The Science of Fate

Hannah Critchlow

4 annotations Dec 2024 data

Chapter 1

  • For some unfortunate people their biology truly is their destiny, but most of the time biology is not that simple in its operations of cause and effect. Biological mechanisms contribute to most disorders of the brain: they don't cause them in a straightforward way. For example, some studies cite that around 80 per cent of a person's risk for developing schizophrenia is down to the genes they were born with, but at current reckoning around 180 genes are implicated, and the way that they interact with each other and with the person's environment is yet to be fully untangled. When it comes to behaviours like food choice, friendship style, an aspect of personality such as sociability, or our beliefs, the biological mechanisms that contribute are vastly nuanced and interact in subtle ways with each other and with environmental factors. Which is not to say that an individual's choices and behaviours in these areas aren't predetermined by innate biological factors outside his or her conscious control. It just means that the idea of fate might need to be relaxed from its total and tragic connotations and understood as the destination we were always overwhelmingly likely to arrive at.

Chapter 2

  • Neuroscientists have also studied the intersection of two issues that most worry the parents of teens – their tendency to take stupid risks and to be in thrall to the influence of their peers – by investigating why teens are more reckless drivers when their friends are present. As Sarah-Jayne has said, with the understatement typical of a research scientist, 'The need for social acceptance by one's peers plays a pivotal role in a lot of adolescent decision-making.'
  • When it comes to the all-important business of processing new incoming information to help produce our unique view of the world and our place in it, the older brain also behaves differently from the younger one. It assigns less importance to the new incoming signals it receives, via the ears, eyes and other sensory organs, in comparison with its prior experience and expectations. Again, this strategy makes sense: those systems for collecting information from the outside world will at some point start to fail. The brain has already spent vast cognitive energies building up its stock of experiences and storing the memories, testing mental strategies and finessing them. The older brain acts efficiently, placing more value on past experience and knowledge than new.

Chapter 3

  • evolution; very efficient.) The nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex (the area of brain directly behind your forehead, involved in higher executive functions, including reasoning, planning, flexibility of thinking and decision-making) are connected. This ensures that we remember feelings of pleasure and associate them with the right triggers, thereby motivating us to repeat the experiences.