Studying the most extreme outcomes of intergroup hatred--murder, mass killings and genocides--has long been part of historical and social research. Neuroscientists and psychologists have also been interested in interpersonal and intergroup violence. This article considers the question of how atrocities arise from a neuroscientific perspective, focusing on war as the context in which they most o...

Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, through the portray of the ‘monster’ hints the uncanny defamiliarization of the familiar role of the society. It shows how the society if anybody does not suit its taste alienates that from itself. The monster’s hideous appearance is the reason of the society’s disliking it and so it is regarded with disgust and hatred. This results not only in the reader’s realiz...

Alexander Pope (1688±1744): his spinal deformity and his doctors. O.P. Sharma. #ERS Journals Ltd 1999. ABSTRACT: Alexander Pope was the towering figure of 18th century England. A poet and a wit he commanded unswerving loyalty from his friends and penetrating hatred from his enemies. His spinal deformity, either due to tuberculosis, trauma or congenital weakness, shaped his career. This brief re...

In recent years, laboratory studies of cultural evolution have become increasingly prevalent as a means of identifying and understanding the effects of cultural transmission on the form and functionality of transmitted material. The datasets generated by these studies may provide insights into the conditions encouraging, or inhibiting, high rates of innovation, as well as the effect that this h...

We discuss the importance of narrative intelligence (story-awareness, story-telling, historical grounding) in regard to an agent’s transcendence of its immediate local temporal context to create a broad temporal horizon in which the experience and future of the agent can be accounted for, together with the advantage that narrative provides to sociality by making the experience of others availab...

Errors occur commonly in healthcare and can cause significant harm to patients. Most errors arise from a combination of individual, system, and communication failures. Neurologists may be involved in harmful errors in any practice setting and should familiarize themselves with tools to prevent, report, and examine errors. Although physicians, patients, and ethicists endorse candid disclosure of...

It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic networks, developed for understanding the origin and organization of life, may also help explain the origin of the kind of cognitive structure that makes cul...

Although most people are religious, there are hundreds of millions of religious disbelievers in the world. What is religious disbelief and how does it arise? Recent developments in the scientific study of religious beliefs and behaviors point to the conclusion that religious disbelief arises from multiple interacting pathways, traceable to cognitive, motivational, and cultural learning mechanis...