Talk Categories: Neuroscience

How Our Brains Keep Us From Collaborating

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The human brain has evolved to keep us alive in the savanna by learning to compete and to cooperate. These two states have existed in human brains for as long as humans have existed. The instinct to compete worked well for small, tribe-sized challenges, but in the current day, this instinct works against us and global problem-solving. Steve Wourgiotis explains how to suppress our brain’s natural instinct to compete and learn to collaborate on a global scale.

Misunderstanding dopamine: Why the language of addiction matters

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Dopamine is the star of our conversations about motivation and addiction. But journalists, marketers, and app developers alike have missed some critical details. Understanding how dopamine really works to motivate our everyday behaviors–and what goes wrong in drug addiction–is the key to more productive thinking about our ‘bad habits,’ as well as today’s opioid crisis.