Awe

the magic ingredient is awe: Hendricks, Peter S. “Awe: A Putative Mechanism Underlying the Effects of Classic Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy.” International Review of Psychiatry 30, no. 4 (2018): 331–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2018.1474185.

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psychedelics consistently deactivate the DMN: For relevant empirical work, see: Carhart-Harris, Robin L., et al. “Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 6 (2012): 2138–43.

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Psychedelics lead people to feel:

Vollenweider, Franz X., and Katrin H. Preller. “Psychedelic Drugs: Neurobiology and Potential for Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 21 (2020): 611–24. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-020-0367-2.

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These compounds lead us to be: Hendricks. “Awe: A Putative Mechanism Underlying the Effects of Classic Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy.”

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Over lunch one day: For an interesting discussion of pilgrimages and their evolutionary roots in our tendencies to walk together, and a broader discussion of looking at spiritual practices through the lens of science, see: Sheldrake, Rupert. Science and Spiritual Practices. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2018.

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to champion nationwide toilet access

: At the time of ESI’s founding, only the well-to-do had toilets and sanitation. Now 31 percent of Indians do.

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From such a modest room: Of course, I’m biased to place such historical significance in the Berkeley free speech protests, but for a history of those protests, how they were shaped by the civil rights movement, and how they spread to the antiwar protests, see: Rosenfeld, Seth. Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2012.

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For Trupti, our greatest illusion: This observation about scarcity reminded me of the scientific studies of my friend Tom Gilovich at Cornell with Leaf van Boven, which show that when we focus on materialism, we get less happy; when we focus on experience, we get happier. Van Boven, Leaf, Margaret C. Campbell, and Thomas Gilovich. “The Social Costs of Materialism: On People’s Assessments of Materialistic and Experiential Consumers.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36 (2010): 551–63.

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Chapter 10: Life and Death

“What do you think”: Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself: 1892 Edition. Glenshaw, PA: S4N Books, 2017, 10.

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Childbirth is the most undervalued: For outstanding treatments of the role of childbirth in human evolution and society, see: Hrdy, Sarah B. Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. New York: Ballantine, 1999. Epstein, Randi Hutter. Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

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In this astonished state:

Zebrowitz, Leslie. Reading Faces: Windows to the Soul? Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.

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Common to the narratives were references: Feldman, Ruth, Katharina Braugh, and Frances A. Champagne. “The Neural Mechanisms and Consequences of Paternal Caregiving.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 20 (2019): 205–24. For an excellent summary, see: Siegel, Daniel. The Developing Mind. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2020.

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This shift in life expectancy: Hawkes, Kristen, James F. O’Connell, and Nicholas G. Blurton-Jones. “Hazda Women’s Time Allocation, Offspring Provisioning, and the Evolution of Long Postmenopausal Life Spans.” Current Anthropology 38, no. 4 (1997): 551–77. Hawkes, Kristen. “Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Longevity.” American Journal of Human Biology 15, no. 3 (2003): 380–400.

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