforms the sensing of epiphenomena: Contour, Rhythm, Tempo, Timbre; to induce salient representations: Harmony, Key, Loudness, Melody, Meter, Pitch, and perceptions: Reverberation - echo; which allow musicians: Elton John, Elvis Presley; to show their fitness: superior coordination, creativity, adolescent leadership, stamina; true for birds and humans.  Levitin showed that listening to music causes a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: auditory cortex, frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, and finally the mesolimbic system, culminating in the nucleus accumbens.  And he found the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout the session.  He argues music mimics some of the features of language and conveys some of the same emotions.  The brain regions pulse with the beat and predict the next one.  As the music is heard it is modeled and generates dopamine rewards for matching each beat and noting creative jokes in the rhythm.  The cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized. 
, food, and fashion.  In most primates adolescents of one sex make their way into other groups driven by this desire for novelty.  Sapolsky suggests the novelty seeking reflects the increasing development of the mesolimbic projection includes projections between the tegmentum and the accumbens, amygdala, hippocampus; is together with the mesocortical pathway the major network in the brain's reward system, allowing dopamine-producing neurons to broadcast widely.  to the nucleus accumbens is a region of the basal forebrain (striatum) rostral to the preoptic area and immediately adjacent to the septum.  The nucleus accumbens was closely associated with the limbic system, mediates the impact of emotion and plays an important role in reinforcement.  If a rodent wins a fight on his home territory, there are long-lasting increases in levels of testosterone receptors enhancing pleasurable effects.  When prairie voles first mate, epi-genetic state changes are induced in the accumbens to support pair-bonding.  The accumbens projects to brain regions associated with movement.  The major pathways of dopaminergic neurons begin in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area.  The amygdala projects back to the accumbens.  The tegmentostriatal system begins in the ventral tegmental area and projects to the nucleus accumbens.  The nucleus accumbens includes high levels of D1, D2 and D3 dopamine receptors located on the spine & shafts of dendrites of excitatory cells reduce the transfer of excitation from the dendrites to the cell bodies, so only especially strong excitatory inputs get through to the cell body to elicit excitation.  It also has D4 dopamine receptors which are highly variable.  The accumbens responds differently to rewards depending on maturity: In juveniles all reward levels result in the same response activity level, During adolescence the accumbens responds to small rewards negatively, and large rewards hugely, In adults the rewards result in measured scaled positive responses.  Chronic stress depletes dopamine from the nucleus accumbens biasing humans towards depression.   and the mesocortical projection includes projections between the tegmentum and the prefrontal cortex; is together with the mesolimbic pathway the major network in the brain's reward system, broadcasting to regions throughout the cerebral cortex. 
to the frontal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires, responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
.  Novelty seeking peaks as the
This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS).  Physical forces and constraints follow the rules of complexity.  They generate phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.  Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the emergence of equilibrium and autonomous entities.  Autonomous entities enable evolution to operate broadening the adjacent possible.  Key research is reviewed. 
emerging frontal regulation is prefrontal cortex which is:
  • The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex.  It evolved most recently.  During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum.  The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior.  It regulates feelings.  Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice.  The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions.  It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory.  It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels.  It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat.  Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it.  Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.  
 starts to inhibit activity. 

Peers, social acceptance, and social exclusion
Adolescents in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
are particularly vulnerable to peer pressure from friends.  They frantically need to belong.  Peers' signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
lessen vmPFC is ventromedial prefrontal cortex which is:
  • Focused on the impact of emotion on decision making
  • A participant in limbic system operations 
  • Many human behaviors involve interactions between the vmPFC, the limbic system & the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Part of decision making is for the limbic system to internally simulate (often with the help of the sympathetic nervous system) what alternative outcomes of a decision will feel like with the results of these somatic marker analyses being reported to the vmPFC.  
  • Damage to the vmPFC results in bad decision making: Poor judgement in choosing friends & partners, Failure to respond to negative feedback; because they can't feel the issues; and are overly controlled by the logical contribution of the DLPFC. 
activity & enhance ventral striatal is a region within the basal ganglia.   It is a target of the tegmentostriatal dopamine pathway.  It has been captured by brain imaging assigning values to subliminal symbols experimentally associated with winning (highly valued) and losing (low valuation) money.  During adolescence, prior to the deployment of the prefrontal cortex, the ventral striatum helps balance/control emotional decision making. 
activity in adolescents but not adults.  Rejection hurts them more: Periaqueductal gray, ACC is either the
  • Anterior cingulate cortex which:
    • Includes the subgenual ACC and the paragenual ACC, and Brodmann areas 24, 25, 32 and 33. 
    • The gyrus of the ACC has two functional components, which both operate abnormally in mood disorders: depression, anxiety & bipolar.  The
      • Rostral/ventral part is involved in emotional processes and autonomic functions.  It connects to the hippocampus, amygdala, orbital prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, nucleus accumbens.  It is overactive during regular or bipolar depression. 
      • Caudal part is involved in cognition and the control of behavior.  It connects with the dorsal PFC, secondary motor cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex
    • Is a central focus of empathy supporting people relating to other's pain.  This is dependent on oxytocin. 
    • In non-human mammals it processes interoceptive signals.  The ACC focuses the internal signals into high level 'gut intuitions.'  Pain catches the ACC's attention. 
    • Performs discrepancy detection from the outcome that was predicted - at a high level.  The ACC cares about the meaning of what is predicted. 
      • If the ACC has been convinced that a pain killer placebo has inhibited pain signals, the ACC will stay silent about actual pain that is signalled from interoceptive networks.  
      • The ACC will signal: physical pain, emotional pain, metaphorical pain, anxiety, disgust, embarrassment, social exclusion especially in adolescence; as one and the same.  The ACC's abnormalities being associated with major depression. 
    • Has a bridging role between the empathetic and self-interested pain monitor.  Sapolsky notes the ACC is essential for learning fear and conditioned avoidance by observation alone through an intermediate step of shared representation of self.  He concludes "At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about the other person in pain as an add-on." 
  • American College of Cardiology
, Amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
  • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
  • Participates in disgust
  • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
  • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
  • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
  • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
  • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
  • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
  • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
, Insula is part of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the lateral sulcus.  It includes: anterior, posterior insula; and is overlaid by the operculum.  Kandel notes the anterior insula is where feelings are calibrated by evaluating and integrating the importance of the stimuli.  It directly signals area 25.  LeDoux showed there are two routes for signals of feelings and emotions to the amygdala: a fast unconscious one and a slow one that involves the anterior insula.  So the insula is assumed to participate in consciousness where it has been linked to emotion, salience & body homeostasis functions:
  • Perception,
  • Motor control: Hand-&-eye motor movement, Swallowing, Gastric motility, Speech articulation;
  • Self-awareness,
  • Inter-personal experiences: Disgust at smells, contamination & mutilation which generate visceral responses, that are projected to the amygdala; binding physical and moral aspects of purity (Macbeth effect)
    • Suffering of others can be projected by the insula to the amygdala and made increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
  • Homeostatic regulation of the sympathetic network, parasympathetic network, and immune system.  Heart rate and sweat gland activity are monitored.   When the amygdala signals concern, the insula prepares the body for action, increasing blood flow to the muscles etc.
; activation with no calming signals from the vlPFC is ventrolateral prefrontal cortex
. 

