differences, all inflicted with this developmental disorder have difficulty understanding the belief

differences, all inflicted with this developmental disorder have difficulty understanding the beliefs, intentions and emotions of others, and often become hyper-aroused when seeing, hearing, or touching rather unremarkable objects or events. All of these capacities require a system that can integrate multiple sources of information. During brain scanning, individuals with autism show a striking reduction in activity in an area called the insula and its connection to both the somatosensory cortex and amygdala. The insula is an area of the brain that is like a traffic cop, responsible for coordinating the flow of information in the brain, both where it is coming from and where it should go. The somatosensory cortex handles our body’s response to the world, including its state of arousal. The amygdala plays a key role in emotional processing, and more generally, in generating positive or negative assessments about the value of an experience. With the traffic cop asleep, and the body’s arousal and emotional hubs dormant, it is no wonder that those with autism lack empathy, can’t understand what it means for someone to be in love, are befuddled by deception, and find the bombardment from our media-intense world truly overwhelming. The lack of connectivity among those with autism is proof that connectivity is necessary for promiscuous thinking. Once we evolved our massively connected, promiscuous brain, tool use, communication, mathematics, music, and morality were transformed. No longer were we constrained to think within the confines of the evolved context. We could take aspects of an ancient psychology that evolved for one problem and use it for new purposes, some beneficial to us individually and as members of a group, and some costly to our own and others’ survival. Consider our capacity to defend members within a group against attack from individuals outside the group. Many, perhaps even the majority of religious groups have carried out this mission, some with violence such as the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Ireland, and some with tranquility such as the Tibetan’s plea for peace amidst a powerful Chinese oppressor. The process starts, however, with an ancient system that we share with all socially living animals. To survive and reproduce, individuals cooperate with members of their own group and defend their resources against members of neighboring groups. All animals, humans included, recognize group members by distinctive markings or recalling features associated with specific individuals. We transformed this evolutionarily ancient capacity into a distinctively human one by combining it with our systems of language, morality, and beliefs. This combination allows us to use symbols to demarcate those within our group from those outside, to tie these symbols to distinctive beliefs, values, and emotions, and to use these different psychological systems to caricature the other as buffoon, vermin, parasite, or inanimate cargo. This combinatorial process allows us to cleanse the in-group by annihilating the out-group. It allows us to increase cooperation within a group while ramping up the defenses to take out enemies living outside the group. This strategy is simple and effective. First, convince one group of people that another group has a set of undesirable traits, Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 31 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012777