But, as mitchell explains, the way that program plays out is affected by random processes of development that manifest uniquely in each person, even identical twins. Deftly guiding us through important new research, shaping our personality, including his own groundbreaking work, sexuality, he explains how variations in the way our brains develop before birth strongly influence our psychology and behavior throughout our lives, intelligence, and even the way we perceive the world.

We all share a genetic program for making a human brain, and the program for making a brain like yours is specifically encoded in your DNA. A leading neuroscientist explains why your personal traits are more innate than you thinkWhat makes you the way you are—and what makes each of us different from everyone else? In Innate, leading neuroscientist and popular science blogger Kevin Mitchell traces human diversity and individual differences to their deepest level: in the wiring of our brains.

In addition, the book examines the social and ethical implications of these ideas and of new technologies that may soon offer the means to predict or manipulate human traits. Compelling and original, Innate will change the way you think about why and how we are who we are. The key insight of innate is that the combination of these developmental and genetic variations creates innate differences in how our brains are wired—differences that impact all aspects of our psychology—and this insight promises to transform the way we see the interplay of nature and nurture.

Innate also explores the genetic and neural underpinnings of disorders such as autism, and epilepsy, schizophrenia, and how our understanding of these conditions is being revolutionized.

Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are The MIT Press

He reports that genetics explains more of the psychological differences among people than all other factors combined. Nature, not nurture is what makes us who we are. Plomin explores the implications of this, drawing some provocative conclusions—among them that parenting styles don't really affect children's outcomes once genetics is taken into effect.

A top behavioral geneticist makes the case that DNA inherited from our parents at the moment of conception can predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses. In blueprint, behavioral geneticist robert Plomin describes how the DNA revolution has made DNA personal by giving us the power to predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses from birth.

. A century of genetic research shows that DNA differences inherited from our parents are the consistent life-long sources of our psychological individuality—the blueprint that makes us who we are. This, says Plomin, is a game changer. Plomin has been working on these issues for almost fifty years, conducting longitudinal studies of twins and adoptees.

After describing why dna matters, plomin explains what DNA does, offering readers a unique insider's view of the exciting synergies that came from combining genetics and psychology. Genetics accounts for fifty percent of psychological differences—not just mental health and school achievement but all psychological traits, from personality to intellectual abilities.

Neither tiger mothers nor attachment parenting affects children's ability to get into Harvard.

The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. It opens with a question: how would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our religions, our languages, our moral codes, our child-rearing patterns, and science? The book tackles these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory.

The ape that understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. At some point, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, however, culture began evolving in its own right.

The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

A revealing insider’s account of the power—and limitations—of functional MRIThe ability to read minds has long been a fascination of science fiction, but revolutionary new brain-imaging methods are bringing it closer to scientific reality. The new mind readers provides a compelling look at the origins, politics, development, revealing how they are increasingly being used to decode our thoughts and experiences—and how this raises sometimes troubling questions about their application in domains such as marketing, and future of these extraordinary tools, and the law.

Russell poldrack takes readers on a journey of scientific discovery, telling the stories of the visionaries behind these breakthroughs. Poldrack also details the unique and sometimes disorienting experience of having his own brain scanned more than a hundred times as part of a landmark study of how human brain function changes over time.

Written by one of the world’s leading pioneers in the field, the new Mind Readers cuts through the hype and misperceptions surrounding these emerging new methods, offering needed perspective on what they can and cannot do—and demonstrating how they can provide new answers to age-old questions about the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human.

. He highlights both the amazing power and major limitations of these techniques and describes how applications outside the lab often exceed the bounds of responsible science. Along the way, or fmri, he gives an insider’s perspective on what is perhaps the single most important technology in cognitive neuroscience today—functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is providing astonishing new insights into the contents and workings of the mind.

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Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

Here, michael Tomasello proposes a complementary theory focused on ontogenetic processes. Virtually all theories of how humans have become a distinctive species focus on evolution. Built on the essential ideas of Vygotsky, his data-driven model explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first six years of life.