Empathy, sympathy, and moral reasoning
Adolescents in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
are better at seeing how they would feel in someone else's situation than seeing how the other person might feel.  Similarly their moral judgments provides rules for identifying right from wrong.  It develops in stages with children using play to work out rules of appropriate behavior.  Kohlberg's 1950s experiments using children led him to conclude moral judgement is a cognitive process that develops in three stages.  Sapolsky raises issues with the framework: Its a model, It does not apply to other cultures, Intuition & emotion are as significant as cognition, Moral reasoning doesn't predict moral actions; and notes the capacity of the frontal cortex to regulate emotions and behavior is far more predictive.  The marshmallow test, performed on three to six year olds, actually predicted their subsequent SAT scores at high school, social success and lack of aggression, and forty years on more PFC activation during a frontal task and a lower BMI!  Jonathan Haidt argues people's moral decisions are rationalizations rather than using reasoning. 
are not as sophisticated as adults since they fail to account for systemic effects. 

As they get older intentional harm to others becomes of interest to the dlPFC is dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is:
  • At the heart of decision making - highly rational, unsentimental 
  • A major agent of working memory
  • The most recently evolved part of the prefrontal cortex.  
  • Mainly interconnected with other parts of the cortex. 
  • Must be inhibited or it constrains right brain creativity. 
& vmPFC is ventromedial prefrontal cortex which is:
  • Focused on the impact of emotion on decision making
  • A participant in limbic system operations 
  • Many human behaviors involve interactions between the vmPFC, the limbic system & the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Part of decision making is for the limbic system to internally simulate (often with the help of the sympathetic nervous system) what alternative outcomes of a decision will feel like with the results of these somatic marker analyses being reported to the vmPFC.  
  • Damage to the vmPFC results in bad decision making: Poor judgement in choosing friends & partners, Failure to respond to negative feedback; because they can't feel the issues; and are overly controlled by the logical contribution of the DLPFC. 
rather than just the amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
  • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
  • Participates in disgust
  • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
  • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
  • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
  • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
  • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
  • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
  • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
 and insula is part of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the lateral sulcus.  It includes: anterior, posterior insula; and is overlaid by the operculum.  Kandel notes the anterior insula is where feelings are calibrated by evaluating and integrating the importance of the stimuli.  It directly signals area 25.  LeDoux showed there are two routes for signals of feelings and emotions to the amygdala: a fast unconscious one and a slow one that involves the anterior insula.  So the insula is assumed to participate in consciousness where it has been linked to emotion, salience & body homeostasis functions:
  • Perception,
  • Motor control: Hand-&-eye motor movement, Swallowing, Gastric motility, Speech articulation;
  • Self-awareness,
  • Inter-personal experiences: Disgust at smells, contamination & mutilation which generate visceral responses, that are projected to the amygdala; binding physical and moral aspects of purity (Macbeth effect)
    • Suffering of others can be projected by the insula to the amygdala and made increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
  • Homeostatic regulation of the sympathetic network, parasympathetic network, and immune system.  Heart rate and sweat gland activity are monitored.   When the amygdala signals concern, the insula prepares the body for action, increasing blood flow to the muscles etc.
. 

Sapolsky's core interest in the best & worst behaviors is rewarded by adolescents ability to feel other's pain empathetically is the capability to relate to another person from their perspective.  It is implemented by spindle neurons.  Empathy towards others is controlled by the right-hemisphere supramarginal gyrus.  Empathy is context dependently mediated by estrogen.  It develops over time: Piaget's preoperational stage includes rudimentary empathy, Theory of mind supports the development; initially feeling someone's pain as one integrated being, then for them and eventually as them.  In adults, when someone else is hurt the anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala & insula activates projecting [scapegoating] to the vmPFC.  If the pain is physical the PAG activates and motor neurons for the area where the other person was injured.  The intertwining of the ACC amygdala & insula in adults results in attribution of fault even when there is none which can make it hard to step in and actually help.  But in seven-year-olds the activation is concrete: PAG and sensory & motor cortexes with minimal coupling to the rudimentary vmPFC.  In older children the vmPFC is coupled to limbic structures.  Ten to twelve year olds abstract empathy to classes of people.  Brizendine asserts young girls develop empathy earlier than boys, because their evolved greater neuronal investment in communication and emotion networks.  Year old girls are much more responsive to the distress of other people than boys are.  At 18 months girls are experiencing infantile puberty.  By adolescence the vmPFC is coupled to theory of mind regions and intentional harm induces disgust via the amygdala.  Sapolsky explains adolescent boys are utilitarian and tend to accept inequality more than girls do.  But both sexes accept inequality as the way it is.  Sociopaths do not develop empathy.   and try with boundless energy and confidence to make 'things' right. 

Except that doing the right thing in an intense empathetic or moral situation is about prior practice:
  • Allowing the brain's signals to act unconsciously, thus
  • Avoiding overwhelming emotional pain becoming one's total conscious inhibiting focus. 

Adolescent violence
Sapolsky notes violence peaks in late adolescence in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
- early adulthood, and then rates plummet.  Adolescent violence is driven by:

The
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic alignment of the American justice system.  The result he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected.  Even as it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to extract profits and leave the victim deflated. 

Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the: activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes, prisons and deportation network.  The scenarios are: Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions.

Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  The alignment of the justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to win. 

criminal justice system has to decide if adolescent criminals are to be considered fully in control of their judgments.  Sapolsky concludes that Behave's scientific foundation demands the transformation of the criminal justice system. 

Back to the Crib, Back to the Womb
Childhood is Sapolsky's next significant influence on our current good or bad behavior. 

Complexification
Childhood's progressively increasing
This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 

John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
complexity occurs in stages.  Neuron, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
formation, migration and synaptogenesis are mostly prenatal in humans.  But myelination is the fatty insulating material deployed by Schwann cells & oligodendrocytes, both types of glial cells, around axons to improve their conduction rate.  In humans it is still occurring 25 years after birth.  It has great impact on long axons, in neurons that project over long distances, where it helps brain inter-region signalling.  The long development time of myelination allows for the later myelinated brain regions to be particularly shaped by the proximate environment. 
occurs when a region has setup its mature structure and is optimizing.  Sapolsky reiterates the later a brain region matures the more it is influenced by the environment: internal & external.  And he concludes that it is useful to remember that the significant aspects of childhood that will be highlighted all alter genes in the brain.  That is the only way it can work and the linkage reveals how bad outcomes might be reversed and good outcomes reinforced. 

Stages
For Jean Piaget the brain's developmental stages defines a series including the: Sensorimotor stage, Preoperational stage, Concrete operational stage, Formal operational stage; of child development.  It is an experimentally derived early model of behavioral development allowing an assessment of the: role of evolved stages, impact of experience, implications for the resulting adult; of the complex process.  Neural formation, migration and synaptogenesis are prenatal.  Myelination proceeds in stages for 25 years.  Sapolsky notes that Piaget's cognitive model ignores emotions and social factors which can't be right.  And while the network of mental agents cooperate to develop coherent responses, our developmental models should represent the separate development of the agents that process objects, faces etc., that allow a child to miss transitivity between objects but detect it in faces. 
were cognitive is the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals according to Princeton's Jonathan Cohen. 
.  Sapolsky adds an early cognitive stage occurs when toddlers form ego boundaries are a cognitive developmental stage that starts when a child realizes there is a 'me,' separate from everyone else.  Prior to the ego boundary a toddler that sees his mother has cut her finger claims his finger hurts. 
.  By nine months infants understand that others have information they don't.  Older children eventually reach a stage where they achieve Theory of Mind of mind is the capability of adults, and even young children, to see that others think and perceive the world differently to them.  It typically develops around age three to four.  It supports the child's development of empathy.  It is associated with the DMPFC, precuneus, superior temporal sulcus & temporoparietal junction.  Subsequently more capabilities appear including: Understanding a second person's theory of mind about a third person, Perspectives and Irony. 
.  But Sapolsky reminds us that Behave's premise is that cognitive development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
can't be viewed in isolation from emotion and social effects. 

