The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.

Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.

To understand most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.

Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding; and if it's rewarding, it involves dopamine; and if it involves dopamine, then it is potentially addictive.

science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.