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Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

The problem is that all three dogmas are half-truths. There are no monsters in the closet, " Murray writes, "no dread doors we must fear opening. But it is a story that needs telling. Human diversity does so without sensationalism, drawing on the most authoritative scientific findings, celebrating both our many differences and our common humanity.

The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas:- Gender is a social construct. Race is a social construct. Class is a function of privilege. All people are equal but, as human Diversity explores, all groups of people are not the same -- a fascinating investigation of the genetics and neuroscience of human differences.

The thesis of human diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. They have stifled progress in understanding the rich texture that biology adds to our understanding of the social, political, and economic worlds we live in.

It is not a story to be feared.

The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

What occurred during human evolution to account for this paradox? what are the two kinds of aggression that primates are prone to, provocative, The Goodness Paradox offers a startlingly original theory of how, in the last 250 million years, and engaging, and why did each evolve separately? How does the intensity of violence among humans compare with the aggressive behavior of other primates? How did humans domesticate themselves? And how were the acquisition of language and the practice of capital punishment determining factors in the rise of culture and civilization?Authoritative, humankind became an increasingly peaceful species in daily interactions even as its capacity for coolly planned and devastating violence remains undiminished.

. In tracing the evolutionary histories of reactive and proactive aggression, biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham forcefully and persuasively argues for the necessity of social tolerance and the control of savage divisiveness still haunting us today. A fascinating new analysis of human violence, historical forebears, filled with fresh ideas and gripping evidence from our primate cousins, and contemporary neighbors.

Steven pinker, author of the better Angels of Our NatureWe Homo sapiens can be the nicest of species and also the nastiest.

The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

Longlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson literary science writing award a leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings todayRenowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time.

Along the way, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, LeDoux explores our place in nature, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day.

This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In the deep history of ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms.

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Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Randolph nesse helped to establish the field of evolutionary medicine. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environment and our ancient human past.

Taken together, these and many more insights help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it by understanding individuals as individuals. Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations, yet can become overwhelming.

With his classic Why We Get Sick, Dr. And there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual disorders and for why genes for schizophrenia persist. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us all with fragile minds. Low moods prevent us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but they often escalate into pathological depression.

A founder of the field of evolutionary medicine uses his decades of experience as a psychiatrist to provide a much-needed new framework for making sense of mental illness. Why do i feel bad? There is real power in understanding our bad feelings.

The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity-and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race

From this understanding—the difference between possessing something versus anticipating it—we can understand in a revolutionary new way why we behave as we do in love, politics, business, addiction, religion—and we can even predict those behaviors in ourselves and others. Simply put, it is why we seek and succeed; it is why we discover and prosper.

From dopamine’s point of view, it’s not the having that matters. Lieberman, md, and Georgetown University lecturer Michael E. In the molecule of more: how a single chemical in your brain drives Love, and Creativity—and will Determine the Fate of the Human Race, Sex, George Washington University professor and psychiatrist Daniel Z.

In pursuit of these things, it is undeterred by emotion, fear, or morality. Yet, at the same time, it’s why we gamble and squander. Thousands of years later, it is the source of our most basic behaviors and cultural ideas—and progress itself. Dopamine ensured the survival of early man. Why are we obsessed with the things we want only to be bored when we get them? why is addiction perfectly logical to an addict? Why does love change so quickly from passion to indifference? Why are some people die-hard liberals and others hardcore conservatives? Why are we always hopeful for solutions even in the darkest times—and so good at figuring them out? The answer is found in a single chemical in your brain: dopamine.

. Long present a potentially life-changing proposal: much of human life has an unconsidered component that explains an array of behaviors previously thought to be unrelated, including why winners cheat, why nearly all diets fail, why geniuses often suffer with mental illness, and why the brains of liberals and conservatives really are different.

Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything

A science news favorite science book of 2018“A sweeping, neurology, suffering, medicine, glorious story of hormones, biology, threaded through with sex, and self-discovery. Siddhartha mukherjeemetabolism, the immune system, behavior, sleep, fleeing, fighting, mood swings, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones.

Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity, medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein reveals the “invigorating history” Nature of hormones and the age-old quest to control them through the back rooms, basements, and labs where endocrinology began.