Feeling someone else's pain
Children next realize that others can have different feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits.  These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula.  Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience.  Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism.  They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles.  Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience.  Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints.  Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:
  • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
  • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
  • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
.  Sapolsky stresses the path to full empathy is the capability to relate to another person from their perspective.  It is implemented by spindle neurons.  Empathy towards others is controlled by the right-hemisphere supramarginal gyrus.  Empathy is context dependently mediated by estrogen.  It develops over time: Piaget's preoperational stage includes rudimentary empathy, Theory of mind supports the development; initially feeling someone's pain as one integrated being, then for them and eventually as them.  In adults, when someone else is hurt the anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala & insula activates projecting [scapegoating] to the vmPFC.  If the pain is physical the PAG activates and motor neurons for the area where the other person was injured.  The intertwining of the ACC amygdala & insula in adults results in attribution of fault even when there is none which can make it hard to step in and actually help.  But in seven-year-olds the activation is concrete: PAG and sensory & motor cortexes with minimal coupling to the rudimentary vmPFC.  In older children the vmPFC is coupled to limbic structures.  Ten to twelve year olds abstract empathy to classes of people.  Brizendine asserts young girls develop empathy earlier than boys, because their evolved greater neuronal investment in communication and emotion networks.  Year old girls are much more responsive to the distress of other people than boys are.  At 18 months girls are experiencing infantile puberty.  By adolescence the vmPFC is coupled to theory of mind regions and intentional harm induces disgust via the amygdala.  Sapolsky explains adolescent boys are utilitarian and tend to accept inequality more than girls do.  But both sexes accept inequality as the way it is.  Sociopaths do not develop empathy.   progresses in stages.  Young children's empathy makes no distinction between:
By age seven children express their own empathy.  By 10 to 12 empathy is abstracted and generalized.  And Sapolsky notes children first negatively stereotype categories of people. 

Similar stages are seen with responses to injustice is when someone has been treated unfairly.  Young children, aged four to six in all cultures, are aware of being treated unjustly.  By age eight to ten kids in some cultures respond negatively to others being treated unjustly.  At that point they attempt to rectify previous inequity.  But by pre-adolescence they are accepting of inequality, justified by merit, effort, or team needs.  And by adolescence boys accept injustice on utilitarian grounds and both sexes accept it can't be fixed; it's the way it is.  Mitigated free will argues that a person should be held responsible for their actions except for mitigating circumstances of a defect of reason produced by a psychosis. 
. 

Moral Development
Kohlberg leveraged Piaget's ideas defines a series including the: Sensorimotor stage, Preoperational stage, Concrete operational stage, Formal operational stage; of child development.  It is an experimentally derived early model of behavioral development allowing an assessment of the: role of evolved stages, impact of experience, implications for the resulting adult; of the complex process.  Neural formation, migration and synaptogenesis are prenatal.  Myelination proceeds in stages for 25 years.  Sapolsky notes that Piaget's cognitive model ignores emotions and social factors which can't be right.  And while the network of mental agents cooperate to develop coherent responses, our developmental models should represent the separate development of the agents that process objects, faces etc., that allow a child to miss transitivity between objects but detect it in faces. 
including: Children working out rules of appropriate behavior; and experimentally demonstrated stages of moral development defines a three stage moral process:
  1. Preconventional reasoning (until age 8 - 10) initially allows aggression.  But around two to four years old adult and peer punishment inhibits the use of aggression.  And subsequently rewards become significant in the decision process.  When these judgements about aggression don't change at age 8 - 10 it predicts increasing risk of adult sociopathy.  For the others post conflict reconciliation decreases glucocorticoid levels and anxiety. 
  2. Conventional reasoning (adolescents and adults) reviews the consequences to others and if they are friends, as well as what others would likely do.  Being well regarded is also significant.  The law becomes significant in the later stage of this phase. 
  3. Post conventional reasoning (Inspiring heroes & insufferable pedants) first increases the value of self-judgement when judging rules.  And beyond this are moral acts valued because they represent a position more important than a law.  
.  He concluded such judgments are cognitive is the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals according to Princeton's Jonathan Cohen. 
.  Sapolsky notes studies suggesting conservatives and liberals reason at different stages of Kohlberg's
The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it.  Evolution's schematic operators and Samuel modeling together support the indirect recording of past successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn how to succeed in the proximate environment. 
model.  But the studies focused on Americans, missing the cross-cultural moral differences and undervaluing intuition and emotion are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
.  And they fail to predict who will do the harder-but-right thing.  Instead that is powerfully predicted by children's scores in Walter Mischel's experiments. 

Marshmallows
In the 1960s Mischel was studying gratification postponement and developed the marshmallow test is Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel's experiment studying gratification postponement.  A child is presented with a marshmallow and told that the experimenter is leaving the room and if the child doesn't eat the marshmallow before the experimenter returns he will be given another.  The child is then observed through a two way mirror.  Only a third of the children lasted the fifteen minutes.  To achieve the task the children had to: Trust in the system, avoid hot ideation of the marshmallow, or displace it with cold ideation of the marshmallow or hot ideation of some other object.   It was performed on three to six year olds, but subsequently predicted their SAT scores at high school, social success and lack of aggression, and forty years on more PFC activation during a frontal task and a lower BMI!  The complexity of the experiment allowed uncertainty to limit the generality of Mischel's conclusions. 
.  Significantly Mischel tracked his subject children's subsequent adult lives.  Forty years later, the children who were able to delay gratification had: Averaged higher SATs, More social success/resilience and less aggressive and oppositional behavior, Lower average BMI is body mass index.  s and excelled at frontal cortical of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires, responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
function. 

Consequences
Sapolsky reviews what childhood events significantly contribute through biology to their adult best or worst behaviors: Mothers, Childhood adversity, Observing violence, Bullying; and subsequently explores: Why most children are still resilient enough to avoid the worst impacts, What happens when everything is wrong, The process by which parents mediate cultural memes into their children.   

Let's start at the very beginning: The importance of mothers
John Bowlby's attachment theory is John Bowlby's model of mother infant bonding.  He argued that infants need: love, warmth, affection, responsiveness, stimulation, consistency, reliability; or they become anxious, depressed, and/or poorly attached adults.  Evolutionarily, sociopaths may be highly successful as managers and leaders but they are probably anxious.  Sapolsky notes the powerful association between murder rates and stopping pregnant girls from terminating unwanted pregnancies.  Typical mothers also provide training on social conventions and their children's position in the group hierarchy.  Children raised without a mother's support fail to understand social constraints and when to use social behaviors.  And in the presence of unsupportive mothers newborns attach to negative stimuli.  This response is explained by the SHRP.  Abused children subsequently seek out abusive relationships as adults.  And a percentage of infants abused by their mothers become abusive mothers. 
launched the modern view of the importance of the mother-infant bond which was subsequently validated experimentally by Wisconsin's Harry Harlow in the infant monkey placed the infants with constructed mothers.  The mothers were made of wire mesh with a feeding bottle attached to the chest.  Some of the 'mothers' differed in being covered with terry cloth.  If the infants were given a choice they chose the terry-cloth mother, even if they were forced to feed from the wire cage mother.  And the infant monkeys that only experienced the wire cage mother and could not 'cling' failed to attach.   . 

