Damasio: Unpleasantness in Vermont The most important part of this article is that Phineas Gages personality and planning

abilities were dramatically changed while his movement, sensory abilities and other functions recovered almost fully. You will not be responsible for a lot of detail, but this is a very important foundation for understanding the importance of the frontal lobe. Solomon et al: Tales from the Crypt Self-esteem: Self esteem is when you believe you have value and meaning. You dont get self esteem for yourself by yourself. You get it when you fulfill societal expectations. It acts as an anxiety buffer. Raising self esteem should reduce anxiety in response to subsequent threats. Cultural values can impact self-esteem. Cultural worldview: Cultural worldviews serve to provide beliefs about the nature of reality. All cultures have morals and some promise immortality for people who behave in accordance to what culture dictates. Anxiety buffer: Anxiety buffers allow for individuals to cope with their fears in an easier manner. Self-esteem acts as an anxiety buffer for our anxiety about death. Two components for cultural anxiety buffer necessary for terror management theory: (a) faith in a meaningful conception of reality (cultural world view); (b) belief that one is meeting the standards of value prescribed by the worldview (self-esteem). Mortality salience: asking people to ponder their own mortality, or susceptibility to death. Awareness of ones own mortality affects our decision making. Worldview defense: exaggerated evaluations of people who are similar and different to you following mortality salience. When thinking about death, we tend to like people who are more similar to us. We tend to like people who have the same beliefs as us when it comes to the afterlife Does this make sense? With our worldview defense, when we are reminded of death, we are vigorously in agreement with those who share our beliefs, but we are also equally hostile towards those who do NOT share our beliefs. Five mitigating factors: These are factors that cause people to not behave in a defensive manner following mortality salience; Five things that make us less anxious about death. 1. Worldviews that value tolerance 2. Self-esteem (not narcissism) 3. common humanity (we are family!) 4. Teach these souls to fly! (<----what?) 5. there is only one liberty, to come to terms with death. After which, everything else is possible -Albert Camus, Notebooks

Contrarian: someone who has a different point of view than the majority. (from Musolinos lecture, was highlighted in the powerpoint and it seemed important, sue me) Otto Rank: proposed that humans ingeniously accomplished portraying humans as more than just physical beings by inventing the soul Ernst Becker: Wrote The Denial of Death. Also known for Terror Management Theory. Says that humans can never banish anxiety. Instead we should use that anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust. - Humans are unique because we are the only form of life that is able to imagine things that do not exist and transform our dreams into reality. - One of the main functions of culture is to distract people from being obsessed about their own deaths. Beckers def. of culture: Culture gives us the sense that we live in a meaningful universe and we as humans contribute to this world in a significant way. Culture exists of human constructed beliefs, in part to reduce anxiety that is a result of the awareness of death. Ogilvie: Anatomy of Internalized Beliefs Instinctive behavior: Instinctive behaviors are hardwired. It includes: eyeblink, startle reaction, and sucking reflex. Learned behavior: Learned behaviors include the idea that you will get electrocuted by sticking a fork in an electrical outlet, putting on sunscreen before going outside, language, belief in santa claus and belief in God. New atheists: New atheists attempt to debunk religions. it is extremely difficult to replace one internalized belief with a new one. Sam Harris- (wrote The End of Faith & The Letter to a Christian Nation) - The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breakthrough example of emerging technology - Children are instructed to disregard the facts of this world out of deference to the God who lurks in his mothers and fathers imaginations. Richard Dawkins- Wrote: The God Delusion

There will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents; obey the tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn, minatory tone. Trust your elders without question. Daniel Dennett- says there is no reason for people to not believe in evolution given all of the evidence other than the fact that they trust people more than they trust scientists. - Wrote Breaking the Spell & Darwins Dangerous Idea -but how in the face of so much striking confirmation and massive scientific evidence, could so many Americans disbelieve in evolution? It is simple: they have been solemnly told that the theory

Christopher Hitchens- Wrote book: God is not great - The person who is certain and who claims divine warrant for his certainty belongs now to the infancy of our species

Internalized beliefs: If something is taught and reinforced early enough it can become internalized, not to be questioned, conscious and unconscious, fixed beliefs. Scientific materialism: The belief that everything that exists is solely physical. This belief is often associated with atheists because it implies that the soul doesnt exist. Also known as monism (which is the opposite of dualism which believes that there are two dimensions to the human being which are your physical body and your immaterial soul; physicalism)

Daniel Stern: Child psychiatrist who eschews psychoanalytic speculation in favor of his own and other investigators lab research with babies. - what Damasio calls the protoself, Stern calls it the Emergent self. Antonio Damasio: A neurologist who has written extensively about brain development in children and the effects of brain injuries in adult patients. we are feeling machines that think. - wrote about the earliest sense of self--- protoself He describes the protoself as "a coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions" Self: Look down for definitions of each self. Note. every self builds on the other.

