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POPSWhy the Brain Follows the Rules
Not surprisingly, the threat of punishment made people act more fairly. In the “punishment threat condition” people split the money close to equally. However, when Person B had no recourse, the people given the money acted very differently and gave away, on average, less than 10 percent of the money. When the researchers looked at the brain activity of people playing this simple game, they found a consistent pattern. One region in the frontal lobes, the orbitofrontal cortex, seemed to be responsible for evaluating the potential for punishment. In other words, it figured out whether or not violating the social norm would get us in trouble. A second brain region, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was responsible for inhibiting the natural tendency to keep most of the money (this would be the greedy thing to do) if this action might lead to future punishment. Interestingly, these brain areas only were activated when the threat of punishment came from a real person, and not a compute
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POPSWhat Will Happen to Biodiversity When the World Becomes A Giant City? “As a species we have lived in wild nature for hundreds of thousands of years, and now suddenly most of us live in cities—the ultimate escape from nature,” says Kareiva. “If we do not learn to build, expand and design our cities with a respect for nature, we will have no nature left anywhere.” Indeed, biocide is occurring at an alarming rate. Experts project that at least half of the world’s current animal species will be completely gone by the end of the century. Wild plant-life is also disappearing. Most biologists say that we are in the midst of an anthropogenic mass extinction that is at least partially caused by human encroachment on more and more areas of the planet. Numerous scientific studies confirm that this phenomenon needs to be addressed quickly.
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POPSDo Dolphins Have a Sense of the Future? It is their ability to understand sentences of sign language that astound though, with a sentence like “touch the frisbee with your tail and then jump over it” returning just that from the dolphin. This proves more than just rigorous training is the answer, but an understanding of what we are asking of them.
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