And, the eventual explanation for a massive drop in crime rates observed starting in the 1990s, provides further evidence of mother-infant bond's significance in humans: Stanford's Donohue & Chicago's Levitt identified that the drop in violence correlated with state abortion legalization passed 20 years prior.  The problem was being born to a mother the child knows would prefer you don't exist.  Again Harlow's results confirmed Donohue & Levitt's proposals.  And the infant monkeys Harlow wrecked had the full set of behaviors, but didn't know when to use them effectively.  Without mothers to teach them, they had no social context. 

Any kind of mother in a storm
Sapolsky explains the SHRP is stress hypo-responsive period, an evolved strategy to protect the developing brain of a newborn from stress generated glucocorticoid based damage.  The many adverse effects on brain development of glucocorticoids induce an advantage from temporarily shrinking the adrenals.  SHRP makes sense since a newborn's mother will be better equipped to handle the stress.  During the SHRP any strong stimulus is assumed positive and the newborn attaches to it.  Without access to a mother the SHRP strategy is abandoned and the adrenals expand and secrete glucocorticoids. 
evolved to protect the very young brain from damage from glucocorticoids are corticosteroids which bind the glucocorticoid receptor.  They decrease excitability of prefrontal cortical neurons.  They have adverse effects in fetal/infant development having organizational effects on fetal brain construction and decreasing levels of: growth factors, neurons, synapses; resulting in an adult brain that is more sensitive to environmental triggers of depression and anxiety.  Glucocorticoids affect gene control structures and induce epi-genetic changes.  They have been found associated with high sodium chloride consumption (May 2017). 
.  But when mom is the source of the aversive stimuli the SHRP ensures abused children will seek similarly abusive relationships as adults, and the girls are more likely to become abusive mothers. 

Different routes to the same place
Most other significant events have similar impacts - Sapolsky groups them as forms of childhood adversity includes different types of stressor: No mother, Unsupportive mother, paternal deprivation, Childhood poverty, [Observing ]violence, Natural disasters, Bullying; which impact development and produce adult problems. 
  • The adversities are stressful and alter stress physiology producing children and adults with elevated: Glucocorticoids, CRH and ACTH, Sympathetic nervous system activity.  Early stress permanently impacts the brains ability to control glucocorticoid secretion.  The more stressors experienced and the less protective factors, the less likely it is that the child will cope and become a resilient adult.  The stressors expand the size and activity of the amygdala helping it ignore prefrontal cortex constraints.  And they degrade the dopamine network through impacts to the development of the mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoids depleting dopamine. 
  • The problems include attachment issues and adults with: depression (dopamine depletion and lowered thresholds making adult stressors more influential), anxiety, substance abuse (dopamine depletion, excessive adult exposure to glucocorticoids increasing drug craving & poorly developed frontal cortex), impaired cognitive abilities especially frontocortical with impaired hippocampal-dependent learning, impaired impulse control (amygdala), impaired emotional control, antisocial behavior and violence, relationships that replicate the childhood adversities.  Abused children who develop PTSD show decreased hippocampal volume.  Glucocorticoids decrease hippocampal production of BDNF.  Childhood poverty impacts development of the corpus callosum & ensures by kindergarten, poor marshmallow test performance.  Childhood poverty increases impacts from environmental stressors: Toxins, Liquor stores instead of fresh food markets, No transport infrastructure, Limited jobs in the immediate vicinity, Little access to low cost capital, Low positions in all social hierarchies.  
 resulting in the same biological profile:
  • The adversities are stressful and alter stress physiology producing children and adults with elevated: Glucocorticoids, CRH and ACTH, Sympathetic nervous system activity.  Early stress permanently impacts the brains ability to control glucocorticoid secretion.  The more stressors experienced and the less protective factors, the less likely it is that the child will cope and become a resilient adult.  The stressors expand the size and activity of the amygdala helping it ignore prefrontal cortex constraints.  And they degrade the dopamine network through impacts to the development of the mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoids depleting dopamine. 
  • The problems include attachment issues and adults with: depression (dopamine depletion and lowered thresholds making adult stressors more influential), anxiety, substance abuse (dopamine depletion, excessive adult exposure to glucocorticoids increasing drug craving & poorly developed frontal cortex), impaired cognitive abilities especially frontocortical with impaired hippocampal-dependent learning, impaired impulse control (amygdala), impaired emotional control, antisocial behavior and violence, relationships that replicate the childhood adversities.  Abused children who develop PTSD show decreased hippocampal volume.  Glucocorticoids decrease hippocampal production of BDNF.  Childhood poverty impacts development of the corpus callosum & ensures by kindergarten, poor marshmallow test performance.  Childhood poverty increases impacts from environmental stressors: Toxins, Liquor stores instead of fresh food markets, No transport infrastructure, Limited jobs in the immediate vicinity, Little access to low cost capital, Low positions in all social hierarchies.  
. 

Observing Violence
Exposure to scenes of violence such as: domestic abuse, warfare, murders, massacres; as children result in impaired concentration and impulse control Sapolsky explains.  Observed gun violence increases the child's adopting violence as a coping strategy.  Later as adults there is increased risk of depression, anxiety and aggression.  Even observing realistic violence indirectly on media causes the responses. 
desensitizes and normalizes the aggression of those already prone to violence. 

Bullying
While bullying is a complex childhood adversity.  Sapolsky explains that targets of bullying aren't selected at random.  And bullies often come from families with single mothers or younger parents with low educational and economic prospects.  Sapolsky notes that someone who bullies and is also bullied is likely to be a real mess as an adult. 
is one of the many forms of childhood adversity includes different types of stressor: No mother, Unsupportive mother, paternal deprivation, Childhood poverty, [Observing ]violence, Natural disasters, Bullying; which impact development and produce adult problems. 
  • The adversities are stressful and alter stress physiology producing children and adults with elevated: Glucocorticoids, CRH and ACTH, Sympathetic nervous system activity.  Early stress permanently impacts the brains ability to control glucocorticoid secretion.  The more stressors experienced and the less protective factors, the less likely it is that the child will cope and become a resilient adult.  The stressors expand the size and activity of the amygdala helping it ignore prefrontal cortex constraints.  And they degrade the dopamine network through impacts to the development of the mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoids depleting dopamine. 
  • The problems include attachment issues and adults with: depression (dopamine depletion and lowered thresholds making adult stressors more influential), anxiety, substance abuse (dopamine depletion, excessive adult exposure to glucocorticoids increasing drug craving & poorly developed frontal cortex), impaired cognitive abilities especially frontocortical with impaired hippocampal-dependent learning, impaired impulse control (amygdala), impaired emotional control, antisocial behavior and violence, relationships that replicate the childhood adversities.  Abused children who develop PTSD show decreased hippocampal volume.  Glucocorticoids decrease hippocampal production of BDNF.  Childhood poverty impacts development of the corpus callosum & ensures by kindergarten, poor marshmallow test performance.  Childhood poverty increases impacts from environmental stressors: Toxins, Liquor stores instead of fresh food markets, No transport infrastructure, Limited jobs in the immediate vicinity, Little access to low cost capital, Low positions in all social hierarchies.  
, Sapolsky singles it out because of the complexity: the targets aren't selected at random.  More often they have personal or family psychiatric issues and poor social and emotional intelligence.  and the bullies often come from families with single mothers or younger parents with low educational and economic prospects.  They may be bullied as they bully which results in very poorly adjusted adults who see bullying as ok and are likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and suicidality.  And otherwise bullies are either:
  • Anxious, isolated children with poor social skills aiming to achieve acceptance and reduce their own frustration. 
  • Future sociopaths. 
are the product of additional adversity and the targets aren't selected at random. 