Protoself: sense of self; aka emergent self; monitors your internal milieu; you know you exist, but are not aware that you know this. Damasio describes the protoself as: A coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions. Protoself monitors and regulates the bodys internal milieu and does what it needs to do to maintain a condition of homeostasis. early stage of selfhood Stern: The infant operates with the non-reflective awareness that it is a bounded entity, shows preferences, makes choices. Core self: both Stern and Damasio call it this bidirectionary- It faces both inward and outward; brain builds off of emergent self; subjective experiences and associations. Makes connections between your internal milieu and the environment. (i.e. when a baby notices a change in its internal state when his/her mom frowns or smiles.) Learns rewards, punishments, feelings and memory. earliest sense of self core self experiences arrive on the heels of an infant's more advanced ability to represent moment-to-moment running record accounts of what's happening in the body and link these accounts with running record accounts of events in the world around it. -Core self is built upon the protoself. It continues to monitor the internal milieu and develops the capacity to associate some coincidences between alterations in the internal milieu and events in the environment. More specifically, the alterations of feelings become linked with events in the environment . Subjective/intersubjective self: Child does not have a sense of self outside of the relationship with the mother or other people. Mother and child have an intersubjective attunement. It is a subjective sense of self-awareness that is not cognitively represented or stored in memory. It enables the infant to crudely differentiate itself from its environment. It is implicit and unconscious and is largely comprised of feelings produced by sensations. -- It is very likely that the emergence of the core self and the intersubjective self are related to the maturation of the limbic system(Paleomammalian brain) Objective self: new level of consciousness, center of own universe. The mirror phenomenon...when you realize your existence...from the paper His objective self had been unveiled and he was delighted to own it. A new level of consciousness had coalesced and henceforth he occupied the center of his own universe. His awakening, as I now see it, was associated with solving the mystery of what it feels like to be Sam. Henceforth he had a clearer understanding he owned his sensations. (Ogilvie) - shared by few other species

- the theory of mind - sally anne test - mirror neurons Symbolic self: who we refer to as ourselves; relies heavily on language. The self that we all carry around with us. How we define ourselves...our personality...who you are which is different for everyone...this self develops for many years. - Daniel Stern calls it the verbal self because it relies heavily on language - Antonio Damasio calls it the extended self because we can extend ourselves into the past or future. the extended selfs assist us in taking the next step. - Unique to humans This is the self we talk about. The self we compare with other selves, the self that we believe gives us directions, offers us guidance, the self that Mark Leary observes can be a curse. Precursors include all the other senses of self language theory of mind Traveling Self : being able to imagine yourself elsewhere with emotions and a certain environment even though you are physically in another location. We are also always nexting which means preparing ourselves for what is likely to come next by imagining ourselves in the next step. Only humans can do this. It shows the connection between thinking and emotions b/c thinking can affect emotions and emotions can affect thinking. They are interconnected. Thinking of yourself elsewhere or of anything else can change your emotions and your emotions can influence your thinking. Nexting: -Daniel gilbert calls the extended self nexting. - to imagine the future; in our minds, preparing ourselves for what is likely to come next and happens around age 4 or 5+ - We do this by projecting mental representations of ourselves into the future in anticipation of, or preparation for, moving on to the next thing. - One skill is essential. Its called episodic memory= remembering things that happened in a persons past Mental Time Travel: the ability to mentally transport ourselves into future circumstances and then ask ourselves how it feels to be there. - MTT requires episodic memory which does not develop until the age of 3 or 4. Prior to that age, children pretty much live in the now with only spotty memories of what happened yesterday and are not able to take peek into tomorrow.

- Some animals have rudimentary skills in this area, but not matching the human ability of MTT. The downsides of MTT are Generalized Anxiety Disorder and imagining death. - A person can be loaded up with semantic memory( memory of words, names, and various facts) but if that person cannot remember anything from the past (episodic memory) mental time travel or long distance nexting is not possible. - language and MTT are the two most prominent traits that separate us from all other members of the animal kingdom. Senses of Self: The Protoself, The Core Self, The Subjective and Intersubjective Self, The Objective Self, The Symbolic Self, The Traveling Self. Internal Milieu: your internal emotional state Psychological Survival: feelings must protect the internal milieu to ensure ease of mind. I dont want to be a thing that dies. challenging an internalized belief is tantamount to challenging psychological survival Working Models: Internal working models are the way that we understand the world around us. It is a concept most often used in attachment theory. Infants are said to develop working models of the world based on the development of a secure and attached relationship with a parent or caregiver. In such a situation, the child will develop a working model of the world as safe and secure. However, if there are problems in the relationship with the infant and caregivers, the working models developed may be negative - the world may come to be seen as dangerous, frightening, unpredictable, etc. As children get older, their working model changes to incorporate both the new ways that they are treated and their new abilities to understand the world. - present in the intersubjective/subjective sense of self. Infant Attachment: Mother is there to protect the child. Baby has a natural attachment to the mother. Intersubjective Self: duality of self and other. very likely that it is related to the maturation of the limbic system Theory of Mind: the ability to put yourself in someone elses shoes and to have an idea about what they think or how they think. Confirmation Bias: a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way.

