The fascinating thing about our best and worst behaviors isn't the behavior itself - the brain tells the muscles to do something or other - big deal. It's the meaning of the behavior.

What happened during the minutes before? That's the realm of sensory stimuli of the nervous system.

As long as experiencing your optimal level of good stress doesn't damage others, it's hard to objectively define where normal enjoyment of stimulation becomes adrenaline junkiehood.

The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.

Pulling a gun's trigger can be an appalling act. But if it is suicidal drawing fire to save someone, it has an utterly different meaning. Placing your hand on someone's arm can be an act of deep compassion or the first step of betrayal. The punch line? It's all about context, and the biology of context is vastly more complicated than the biology of the behavior itself.

It's great to have a buff frontal cortex to do that harder thing - for example, help a person in need rather buy some useless, shiny gee-gaw.

Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.