A key question
Sapolsky considers why are many children resilient to childhood adversity includes different types of stressor: No mother, Unsupportive mother, paternal deprivation, Childhood poverty, [Observing ]violence, Natural disasters, Bullying; which impact development and produce adult problems. 
  • The adversities are stressful and alter stress physiology producing children and adults with elevated: Glucocorticoids, CRH and ACTH, Sympathetic nervous system activity.  Early stress permanently impacts the brains ability to control glucocorticoid secretion.  The more stressors experienced and the less protective factors, the less likely it is that the child will cope and become a resilient adult.  The stressors expand the size and activity of the amygdala helping it ignore prefrontal cortex constraints.  And they degrade the dopamine network through impacts to the development of the mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoids depleting dopamine. 
  • The problems include attachment issues and adults with: depression (dopamine depletion and lowered thresholds making adult stressors more influential), anxiety, substance abuse (dopamine depletion, excessive adult exposure to glucocorticoids increasing drug craving & poorly developed frontal cortex), impaired cognitive abilities especially frontocortical with impaired hippocampal-dependent learning, impaired impulse control (amygdala), impaired emotional control, antisocial behavior and violence, relationships that replicate the childhood adversities.  Abused children who develop PTSD show decreased hippocampal volume.  Glucocorticoids decrease hippocampal production of BDNF.  Childhood poverty impacts development of the corpus callosum & ensures by kindergarten, poor marshmallow test performance.  Childhood poverty increases impacts from environmental stressors: Toxins, Liquor stores instead of fresh food markets, No transport infrastructure, Limited jobs in the immediate vicinity, Little access to low cost capital, Low positions in all social hierarchies.  
?  He argues that:

A sledgehammer
Sadly 1980s Romanian infant institutions provided a human equivalent to Harlow's experimental setup in the infant monkey placed the infants with constructed mothers.  The mothers were made of wire mesh with a feeding bottle attached to the chest.  Some of the 'mothers' differed in being covered with terry cloth.  If the infants were given a choice they chose the terry-cloth mother, even if they were forced to feed from the wire cage mother.  And the infant monkeys that only experienced the wire cage mother and could not 'cling' failed to attach.   .  Ceausescu's banning of abortion and requirement for families to have at least five children resulted in impoverished families abandoning newborns.  Overwhelmed institutions generated deprivation and neglect.  The children's lives were followed by Harvard's Charles Nelson who characterized them as adults:

Culture, with both a big and a little c
Prior to the general review of culture's effects on our best and worst behaviors, Sapolsky reviews how: culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings: 
    • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
    • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
influences childhood and parents mediate the process.  Sapolsky explains this begins with parenting style is a psychological classification including: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, neglectful; ways of parenting that provide children with their first experience of proximate culture.  Each style typically produces adults that use that same approach.  Different cultures value different styles. 
.  He stresses that each style usually produces adults with that same approach, with different cultures valuing different styles. 
He adds transmission by peers from a young age as identified by Judith Harris is a book by Judith Rich Harris which argues children's personality is most significantly influenced by peers.  Her reasons include:
  • Parental influence is mediated by peers
  • Peers impact linguistic development
  • Other primates are socialized by peers, not mothers. 
in The Nurture Assumption.  Sapolsky explains that children play is a powerful tool for learning social competence.  It appears universal among socially complex species.  It has an evolved high priority displacing foraging and using up energy stores.  There are a number of behavioral strategies practiced in play that train those participating.  Play:
  • Supports safe practice of using social tools.  Allows for trying out roles and honing motor skills. 
  • Allows a peer group to provide context for these developments: Approach to hierarchy; etc.  Parents will aim to select the peer group. 
  • It integrates cultural details from local neighborhoods
  • It supports practice of aggression. 
  • Demonstrates that transient stress is enjoyable. 
  • It allows the developing neuron network to identify which synapses to prune.  
 with peers, which builds social competence.  And neighborhoods transmit their cultural characteristics.  As do tribes, nations and states. 

Parents in cultures of honor tend to be authoritarian.  The children are aggressive and endorse violent responses to honor is a doomsday machine emotional signal, which Pinker explains as an advertisement of the desire to publically avenge even minor trespasses and insults. 
violations. 

Collectivist versus individualist cultures
Mothers in individualist cultures, speak louder reflects the energy of a tone, but is an emergent psychological construct. 
, play music is a complex emergent capability supported by sexual selection and generating pleasure.  It transforms the sensing of epiphenomena: Contour, Rhythm, Tempo, Timbre; to induce salient representations: Harmony, Key, Loudness, Melody, Meter, Pitch, and perceptions: Reverberation - echo; which allow musicians: Elton John, Elvis Presley; to show their fitness: superior coordination, creativity, adolescent leadership, stamina; true for birds and humans.  Levitin showed that listening to music causes a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: auditory cortex, frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, and finally the mesolimbic system, culminating in the nucleus accumbens.  And he found the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout the session.  He argues music mimics some of the features of language and conveys some of the same emotions.  The brain regions pulse with the beat and predict the next one.  As the music is heard it is modeled and generates dopamine rewards for matching each beat and noting creative jokes in the rhythm.  The cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized. 
louder, are more animated and see their role as teacher.  They encourage individually competitive games and hobbies where children do things.  The children are taught to be assertive, autonomous & influential.  They acquire theory of mind of mind is the capability of adults, and even young children, to see that others think and perceive the world differently to them.  It typically develops around age three to four.  It supports the child's development of empathy.  It is associated with the DMPFC, precuneus, superior temporal sulcus & temporoparietal junction.  Subsequently more capabilities appear including: Understanding a second person's theory of mind about a third person, Perspectives and Irony. 
later than collectivist children. 

Mothers in collectivist cultures, spend more
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
  • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
  • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
  • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
  • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
  • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
  • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
  • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 
Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
  • Our familiar time emerges
    • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
    • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
    • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
    • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
    • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time soothing their children, maintaining contact, and facilitating contact with other adults.  They pick cooperative games.  They stress getting along, thinking of others, accepting and adapting.  These children see social competence as taking someone else's perspective. 

Class differences
St. Michael's College anthropologist Adrie Kusserow observed parent child interactions in three US is the United States of America.   neighborhoods:

Nine long months
The demonstration that fetuses were effected by what they tasted & heard outside the womb encouraged interest among the public.  For our best and worst behaviors Sapolsky judges other neonatal environmental influences are even more significant: Glands are active in the fetus and their action is transformative, Hostile external environment. 