Triune Brain: there are three parts of the brain. Reptilian Brain mostly in and around the brain stem controls basic life functions like balance, breathing, heart rate, territorial dominance, and ritual displays - physical survival - Brain stem = survival. Paleomammalian Brain Also called Limbic System and/or midbrain involved in learning and memory at a most primitive level, emotion, approach and avoidance, feeding and reproductive behavior - physical survival -limbic brain= emotions. Neomammalian Brain Cerebral Cortex found uniquely in mammals Forebrain portion of cerebral cortex is much larger for humans than any other mammal confers ability for language, planning, and consciousness AND I will argue that the forebrain is largely responsible for providing human beings with the burden of surviving psychologically -psychological survival -neo-cortex= high order thinking. Bloom: Religion is Natural Terms: Universals of religion: Like language, religion is universal. All societies have at least one language; all societies have at least one religion. Like language, religion isnt present at birth. The specific religion is determined by culture rather than genes or physical environment. All religions include a belief in spiritual beings, in the supernatural. These often have mental lives, but no physical form. Most religions have an afterlife. Common-sense dualism: According to Bloom, we have a natural instinct to believe that our bodies and souls are distinct entities. It is a natural byproduct of the fact that we have two distinct cognitive systems, one for dealing with material objects, the other for social entities. Dualism implies that you can have one without the other. It is open to the idea that people can survive death of their bodies. Dualism comes naturally to children. Common-sense dualism clashes with science.

Substance dualism: Substance dualism is the view that the universe contains two fundamental types of entity: mental and physical. It is assumed by almost all scientists that they get no bitches <-- WHAT most helpful answer to this study guide right here and that substance dualism is mistaken and that mental life is the product of physical brains. Agency: The capacity for an agent to act in the world. We are hypersensitive to sign of human agency and attribute human qualities to non-human objects. Power.

Design: The argument for design- the intuition that the design that is apparent in the natural and biological world is evidence for a designer. Promiscuous teleology: Children are more prone to promiscuous teleology, in which they tend to see the world in terms of design and purpose, more so than adults. Creolization: Creolization is where children who are not exposed to a full-fledged language will create one, adding abstract principles and structures. They use inborn capacities to go beyond input. This often occurs with deaf children who have not learned sign language.

Ramachandran: Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution Machiavellian primate: A name given to humans, referring to our ability to read minds in order to predict other peoples behavior and outsmart them. Anosognosia: A strange disorder in which people have had damage to their brain and often suffer from paralysis or blindness, but deny it. Also called denial syndrome. These patients often not only deny their own paralysis, but will deny another persons paralysis. -We suggest that this bizarre observation is best understood in terms of damage to Rizzolatti's mirror neurons. Virtual reality simulation: It's as if anytime you want to make a judgement about someone else's movements you have to run a VR (virtual reality) simulation of the corresponding movements in your own brain and without mirror neurons you cannot do this. Big Bang of human evolution: A sudden explosion of human mental abilities and culture. This occurred about 40,000 years ago.

-- suggest that the so called big bang occurred because certain critical environmental triggers acted on a brain that had already become big for some other reason and was therefore "pre-adapted" for those cultural innovations that make us uniquely human(One of the key pre adaptations being mirror neurons.) - Inventions like tool use; art, math and even aspects of language may have been invented "accidentally" in one place and then spread very quickly given the human brain's amazing capacity for imitation learning and mind reading using mirror neuron Cultural Big Bang: There is paleontological evidence that an explosion of new activities occurred sometime between 30,000 to 50,000 years ago.

Lynne et al: Psychology and Scientific Thinking Terms: done Levels of explanation: having different levels of mental processes which can be seen like a ladder, with the lowest rungs being closely related to biological influences and the higher levels related closely to social influences. Psychology spans many levels of explanation. Single-variable explanations: explanations that try to account for complex behaviors in terms of only a single cause. We need to be skeptical to single-variable explanations of behavior since human actions are multiply determined (caused by many factors). Nave realism: Belief that we see the world precisely as it is. This is why we trust our common sense. we assume we can trust our intuitive perceptions of the world and ourselves -> we should do this MOST of the time. - naive realism can be deceiving when it comes to evaluating ourselves, and making wrong conclusions about human nature. Confirmation bias: tendency to seek out evidence that supports our hypothesis and neglect or distort evidence that contradicts them Belief perseverance: tendency to stick to our initial belief even when evidence contradicts it Pseudoscience: set of claims that seem scientific but arent Metaphysical claims: assertions about the world that are not testable ex: belief in God

Opportunity cost: The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action. Correlation: the idea that one thing is related to the other by way because they seem related. it is important to know that correlation does not equal causation Causation: the idea one one thing occurs due to something else. Falsifiability: capable of being disproven Replicability: numerous studies about something so that findings can be duplicated consistently Occams razor: When confronted with two explanations that fit the evidence equally well, we should generally select the more parsimonious one, i,e., the simpler one.

