Part 4 Consilience Conference 2012: A lowly graduate student's notes

These posts will not be in any discernible order; nor will they resemble the order of presentations during the conference. They will merely reflect what I found profoundly interesting and what presentations sparked future research endeavors. These thoughts will be poorly cited and eventually as time permits, I will fill in citations as I move along.

With that being said, if it seems as though I think my thoughts are original or of my own, when in fact someone already went there...it's not plagiarism. Its my daily life. Someone. Already. Did. It. In that case, comment with a citation or two.

Patricia Churchland

What are social instincts?

What genes take us from a reptilian brain to a mammalian brain?

Attachment and trust are our moral value center.

Social Problem Solving:
Our brains regulate, repress, calculate, plan, track reputations...
This problem solving is located in the PFC. There are deep connections to the deep (reptilian/Darwinian) brain.

"Deep value" is to ensure one's own survival; this is akin to the processing that occurs in the reptilian brain. "Mammalian value" is to ensure not only one's own survival, but the survival of others (especially offspring.)

In mammals, especially humans, a trade-off exists: a mother has to deliver a baby through a bony pelvis, so the brain needs to be relatively small at birth to accomplish this. This creates a large newborn dependence on its mother (sometimes even through graduate school....) in order to have brain mature to adult size. This immature brain of warm-blooded loco-motors must be able to adapt to a multitude of environments. So the benefits of having newborn dependence outweighs the costs.

Oxytocin promotes bonding, cooperation, mutual grooming, sex, and related reproductive behaviors. It also lowers cortisol and provides a calming effect. There is a decrease in defensive postures, increased level of trust, and autonomic arousal decreases. Dopamine also plays a key role in learning, if there is a block of dopamine, organisms fail to learn. 

This is when the magic happened:



Lack of parental investment --> underdeveloped PFC -->  low K lifestyle (FAST) --> low investment in offspring --> underdeveloped PFC --> low K lifestyle (FAST)

This cycle is perpetuated since individuals with an underdeveloped PFC do not feel the rewards that come from investing in their offspring: they find no pleasure in helping; consequently, they do not feel the pain when their offspring are in distress. They can't learn to parent. Their reward systems are not hardwired to invest in their offspring.

Do low K women have low endogenous oxytocin and/or dopamine, especially following childbirth?

There are many more unanswered questions, I will definitely be coming back to this post and updating.