Boy and girl brains, whatever that might mean
Sapolsky stresses that hormones are signalling molecules: ACTH, TRH, Melanocyte stimulating hormone, Testosterone, Oxytocin, Vasopressin, Insulin, Growth hormone, Estrogen, Progesterone, Angiotensin II, Asprosin, EPO, Irisin, Leptin, FGF21 hormone, Prostaglandins, TSH, Thyroxine, Glococorticoids: Cortisol; that are transported by the circulatory system to interact with target organs having appropriate receptors.  The levels of hormones can fluctuate massively, as in pregnancy. 
have lifelong organizational effects in the fetus, rather than the activation effects seen in adults.  Eight weeks post-conception: Male brains are masculinized by fetal gonads secreting testosterone is a hormone secreted by the testes, ovaries, and adrenal glands, in response to stimulation from the hypothalamic/pituitary/testicular cascade, that makes humans more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status, according to Sapolsky.  That means players of the Ultimatum Game, if previously given testosterone can become more generous.  High testosterone in a fetus masculinizes the brain.  Males generate 10 times the amount.  It is the trigger for sexual desire in males and females, stimulating the hypothalamus.  Testosterone's effect is highly socially contextual so it may encourage acts of kindness or aggression (when challenged).  The level of testosterone does not predict which individuals will be aggressive in: Birds, Fish, Mammals including primates.  Genes impact the potency of testosterone by altering the enzymes that: Construct it, Convert it to estrogen, code the androgen receptor.   This androgen receptor includes a variable polyglutamine repeat which alters the sensitivity to the testosterone signal.  The more potent form is associated with boys showing more dramatic 'masculinization' of the cortex.  But the detected genetic influences are small.  Testosterone decreases activity in the prefrontal cortex and its functional coupling to the amygdala while increasing the coupling between the amygdala & the thalamus.  Testosterone shortens the refactory period of amygdaloid & amygdaloid target neurons.  This results in impulsive risk taking and more focus on unfamiliar faces and distrust of them.  Testosterone increases activity in the ventral tegmentum projecting dopamine to enhance place preference.  Winners of fights become more willing to fight in part due to testosterone increasing confidence and optimism and reducing fear and anxiety.  And winning at: Chess, Athletics, Stock trades; induces the BNST to add testosterone receptors increasing its sensitivity to the hormone.  People become overconfident and overly optimistic. 
& "anti-Mullerian hormone," Female gonad's secret estrogen is a generic term for a number of related steroid hormones each of which works differently.  Estrogen:
  • Is generated in the ovaries.  It supports the generation of oxytocin, and so is associated with attachment, nurturing and other affiliative behaviors. 
  • Supports verbal memory.  Removal of ovaries without immediate estrogen replacement therapy degrades verbal memory performance.  The HT reduces age-related shrinkage of the PFC, parietal cortex, and temporal lobe in women, and made them less depressed and angry. 
  • Supports mitochondrial operation in the blood vessels of the brain. 
  • Contributes to maternal aggression but it can reduce aggression and enhance empathy, depending on brain state.  There are two different estrogen receptor types which mediate these conflicting effects.  The level of each type of receptor is independently regulated.  Different receptor variants are associated with:
    • Higher rates of anxiety among women
    • Higher rates of antisocial behavior and conduct disorder in men
  • Is essential for vaginal lubrication 
  • Facilitates the elimination of cholesterol
  • Has anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative properties improving response to stress
and progesterone is a steroid hormone.  It:
  • Rarely directly effects areas of the brain.  Instead it is converted into other sterioids which have different actions in different brain areas. 
  • Increases maternal aggression in concert with estrogen by increasing oxytocin release in certain brain regions.  However, on its own progresterone decreases aggression and anxiety.  It decreases anxiety by entering neurons where it is converted to allopregnanolone which binds to GABA receptors increasing their sensitivity to GABA.  
  • Decreases female sex drive during the second half of the menstrual cycle.  
.  But Sapolsky warns of messy complications:

Expanding the scope of "environment"
Many external factors have an impact:

Back to when you were just a fertilized egg
Sapolsky reviews the contribution of the
Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
genome to our best and worst behavior.  It is a contentious subject with
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and the emergence of agents. 
reductionists arguing genes imply essentialism at one extreme and the other where people resist linking genes and behavior.  He notes that gene alleles, one of multiple alternative forms of a schematic sequence with the same address on a schematic string.   affect:

Part 1: Genes from the bottom up
But Sapolsky concludes that while genes are important, they are not
Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents.  This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS.  The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents.  These software agents are aggregates. 
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined. 
agents and they are constrained in what they can do by the 'environment':

Transcription factors in neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
are regulated by the
This page discusses the potential of the vast state space which supports the emergence of complex adaptive systems (CAS).  Kauffman describes the mechanism by which the system expands across the space. 
environment: Intracellular where the immediate chemical state can activate a transcription factor, Adjacent neuron which signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
this neuron across a synapse, a neuron structure which provides a junction with other neurons.  It generates signal molecules, either excitatory or inhibitory, which are kept in vesicles until the synapse is stimulated when the signal molecules are released across the synaptic cleft from the neuron.  The provisioning of synapses is under genetic control and is part of long term memory formation as identified by Eric Kandel.  Modulation signals (from slow receptors) initiate the synaptic strengthening which occurs in memory. 
, Distant organ that generates a hormone transported in the blood to a receptor on the neural circuit, a network of interconnected neurons which perform signalling, modeling and control functions.  In Cajal's basic neural circuits the signalling is unidirectional.  He identified three classes of neurons in the circuits:
  • Sensory, Interneurons, Motor; which are biochemically distinct and suffer different disease states. 
, Outside world of smells and sights.  The transcription factors and the genes they activate operate in a CAS where:
  • Genes encode the 1,500 different transcription factors
  • The human genome contains four million transcription factor binding sites. 
  • The presence of a particular set of transcription factors control the transcription of a network of genes, including those coding for other transcription factors.  
  • An average cell uses 200,000 transcription factor binding sites to generate its distinctive gene-expression profile. 
Sapolsky explains that epi-genetic represent state surfaces within cells and eggs which can be operationally modified so as to provide a heritable structure.  DNA, histones and other stable structures provide surfaces where these states may be setup.  Egg carriers are in a particularly powerful position to induce epi-genetic changes.  Sapolsky notes [childhood] events which persistently alter brain structure and behavior via epi-genetic mechanisms including: pair-bonding in prairie voles, as they first mate, is supported by changes in oxytocin & vasopressin receptor gene regulation in the nucleus accumbens. 
changes can reflect chemical & structural shifts which alter the ability of transcription factors to bind to the target DNA.  Lamarckian inheritance of environmental effects can occur over generations! 

And Sapolsky notes that proteins, a relatively long chain (polymer) of peptides.  Shorter chains of peptides are termed polypeptides.   are often constructed uses the product of the transcription of DNA into messenger m-RNA and is mostly the translation of the m-RNA into a folded protein by Ribosomes and t-RNA. 
from m-RNA (RNA), a polymer composed of a chain of ribose sugars.  It does not naturally form into a paired double helix and so is far less stable than DNA.  Chains of DNA are converted by transcription into equivalently sequenced messenger m-RNA.  RNA also provides the associations that encode the genetic code.  Transfer t-RNAs have a site that maps to the codon and match the associated amino-acid.  Stuart Kauffman argues that RNA polymers may be the precursor to our current DNA based genome and protein based enzymes.  In the adaptive web framework's (AWF) Smiley we use a similar paradigm with no proteins. 
sequences that contain non-coding introns.  Enzymes, a protein with a structure which allows it to operate as a chemical catalyst and a control switch. 
then remove the introns.  The mechanism enables multiple protein variants to be generated from one DNA sequence.  90% of human genes with exons are alternately spliced. 