Chapter 4, My Brain Made Me Do It (re-read) This is a somewhat difficult chapter, but it provides some good background to both the lectures and the Monterosso & Schwartz article. Monterosso & Schwartz: Did Your Brain Make You Do It? (re-read) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/neuroscience-and-moralresponsibility.html?_r=1 Read carefully because they make important points: What is their distinction between caused behavior and intended behavior? The participants described the protagonists with brain characteristics in ways that suggested that the true person was not at the helm of himself. The behavior was caused. In contrast, while psychologically damaging experiences like childhood abuse often elicited sympathy for the protagonist and sometimes even prompted considerable mitigation of blame, the participants still saw the protagonists behavior as intentional. The protagonist himself was twisted by his history of trauma; it wasnt just his brain. What is nave dualism? This is the belief that acts are brought about either by intentions or by the physical laws that govern our brains and that those two types of causes psychological and biological are categorically distinct. People are responsible for actions resulting from one but not the other.

Ogilvie et al: The Undesired Self Self-Discrepancy score: The ought self is who you ought to be Higgins: distance from ideal self and undesired self decides whether you are happy or sad. As you get closer to ideal self, the happier you get. If youre far from your ought self, the more anxious you are. The closer you are to your ought self the less anxiety Ought self: anxiety Ideal self: it is an internalized notion of how we would like to be and who we would like to be (began with Freud who said: young boy would want to kill father in order to get to father but since this seems irrational they would internalize the father and try to become them in order to find someone similar to the mother to marry (reverse goes for women))

Undesired self: internalized notion of who we would not like to be. This is usually understood as a past state, one that was of the least value. The undesired self and ideal self are on a continuum, one can be arguably close to both at the same time. Mortality salience: being aware of ones own mortality Death thought accessibility: How fast you can bring up a thought about death into mind. Sheldon explained that people who were standing in front of a cemetery had more accessibility than people who were standing at a supermarket Hamilton: The Biology of Thou Shalt Not Behavioral inhibition: Learning not to do something. Isnt present at birth but develops. It is withholding a response when the behavior is either punished or no longer rewarded. It typically takes people about 20-30 years to learn behavioral skills, whether they be of some religion or non-theists. Disinhibition: Disinhibition is the temporary increase in strength of an extinguished response due to an unrelated stimulus effect (frontal lobe damage, alcohol, or psychopathy) it makes people impulsive, childish, not care about others, have poor planning skills (traveling self is essentially on vacation). Pavlov and Sherrington a came up with concept of inhibition. Classical conditioning- learned response. (Pavlov) Ring and bell & give dog food --> dog salivates

Learning occurred Ring a bell, present light, & no food --> dog does not salivate Learning did not occur Bell + Light test, and a loud random noise --> saliva follows This is disinhibition Bell = food. Light = no food. Holding a response in abeyance- withholding of the salivation Basically, the bell says to salivate, the light says dont, but since the noise interrupted the light, the dog salivated (Sherrington) neurons in the reflex arc in the brain We touch a hot handle, quickly move our hands away (spinal reflex) But we also learn. Recognize hot handle and move hand away Synapse- the space between the incoming pain neuron and the outgoing movement neuron Inhibition- reflexes can be blocked when a third neuron/signal comes into the synapse.

Opposing functions: When something operates not only by the presence or absence of some excitatory event, but rather has opposing functions that can excite and inhibit. Sherrington came up with the concept Examples: a car doesnt just have an accelerator that makes it go or not go, but also has brakes, reverse and forward functions. Emotional intelligence: The ability to consider different behaviors and then select the best alternative. The frontal lobe is concerned with this. For example, the frontal lobe inhibits some inappropriate but often tempting behaviors. Behavior inhibition Paul Broca- French Physician Left temporal lobe is associated with language control Loewis Chemical messengers carry info across synapses converging evidence what is the chemical messenger for inhibition? chemical messengers for: excitatory behavior = norepinphrine (like dopamine) inhibition = acetylcholine

 when does behavioral inhibitance emerge? studied at princeton uni. by prof. campbell tested behavior of newborn rat pups excitatory system is good to go @ birth the brains inhibitory system is not yet present at birth and gradually develops over the first 4 weeks of life in the rat. where are these inhibitory systems in the brain? in the limbic system, which is also responsible for emotions.