A reader emails an article showing that human-rabbits are a different species:
A man holding his 4-year-old daughter’s hand was so terrified by a drive-by shooting unfolding before him in The Bronx that he released the kid’s grip and made like Usain Bolt — leaving the child to fend for herself, surveillance video released by the NYPD Saturday reveals.
The footage shows the instant the man — walking with his daughter along College Avenue near East 170th Street at 9 p.m. Wednesday — reacts to gunfire from a passing Lincoln Town Car…
Yet instead of grabbing the girl or shielding her, he shook free of the girl and ran…
A police source was similarly stunned: “What’s wrong with that guy? You can’t just leave your kid like that…”
“Ain’t no sense in both of them dying,” another person reasoned.
Elizabeth Phelps, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at NYU, said the dad’s apparent abandonment is just a normal reaction…
“… it’s silly to give anybody in that circumstance a hard time,” said Abigail Gepner.
Imagine how this guy will respond in the Apocalypse, which I assume is going to turn that city into a giant meat grinder.
Notice also, the cop is blown away while the other city rabbits all totally understand. I will bet you could separate out Trump supporters by this metric alone.
The fear which drove that man to shake free of his little girl, and leave her in front of the drive-by originated in the amygdala – the same organ whose morphological divergence is associated with political affiliation.
Politics is r/K Selection Theory, and the amygdala is the foundational mechanism.
[…] Rabbit Parenting 101 […]
The footage in question,https://youtu.be/lj9aE7Wq0jU
You’re right — running away and leaving the kid literally would not occur to me as an option. It makes as much sense to me as flapping my arms and flying away or shooting back with my finger by saying “pew pew”.
I notice you talk more about the amygdala and less about the ACC. Does the absolute size of either matter, or is it only the relative sizes as the original study of political affiliation concluded?
Absolute size is probably not clearly important, though relatively, liberals are bigger in the ACC which creates the pain the amygdala calls for when needed. So Conservatives see where stress is needed better than liberals, but liberals have an ACC that will lay them low whenever the amygdala calls for aversive stimulus. I will bet if you could look at repetitive childhood pain, like teasing, you would find it develops the ACC and the child learns to turn off the amygdala as a defensive mechanism.
I see the ACC as an alarm, but it is the amygdala scanning and triggering, and learning from the past. So the amygdala is more interesting to me, though the size of the alarm does vary, and may affect how the brain decides to let the amygdala operate.
I think the mechanism is the opposite of what you describe. The amygdala is the simple alarm system — it’s very visual and auditory, and entirely reflexive. The amygdala goes off all the time. When you jump in a scary movie, that’s all amygdala.
The ACC is what handles the siren from the amygdala. The amygdala learns when to trigger the alarms (and a lot of them are hardwired and difficult to deprogram, like spiders and the scary movie jump) while the ACC determines what the false alarms are. The mechanism is that the amygdala lights up, sends the alarm to the ACC, and the ACC consults the rest of the brain and decides if this is a real or false threat.
That’s why the eye-gaze studies on liberals are so interesting. Not only does it take longer for the amygdala to light up when shown alarming photos (which are always false alarms, because they are pictures) but they take longer to look over at the image. It’s not a long time (a fraction of a second) but it is significant in amygdala time frames, since the amygdala alarms in milliseconds. It means that parts of the brain (the specific areas haven’t been identified to my knowledge, this is developing science) alters behavior to avoid having the amygdala trigger as long as possible. Also, once the amygdala triggers, it takes longer for the liberal ACC to say, “it’s just a picture, no threat” and the liberal amygdala stays active longer.
It could be, there certainly isn’t enough to say conclusively either way.
But my impression was that in liberals, the amygdala wasn’t being suppressed, but was rather not lighting up, possibly because it lacks the threat conditioning to be on the alert. Like increasing reaction time with practice. It is just undeveloped. Maybe even exacerbated by liberals hacking the system to minimize stress by turning off the circuitry that triggers it in youth.
Now you could be right and I could be right, if the ACC is doing error detection on triggers, before then sending the aversive stimulus called for.
Now that you raise it, I have forgotten what it was in interacting with my narcissist that led me to see the ACC as the shock producer, and the amygdala as the trigger. I have to think back to that.
Now you might eb
A lot of amygdala scanning happens before any other part of the brain has processed the image, so I see the delay as purely happeneing in the amygdala.
It’s both. The gaze tracking shows that they take longer to look at the offending image, and take longer for amygdala activation on the fMRI once they do (and then also take longer for the amygdala to relax.)