Sapolsky considers the impact of transposons are regions of DNA which are copied and inserted into other areas of the DNA schemata.  Their effect and existence was first noted by Barbara McClintock.  Plants, when under stress, utilize transposons to rapidly evolve their genomes.  Higher animal's immune systems and neuronal stem cells when forming memories, also leverage transposons.  , which he notes operate within neuronal stem cells is a biological cell which is partly or wholly undifferentiated.  A totipotent cell can generate a complete embryo and placenta.  Embryos include pluripotent cells which can generate any tissue in the body.  Adult humans' cells have turned off this ability but still include multipotent stem cells that differentiate into multiple cell types.   Typically a cell's local environment will have the signals required for it to obtain context and differentiate appropriately.  This will include both the external environment and the internal state of the cell which has replicated from a parent and obtained its epi-genetic state.   So introduction of undifferentiated stem cells into an injured area is not likely to have either aspect of the environment suitable.  Consequently development is aiming to encourage differentiation to progenitor cells for the damaged region.  This requires delivering the cells to the appropriate part of the body.  To avoid rejection by the immune system techniques aim to use cell lines developed from the patient's cells.  The techniques to generate these cell lines include: SCNT, iPS.  Possible mechanisms of stem cell therapy are: Generation of new differentiated cells, Stimulation of growth of new blood vessels to repopulate damaged regions, Secretion of growth factors, Treatment of diabetes (1 and 2) with addition of pancreatic cells, Assistance of other mechanisms; in the brain expanding the genome of neurons forming memories. 

Part 2: Genes from the top down--Behavior Genetics
Sapolsky argues that 'behavioral genetics' had struggled to quantify the magnitude of genetic effects on: IQ, Sexual orientation; forcing additional approaches: 
Part 3: So what do genes actually have to do with behaviors we're interested in?
Sapolsky notes that behavioral genetics has beneficially incorporated molecular approaches.  But many interesting findings are complicated by gene/environment interactions:


Centuries to millennia before
Sapolsky notes that the cultures is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings: 
    • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
    • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
that surround us have huge effects on how individuals behave.  These behaviors reflect the culture the individuals were raised in as well as where they live.  He illustrates his case with:
  • Gender differences in mathematics where the more gender equality the less difference there was in math scores with Iceland's girls scoring better than boys, while most other countries have boys scoring better especially in unequal cultures like Turkey's. 
    • Earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts gender equality in today's culture. 
  • Long term impacts - population density in 1500 significantly predicts how authoritarian a government was in 2000. 
He explores where we are now and how we probably got here: Patterns of cultural variation effect behaviors, Culture & biology coevolve, and Ecology effects culture. 

Life is unrecognizably different, depending on which culture you were born into:

Hobbes or Rousseau- how we got there
Sapolsky explains that contemporary evaluations of the applicability of these philosophies leverage data:
  • Archaeological
  • Contemporary humans living in pre-state tribal societies
But there are definitional disagreements.  University of Illinois's Lawrence Keeley and Harvard's Steven Pinker argue archaeological evidence of war is broad, ancient, & barbaric and violence is declining.  They argue that archaeologists are ignoring the evidence to pacify the past.  Rutgers R. Brian Ferguson strikes back arguing: Their evidence does not show what they claim and they cherry-picked their data. 

Keeley, Pinker & Santa Fe Institute's Samuel Bowles conclude from looking at contemporary hunter-gatherers: New Guinea: Gebusi, Mae Enga; & Borneo head hunters, Maasai & Zulu warriors from Africa, Amazonians: Waorani, Jivaro; Brazilian and Venezuelan Yanomamos is a tribe of contemporary Venezuelan hunter gatherers.  They are still isolated from modern societies (Nov 2018).  They have been a popular model of historic hunter gatherers: discussed in Behave, and in The Origin of Wealth. 
; that warfare is nearly universal.  Anthropologists again argue there was cherry-picking with Global surveys showing less violence.  There are issues with the statistical analyses.  And other studies do not find the levels of violence of the initial reports. 

Sapolsky argues 95 to 99% of hominin history was spent in small nomadic bands that foraged for edible plants and hunted cooperatively.  Few records exist: cave paintings from forty thousand years ago which show hunting but not war.  So most people infer from the current day hunter-gatherer tribes the: Hazda, Mbuti, Batwa, Gunwinggi, Andaman Islanders, Batak, Semang and Inuit cultures.  Mostly the men discuss how fantastic their last hunt was while generations of females provide the calories from foraging.  Most hunter-gatherers:
Sapolsky writes the evidence suggests a mixture of Hobbes & Rousseau.  He does not consider hunter-gatherers as angels but sees war as rare until the nomadic lifestyle was abandoned. 

So Sapolsky suggests agriculture/herding was one of the all-time human blunders because it:

He concludes by asserting the most consequential aspect of the coevolution of brains and culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings: 
    • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
    • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
is childhood, when cultures inculcate individuals.  The delayed maturation in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
of the frontal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires, responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
allows for sculpting by the environment including cultural norms. 


The Evolution of Behavior
Sapolsky asserts that only
This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
evolution can explain behavior.  He argues like anatomy and physiology, behaviors evolve. 

Kin selection is a strategy of selfish genes, which aims to maximize gene survival & replication across all the bodies where a copy of the gene probably exists: relatives.  Altruism is beneficial to gene replication in this situation.  Love supports the agent's prioritization of appropriate altruistic strategies.  E. O. Wilson was originally an advocate of kin selection but subsequently concluded that there is no mechanism by which it can operate.  He abandoned kin selection and now asserts neo-group selection is responsible for the effects.  Sapolsky describes an array of strategies used to identify kin:
  • Genetically shaped pheromonal signatures.  Rodents leverage the immune systems MHC super variable gene regions to develop unique signals.  The more similar the signals are the closer is the relative.  Pregnancy triggers adult neurogenesis in the olfactory system of rat mothers to allow them to learn the smell of their newborn.
  • Imprinting on the female whose birdsong a chick heard while still in the egg
  • Degree of paternalism depending on likelihood of being the father in primates
  • Humans use cognition
allows relatives to group together to help their genes persist into the next generation.  Sapolsky notes that across species mating third-cousins is an evolved behavior.  Women prefer the smell of moderately related over unrelated men.  Identifying kin works differently across species.  Human kin recognition is mainly cognitive is the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals according to Princeton's Jonathan Cohen. 
.  Sapolsky notes it is far from accurate which is significant. 

Non-kin can also evolve to cooperate through reciprocal altruism benefits another organism at a cost to the behaver.  It is differentiated from kin altruism, by Williams and Trivers, since it can apply between unrelated individuals.  It can be induced by natural selection when there is mutual survival benefit in group activities and cheating can be detected and discouraged.  Humans, leveraging the cognitive niche, can particularly easily, build an evolved amplifier, through sharing information at little cost and significant benefit.  But African savanna hunters similarly gain from sharing large game meat with other un-related altruistic group members since the meat would otherwise spoil before it could be eaten. 
.  Sapolsky notes the strategies to maximize cooperation and limit cheating have been investigated using game theory investigates the optimal strategies for cooperating.  The iterative Prisoner's Dilemma scenario was shown by Axelrod & Hamilton to reward a Tit for Tat strategy with perfect signals.  An effective way to limit the risks of initiating Tit for Tat in a potential sea of Always Defectors is a genetically encoded signal of cooperation such as the green-beard gene.  Other evolved strategies include genetic algorithms.   including
Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
genetic algorithms. 

Sapolsky views the three foundations of behavioral evolution: individual
This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
natural &
This page describes the consequences of the asymmetries caused by genotypic traits creating a phenotypic signal in males and selection activity in the female - sexual selection.   
The impact of this asymmetry is to create a powerful alternative to natural selection with sexual selection's leverage of positive returns.  The mechanisms are described. 
sexual selection, kin selection, reciprocal altruism; as a lens to understand:
But he notes that neo-group selection is David Sloan Wilson and subsequently Harvard's E.O. Wilson's, multi-level evolutionary selection mechanism.  It is seen to operate in humans and is explained by Tit for Tat style cooperation and prosociality.  Wilson writes group-level selection affects the traits that are interactive with groupmates, so that success of an individual's genes depends at least partially on the success of the society to which the individual belongs.  In ants, bees, wasps and termites group selection almost entirely overrides individual selection.  For humans both group and individual selection apply and can be in conflict. 
is also a significant force in evolving humans' behaviors. 

