After all, we're a brain embedded in this larger set of structures. You can call it culture, call it society, call it your family, call it your friend, call it whatever it is. It's the stuff that makes people sign onto their Facebook a thousand times a day. It's the reason Twitter exists. We have got all these systems now that really make us fully aware of just how important social interactions are to what it is to be human. The question is, how can we study that? Because that, in essence, is a huge part of what's actually driving these enzymatic pathways in your brain. What's triggering these synaptic transmissions and these squirts of neurotransmitter back and forth is thoughts of other people, what other people say to us, interacting with the world at large.
American science writer
The story of the brain's separation from the body begin with Rene Descartes. The most influential philosopher of the seventeenth century, Descartes divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs.
The mind is made out of used parts, engineered by a blind watchmaker. The result is that the uniquely human areas of the mind depend on the primitive mind underneath. The process of thinking requires feeling, for feelings are what let us understand all the information that we can't directly comprehend. Reason without emotion is impotent.
"The moral of Harlow's experiment is that primate babies are born with an intense need for attachment. They cuddled with the cloth mothers because they wanted to experience the warmth and tenderness of a real mother. Even more than food, these baby monkeys craved the feeling of affection. "It's as if the animals are programmed to seek out love,
t. He decided to raise the next generation of baby
monkeys with two different pretend mothers. One was a wire
mother, formed out of wire mesh, while the other was a mother
made out of soft terry cloth. Harlow assumed that all things being
equal, the babies would prefer the cloth mothers, since they
would be able to cuddle with the fabric. To make the experiment
more interesting, Harlow added a slight twist to a few of the
cages. Instead of hand-feeding some babies, he put their milk bottles in the hands of the wire mothers. His question was simple:
what was more important, food or affection? Which mother
would the babies want more?
In the end, it wasn't even close. No matter which mother held
the milk, the babies always preferred the cloth mothers. The
monkeys would run over to the wire mothers and quickly sate
their hunger before immediately returning to the comforting folds
of cloth.
"Colin Powell made a number of mistakes in the run-up to the Iraq war, but his advice to his intelligence officers was psychologically astute: "Tell me what you know," he told his advisers. "Then tell me what you don't know, and only then can you tell me what you think. Always keep those three separated.
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"the problem with statistics is that they
don't activate our moral emotions. The depressing numbers leave
us cold: our minds can't comprehend suffering on such a massive
scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a
well but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every
year for lack of clean water. And why we donate thousands of
dollars to help a single African war orphan featured on the cover
of a magazine but ignore widespread genocides in Rwanda and
Darfur. As Mother Teresa put it, "If I look at the mass, I will
never act. If I look at the one, I will