Hard-Wired

Summary

This review argues that Nicholas Wright’s Warhead overlooks scientific evidence about the reciprocal relationship between warfare and neurobiology: studies find lasting changes in brain regions associated with memory, motivation, threat perception, and trauma among soldiers and civilian survivors, while cognitive rigidity, impulsivity, and differences in the prefrontal cortex are linked to vulnerability to extremist or authoritarian ideologies. It criticizes the book’s cheerful, admiring treatment of war and its proposal that democracies exploit “survival-grade neural machinery” to win conflicts, concluding that brain science instead shows the brain to be malleable and demonstrates that war diminishes human capacities and profoundly alters individual bodies.

Highlights

• When neuroscientists assess soldiers before and after deployment to a war zone, they observe changes in the architecture of their brains. Some regions of the brain physically shrink, especially those linked to memory, motivation, and threat perception. Other regions get larger or become more interconnected, such as areas involved in trauma processing. Several studies have found that many of these unconscious neural changes persist long after the soldier has left the war zone.
• Minds that are more cognitively rigid and impulsive in everyday situations are most likely to take any ideology to its extreme.
• The book alternates between basic neuroscience and war history, with the aim of figuring out how democratic societies should “diligently exploit” and leverage our “survival-grade neural machinery” so that democratic societies can win more wars and “save civilization”.
• The brain sciences counter this narrative. They reveal that the brain is flexible and malleable, not fixed; that our minds do not thrive in conflict, but rather that many of our most creative capacities diminish; and that the costs of war to individual people matter profoundly, altering the fabric of our bodies.

Source

Reviewed work

Warhead by Nicholas Wright