Still Sapolsky stresses that we are not descended from any of the other living species.  He reviews a variety of measures that all suggest we are profoundly confused.  We exhibit behaviors: Violence driven by male-male competition for reproductive access to females, Violence against females for coercive sex or punishing rejection; that make sense to an elephant seal or a baboon have asymmetric sizes, and musculature.  Males may be much bigger and more muscular than females and have conspicuous facial markings.  Sapolsky's tournament primates include: baboons, mandrills, rhesus monkeys, vervets, and chimps.  And he additionally lists gazelles, lions, sheep, peacocks, & elephant seals.  Selection has supported evolved capture of fighting skills and display.  Such males:
  • Use aggressive conflict to obtain high dominance rankings.  
  • A small percentage of high rank males do all the mating.  They will mate with any female anytime.  So they have evolved to invest in larger testes and higher sperm counts. 
  • Males do no investment in parenting of their children.  
  • Females look for signals of good genes.  This encourages sexual selection of signals of male health, status and dominance.  
  • Females don't compete with each other since they will all breed with the high rank males. 
.  But other behaviors don't fit that mold: People forgoing reproduction, Individuals sacrificing themselves for strangers. 

Sapolsky sees broad evidence of human kin selection.  But there are complications:
  • Clan fighting occurs - but many wars show evidence of families fighting on both sides. 
  • Intra-family individual violence occurs
  • Patricide occurs, typically as revenge for abuse and fratricide. 
  • Parents killing children because of mental illness, abuse that unintentionally turned fatal
  • Money is bequeathed to non-kin.  Sapolsky judges that our cognitive based kin assessment helps explain these situations.  If you 'feel' like a relative to me you are a relative.  And we can be manipulated into feeling more or less related to someone than we really are. 
Sapolsky asserts reciprocal altruism benefits another organism at a cost to the behaver.  It is differentiated from kin altruism, by Williams and Trivers, since it can apply between unrelated individuals.  It can be induced by natural selection when there is mutual survival benefit in group activities and cheating can be detected and discouraged.  Humans, leveraging the cognitive niche, can particularly easily, build an evolved amplifier, through sharing information at little cost and significant benefit.  But African savanna hunters similarly gain from sharing large game meat with other un-related altruistic group members since the meat would otherwise spoil before it could be eaten. 
and neo-group selection is David Sloan Wilson and subsequently Harvard's E.O. Wilson's, multi-level evolutionary selection mechanism.  It is seen to operate in humans and is explained by Tit for Tat style cooperation and prosociality.  Wilson writes group-level selection affects the traits that are interactive with groupmates, so that success of an individual's genes depends at least partially on the success of the society to which the individual belongs.  In ants, bees, wasps and termites group selection almost entirely overrides individual selection.  For humans both group and individual selection apply and can be in conflict. 
drive: rules, laws, treaties, penalties, social conscience is the mental agent that punishes behavior that deviates from internal and external norms, according to Ness and Lloyd.  Sapolsky views conscience as an evolved process driven by reciprocal altruism and neo-group selection. 
, inner voice, morals provides rules for identifying right from wrong.  It develops in stages with children using play to work out rules of appropriate behavior.  Kohlberg's 1950s experiments using children led him to conclude moral judgement is a cognitive process that develops in three stages.  Sapolsky raises issues with the framework: Its a model, It does not apply to other cultures, Intuition & emotion are as significant as cognition, Moral reasoning doesn't predict moral actions; and notes the capacity of the frontal cortex to regulate emotions and behavior is far more predictive.  The marshmallow test, performed on three to six year olds, actually predicted their subsequent SAT scores at high school, social success and lack of aggression, and forty years on more PFC activation during a frontal task and a lower BMI!  Jonathan Haidt argues people's moral decisions are rationalizations rather than using reasoning. 
, ethics, etc.  He notes that a study of present day hunter-gatherers showed, only 40% of people within the bands are blood relatives.  So we potentially evolved from hunter-gatherers that were driven by reciprocal altruism.  And neo-group selection is at the core of cooperation and competition among human groups and cultures is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings: 
    • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
    • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
. 

Sapolsky notes that these gene driven behavioral arguments were intended to be threatened by Punctuated Equilibrium is Steven Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge's proposal about how evolution occurs.  They suggested that most of the time 'nothing happens' and then there are intermittent rapid lurches.  The idea is analogous to Schumpeter's waves of creative destruction.  Complex adaptive systems will operate this way driven by the underlying slow mutations of the germ-line schemata and the action of infrastructure and evolved amplifiers. 
.  While Dawkins dismissed macro mutations and species selection, there is evidence of rapid gene spreading and our understanding of transcription-factors are enzymes which associate with a transcription complex to bind to the DNA and control its transcription and hence translation into proteins.  The regulation of DNA transcription and protein synthesis are reviewed by Tsonis.  Transcription factors allow environmental state to become reflected in the control of DNA transcription.  Transcription factors can regulate multiple genes, allowing network effects & multiple transcription factors can regulate a gene allowing sophisticated control processes.  In AWF the transcription, translation and deployment infrastructure of the eukaryotic cell has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation. 
, transposons are regions of DNA which are copied and inserted into other areas of the DNA schemata.  Their effect and existence was first noted by Barbara McClintock.  Plants, when under stress, utilize transposons to rapidly evolve their genomes.  Higher animal's immune systems and neuronal stem cells when forming memories, also leverage transposons.   and other
This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
amplifiers enables us to accept macro-mutational events.  Still Sapolsky concludes that depending on what genes are being affected, gradualism and punctuated change occur in evolution without the edifice collapsing. 

Steven Jay Gould's tinkering exaptation, initially termed pre-adaptation refers to the coopting of some function for a new use.   allows evolution to produce good enough solutions.  They suggest other traits were purely spandrels are Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin's evolved traits that appear as side effects of exaptations and have no selection value themselves.  A spandrel is an architectural term for the space between two arches.  Gould and Lenontin's point was that adaptationists would suggest spandrels were created to provide a medium for the artwork that was often placed on them because they were there. 
.  Sapolsky suggests there are less adaptations in evolutionary biology is a trait that increased the number of surviving offspring in an organism's ancestral lineage.  Holland argues: complex adaptive systems (CAS) adapt due to the influence of schematic strings on agents.  Evolution indicates fitness when an organism survives and reproduces.  For his genetic algorithm, Holland separated the adaptive process into credit assignment and rule discovery.  He assigned a strength to each of the rules (alternate hypothesis) used by his artificial agents, by credit assignment - each accepted message being paid for by the recipient, increasing the sender agent's rule's strength (implicit modeling) and reducing the recipient's.  When an agent achieved an explicit goal they obtained a final reward.  Rule discovery used the genetic algorithm to select strong rule schemas from a pair of agents to be included in the next generation, with crossing over and mutation applied, and the resulting schematic strategies used to replace weaker schemas.  The crossing over genetic operator is unlikely to break up a short schematic sequence that provides a building block retained because of its 'fitness';  In Deacon's conception of evolution, an adaptation is the realization of a set of constraints on candidate mechanisms, and so long as these constraints are maintained, other features are arbitrary. 
than socio-biologists once asserted and less spandrels than Gould and other critics argued, with reality anchored in the complexity of evolution.  


Us Versus Them
Sapolsky explores our tendency to form 'Us' versus 'Them' dichotomies and to